Is there any truth to the rumor that blue running board lights or a purple cab light signify that a trucker is gay? In a profession that most assume to be extremely homophobic, from the NRA swatch on the top of a driver’s cap down to the busty mudflap girl over the back tires, Anderson explains how gay truckers meet.
I was always out to my family, but the first time I was interviewed about being a gay trucker, they gave me a fake name because they were worried I’d get beat up.” I returned to college and got my degree through the creative writing program at Seattle Pacific University where I was the first openly gay graduate of that program.
That license was replaced by the CDL, commercial driver’s license, which I still have. I dropped out of college in Alaska to get my intrastate permit when I was 20, and my chauffeur’s license allowing me to do interstate hauling when I was 21. My uncle was a gypo, which is trucker lingo for a renegade independent who spends a lot of time trying to avoid the DOT. Both my father and grandfather were stick haulers, meaning they carried logs. I’ve hauled trains, doubles and triples, sometimes over 1,000 feet long. “I’ve done log hauling, refrigerated and dry freight. He describes his trucking years without sensationalizing or fetishizing the profession. Despite the fact that he lives in a log home high up in the Selkirk Rocky Mountains of Washington, had driven truck for seventeen years, and does justice to a rancher’s belt buckle with the looks and bearing of an extra in Joe Gage’s porn classic, K ansas City Trucking Co., Timothy Anderson warns me at the beginning of our conversation not to portray gay truckers “as free roaming sexual cowboys or disease carrying pariahs.” He is a man with a serious and honorable message.Īnderson knows the realities of gay trucker life beneath its eroticized skin.