From Toads to Queens

The information in From Toads to Queens: Transvestism in a Latin American Setting (a 2000 Lammy Nominee) is crucial to understanding Latin American culture and its relation to HIV prevention. You’ll find research findings that offer insights into and analysis of the sexual culture and risk factors that place transvestites in the sex trade and their customers at risk of contracting HIV. This information could prove valuable to developing preventions and interventions for similar populations in countries all over the world.

In From Toads to Queens, transvestites in the sex trade and their customers share fascinating personal accounts from their daily lives, including details of their sexual encounters. Specifically you will gain insight into:

• sexual practices
• pay rates in the sex trade
• types of lovers and sexual partners
• locations of “work”
• conceptions of fashion and beauty among transvestites
• relations between transvestites, the police, and gay bashers
• clients who are heterosexual men
• drug consumption and unsafe sex
  
  From this book, you will gain a comprehensive analysis of Latin transvestites, how this population questions assumptions about sexual orientation and practice, and how they are affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Most importantly, From Toads to Queens documents boundry-crossing individuals’existence and subverts the simplistic division of people into traditional psychiatric categories, a crucial first step in devising ways to decrease the rates of HIV infection among specific populations.