Stories That Scandalize: Transactional Sex and Postconflict Moral Imaginaries Available to Purchase

The peche is a regional colloquialism that gay and transgender interlocutors used to refer to the small gifts they gave to their sexual and romantic partners. Stories about peches, often set in the period of Peru’s internal armed conflict, dramatized interlocutors’ intimate and romantic relationships with men whom they considered to be heterosexual and emphasized shared values of mutual obligation and discretion. At the same time, interlocutors encountered the project to “end AIDS” through HIV prevention efforts urging them to cease the practice of transactional sex. Interpreting the technical construct of “transactional sex” like a peche illuminates the underlying moral assumptions of the project to end AIDS.