On the open road
Nomen Nescio
Gay truck drivers find freedom and acceptance in rugged industry
By RYAN LEE
Friday, August 12, 2005
There are numerous professional perks for gay truck drivers who race up and down America’s highways each day and see every part of the country while potentially making more than $1,000 per week.
For some gay male truck drivers in particular, the profession also provides a nationwide network of anonymous sex and the admiration of “truck chasers” — men who cruise highway rest stops and Internet trucking groups looking to fulfill their “trucker stud” fantasies.
But life in the fast lane can be tough, according to several gay truckers who say that they and their colleagues regularly struggle with loneliness and poor health.
“It’s a hard living; it’s a really hard living,” says Scott Langley, a driver who retired after 11 years as part of a road team with his partner, Tim Page.
“You’re away from home for weeks at a time, you don’t have a social life and you find yourself alone when you’re a single driver,” Langley says. “But sometimes it makes it even harder when it’s a team and you’re with that person for long periods of time.
“When somebody first goes out on the road, within the first week they know whether they’re cut out for it,” says Langley, who along with Page owns two trucks driven by two gay male teams.
Timothy Anderson started trucking in Alaska during his early 20s. He was drawn to the profession by the freedom and independence it provided.
“I could never figure out where I wanted to live on the West Coast, and trucking allowed me to avoid making that decision by waking up someplace different everyday,” says Anderson, president of the Gay Trucker’s Association, www.gaytruckersassn.org.
Some two decades later, Anderson says that his independence came at a cost.
“Your friend’s lives keep going while you’re on the road, and I became very much isolated within the trucking culture to the point where all of my friends were truck drivers,” Anderson says.
Truck drivers were among the earliest and most loyal fans of the Derek & Romaine Show on Sirius Satellite Radio’s gay channel, Out Q, teaching host Romaine Patterson about the varied interests and exploits of gay and lesbian truckers.
“I think the hardest thing gay and lesbian truckers face is that being in a truck for such long periods is very hard on any type of relationship,” Patterson says. “There are definitely the truckers who enjoy the ‘pickle park’ with the best of them, but the calls that really stand out in my mind are from the ones who are really having a hard time meeting other truckers and friends while out on the road.”
IN ADDITION TO regular bouts of loneliness, gay and lesbian truck drivers also have to deal with being stereotyped, Anderson says.
“I’m not sure who gets the worst rap — whether it’s the typical dyke image lesbian drivers usually get, or the trucker stud image that a lot of gay porn seems to enforce, and that’s not necessarily accurate either,” he says.
But the popular image of gay truck drivers searching for — and finding — anonymous sexual partners along their routes accurately describes Langley and Page’s experience.
“Every rest area we went to, we were being cruised by some guy, or were cruising somebody ourselves,” Langley says. “The cruising is quite active and probably more active now than it’s ever been. … It’s not talked about, and people don’t even like bringing it up.”
But Langley says the reluctance to talk about cruising among gay truck drivers is belied by the popularity of his and Page’s Web site, www.gaytruckers.com, and their magazine, Gay Truckers Classifieds.
The couple started their magazine in the mid-1990s and operated it for the first three months as a general interest magazine for all truckers. Then a gay truck driver asked to take out a classified ad with hopes of finding a supportive team driver, Langley says.
Since then, the magazine evolved into strictly a classified outlet for gay truckers and “truck chasers,” with close to 2,000 subscribers and about 5,000 copies of each monthly issue being sold. Launched in 2004, the gaytruckers.com Web site boasts more than 44,000 registered users, Langley says.
“Obviously guys are out there doing things, otherwise we wouldn’t have all of the readers and members that we do,” says Langley, who outed Mississippi and Louisiana as the states with the most active rest areas for cruising truckers.
Anderson agrees that there is some action out on the road, but said promiscuous drivers are a minority.
“You can’t deny there is some cowboying going on out there — to do that would be disingenuous — but I don’t think it’s the standard for most drivers,” Anderson says. “So many drivers are tired of being put on a sexual pedestal. It reflects on us in some pretty bad ways.”
But cruising among gay truck drivers is just a given part of the industry, Watkins says.
“Folks mention it; they know about what goes on between the gay guys, but it doesn’t seem like it’s causing any great, rampant anger or backlash among the truck drivers,” she says.
DESPITE ITS RUGGED façade, the trucking industry is actually a relatively progressive arena with marginal levels of sexism and homophobia, gay truckers say.
“I worked in factories for years before I got into trucking, and I saw lots of discrimination there, but out on the road I’ve had a really good time,” Watkins says. “I’ve had no qualms whatsoever with pay scales being [discriminatory] — every company I’ve worked for never cared if you were male or female, black or brown, gay or straight.”
The 5-foot-2-inch Watkins says men in the trucking industry sometimes underestimated her abilities, but that too is lessening as more women enter the field.
Gay and lesbian truck drivers tend to demand respect from their peers because of the grueling nature of truck work, Anderson says.
“There’s a lot less homophobia in trucking than in a lot of other industries because the job is just so tough that you instantly gain respect from someone, even if they’re straight or conservative, just because you’re out there,” Anderson says.
Langley, who pretended to be Page’s cousin when the two of them first started out as a team, has seen some gay drivers and teams frozen out of work by some companies, but he agreed that sexual
orientation is a non-issue for most employers.
“If you go in there as a bunch of flaming queens dressed in daisy dukes, you’re not going to get any work,” he says. “If you go in there with an attitude of ‘I’m here to help you, you help me, and if my personal interests are a problem for you, then I don’t need to be here,’ then you’re not going to get much flak.”
Patterson, from the Derek and Romaine show, says she relishes the chance to expose gay trucking issues to the heterosexual truck drivers who listen to the show.
“Our truckers have really taught us a lot about how you can really change people just by hanging out and having a good time,” Patterson says.”
Many of the leading trucking companies are “standouts” when it comes to protecting gay and lesbian workers.
In May, Green Bay, Wis.-based trucking company Schneider National rolled out a marketing campaign to recruit same-sex couples as big rig driving teams. The company also includes sexual orientation in its employment diversity statement.
A sampling of other freight companies shows that most include sexual orientation in employee anti-bias policies, but none use recruiting efforts aimed at gay couples, according to the Human Rights Campaign. The companies sampled include Fed-Ex Freight, Pacer Global Logistics and Ryder.
Despite its progressive leanings, the trucking industry still needs to be prodded into fully addressing all of the issues of importance to gay drivers, Anderson says.
“One of the things our industry has never really dealt with is that we have numerous members of the trucking industry who are HIV-positive,” Anderson says. “It would help if their managers had some understanding of the challenges those drivers are facing, and that’s one of the primary roles of [the Gay Trucker’s Association].”
But Langley says gay truckers organizing into a political force within the industry is unnecessary.
“There’s not a huge need for it because as long as you’re professional about what you do, being gay is not an issue,” he says.
Anonymous Sender
realitytrucker
Cyborg 0091
I knew those truck drivers were going werid,stop drink a carton a day
something odd is bound to happen.
Yep I knew those flouro tops were part of some kind of cult begining.
If ya look like the flying circus,ya feel like it too...
This is great news for tasmania's log truck drivers.
All those local gov co designated truck stops will have condom vending
machines next under the howard reigeim.
Just as well I was able to disable the truck stop out the front of my
place,nothing a stroll with a steel bar and some red paint did not fix.