She-goat, Degenerate, Fag

This story started as an investigation of the growing problem of child sex tourism and human trafficking in the jungle city of Iquitos, Peru. Rober was 16 when I met him last year, living with his parents in a wooden house with a thatched roof on the edge of the city, and selling his body at night dressed as a woman. He and his friends are all chivas, she-goats, as they call themselves: degeneradas, degenerates, mariconas, female fags. They think, feel, dress and act as women, or their fantasies of what being a woman is. Total fascination with their appearances, staring into the mirror applying makeup, posing, looking, seeing, obsessed.

They would giggle a lot, draping their arms over each other and striking different postures for the camera. Rober had all his toenails painted pink. Pyramid-shaped silver earrings dangled beside his childlike face, which he kept brushing over with his bangs, dyed orange at the tips. His friend Cesar was visibly younger and thin as a wafer, and had cut his shorts at an angle that began just above his thighs. I could sense their hunger for attention as they performed for the camera.

Most have dropped out of school and have trouble with their parents. Rober was one of the few who could put on makeup and try on women’s clothes at home without eliciting abuse. His parents spent much of the day in front of a grainy black and white television, watching Evangelical Christian music videos and telenovelas, speaking little and hardly working. His mom sold vegetables, cooking oil and sweets through an open window that faced the reddish earth of the street.

After I saw Rober playing volleyball the first afternoon we met, jumping high into the heavy, stifling tropical air to nail spike after spike against the opposing team of transgender and gay teens, I decided to focus on him.

I had been shooting foreigners at discos, afterhours bars and plazas for nearly a week, the balding French guidance counselor and Belgian non-profit worker feeding beer to skinny teenage prostitutes, the fat HIV-positive American captain in his 70s still paying 15 year old boys to give him head and let him fuck them.

The main square in Iquitos was a feeding ground for foreigners to play at anything they couldn’t do in their own countries: from seven to 10 p.m., the elder trannies held the fort; around nine, teenage girls in miniskirts appeared with their gay pimps; after 11, adolescent boys sat on the edge of the central monument waiting for bloated white men in white tennis shoes, polo shirts and glasses to give them their room numbers and a few soles to pay for the motortaxi to the hotel. Iquitos was a city trapped in the Amazon, no roads leading in, no roads leading out, would-be Shaman on the corner selling necklaces and Ayahuasca tours, a city of children selling themselves, and no one was doing anything to stop it. There was a mural in the middle of the main tourist drag: NO CHILD SEX TOURISM. WILL BE SENT TO PRISON. I wanted to get closer to some of these kids, and see through their eyes what being a child in Iquitos meant.

Rober started selling his body when he was 12, soon after he began to dress as a woman and hang out with older chivas in his neighborhood. He would charge as little as 5 soles ($1.70) for oral and 10 soles for anal, a fraction of what straight female prostitutes got.

After a late night out, he would sometimes give some money to his parents. He said they hardly asked him how he got it. He pushed away the mosquito net surrounding his bare, yellow sponge mattress around noon or 1 p.m., dragging his flip flops into the kitchen and eating whatever scraps of food from lunch were left.

One late Monday morning while Rober was still sleeping, I sat with his mother Graciela at the slab of wood that serves as their kitchen table, as her husband Roger sat in the other room in front of the television. She lowered her voice and told me that Rober’s father was Roger’s brother, but that they got separated because he drank a lot and was abusive. She moved away with her kids, and soon began living with another woman. They started having a relationship. Graciela would wear the man’s clothes; she’d put on a baseball cap and work with a machete outside while her partner stayed in. After awhile, she forgot what it was like to put on lipstick. She remembers feeling satisfied. Then Roger started arriving, and soon he asked her to marry him.

As she served me a plate of boiled river fish and roasted plantains while Rober slept on the other side of the thin wall of wooden planks, his mother said that she was worried about Rober’s habit of staying out late almost every night, and coming home stumbling drunk. She and Roger are Evangelicals, and their religious doctrine forbids drinking.

“We, as Christians, have hope that Rober can change,” Roger said, visibly ashamed. “But it’s not for us to change him—only God can do that. God does not destroy, he allows prostitutes and homosexuals to live in the world too, and we have to accept that.”

Rober dropped out of school after finishing the 8th grade because the family couldn’t afford the twenty five soles ($8.50) it cost to get the paperwork done. Two years later, he still talks about returning to school. He also dreams of being a beautician, of traveling to Lima, Peru’s capital, and working there. Last year, an older chiva offered to take him and a few of his friends there, to give them free chest and ass implants too, all they’d have to do is work to pay it back: first they’d stop in the bigger jungle city of Pucallpa to pay back that trip, and then off to the capital, where they’d get the implants and start working there.

It is one year later as he tells me this. Rober’s hair is longer now as he sits in the small space of shade offered by a bush beneath the blazing sun. The wind whips around us and I remember how he and his friend had begged me the year before to send them female hormones from Lima, where they were much cheaper than in the jungle. And as I watched them, still growing up, the first hairs beginning to appear on their upper lips, I know that I’d considered doing it, for a few minutes, just to make them happy, about something, about themselves.

EVAN ABRAMSON is a photographer and multimedia artist based in New York City. His photographs have appeared in The Guardian Weekend Magazine, Newsweek, The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic Adventure, The New York Times, The Washington Post, FT Weekend, Daylight Magazine, NACLA Report on the Americas, and Courier Japan.