Many gay men in the popular sectors of Lima, Peru participate in vóley callejero, or street volleyball. The ethnographic data presented in this article describes verbal and corporal mechanisms through which gay identity emerges within the particular context of the street volleyball game, ultimately highlighting the contextual nature of identity. The volleyball players are not just hitting a ball back and forth, they are engaging in a meaningful activity that illuminates intersections of language, sexuality, and identity. Through the manipulation of the street into a volleyball court, the volleyball players create a space conducive to the articulation of particular verbal and embodied practices that index gay identity. The challenge to the regulations of "proper" volleyball through the practice of ritual insulting and the cultivation of gay volleyball technique are playful reconfigurations of gendered practices prominent in the sites where fieldwork was carried out.

As declarations of a possible “end of AIDS” emerged during the epidemic's fourth decade, some HIV‐prevention efforts shifted to address social conditions and individual dispositions among the populations most affected. In Peru, where HIV was concentrated among transgender women and gay men, health science positioned transactional sex as one site of intervention. Gay and transgender communities themselves circulated stories that dramatized transactional sex. Set against the backdrop of Peru's armed conflict (1980–2000), these stories pivoted on peches—the small gifts given to incentivize sexual and romantic relationships—and reflected a shared moral imaginary linked to the context of postconflict society. Interpreting transactional sex like a peche illuminates the moral dimensions of the category and suggests that the technical project of achieving an “end of AIDS” future is also imaginative and moralizing. Peches thus offer an interpretive approach to the persistent tensions between local and globalized categories, in relation to both HIV/AIDS and more broadly to other contexts. [sexuality, transactional sex, HIV/AIDS, end of AIDS, gay, transgender, morality, Peru]

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This chapter illuminates one dynamic of the global emergence and successes of LGBT politics in the early twenty-first century: how LGBT communities remember and narrate the emergence of LGBT politics and the historical antecedents they use to contextualize contemporary LGBT rights claims. In juxtaposing a nationally circulating narrative with a regional one, the chapter suggests that how narratives about the emergence of LGBT politics circulate is a function of scale. For example, both national and regional LGBT rights efforts take note of events in the city of Tarapoto, located in Peru’s Amazonian region. At the national level, the violence that occurred in Tarapoto during Peru’s internal armed conflict helped link LGBT rights claims to the country’s broader human rights movement. Yet in Tarapoto interlocutors emphasized a municipal anniversary parade as a starting point for recounting the successes of LGBT rights in the region. Whereas analyses at the national scale may indicate a less successful record of LGBT rights in Peru in comparison to other Latin American countries, shifting analysis to the regional scale reveals an alternative account.

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