The title is a Star Trek reference.  Just wanted to make sure y’all knew that.  Weren’t tribbles awesome?  Another thing you may want to know about this entry is that it will contain some potentially exceptionally offensive language and descriptive situations regarding homosexuality.  In short, you’re a terrible parent if you’ve just found this in your kid’s browsing history…because you’re snooping.  Screw off man!

I’ve talked about how trucking has its ups and downs and about how I do enjoy it a great deal.  The common fair criticisms that are directed toward truckers get old and meaningless after a short while and you learn to deal with public misconceptions as a simple fact of life.  There are stereotypes that hold quite true however and homophobia in the trucking industry is one I have seen to be exceptionally well preserved.  Racism is also a powerful element within the trucking industry but it’s a complicated issue that is not motivated by simple hatred of a different skin colour.  It’s a different issue that I may delve into one day on this blog but for today, I’ll post about a particular story I was told by a fellow who’s word I wouldn’t doubt for a moment.  His Hell’s Angels tattoos and what he claims to be scars left by bullet wounds are quite a testimonial to his life’s history.  It’s a rough one.  No one can tell it quite like him though so I’ll simply quote his story from what I can remember of it.

One night when I was down in ________ state, I passed another truck on the interstate and he flashed his brights at me to signal I had room to pull back into the driving lane.  About two or three minutes later, he came up to speed and passed me.  After I flicked my brights to show him he had enough room to come back into the driving lane, he pulled in and flashed his marker lights and tapped on his brakes.  Right after that, he pulled off onto an off ramp.

Being a highway driver, i wasn’t sure what was going on.  Was something wrong with my truck?  Did I cut him off?  What was the deal?  So I followed him off the interstate and he had parked in a small truck stop parking lot.  He was kinda at the back where it wasn’t well lit.  So I pulled up beside his truck and parked.

I pulled my air brakes and right away heard my passenger’s side door latch clicking.  I always lock my passenger’s side door so I leaned over, unlocked the door and sat back and grabbed my hickory stick; the thing we use for clunking our tires when we do a circle check eh?  So he opens the door, steps up on my running board and puts his elbows on my passenger’s seat.  What he said at that point simply took me absolutely off guard.

“Hi Driver.”

“What’s up?  Is there a problem here or something?”

“Well no driver.  I just thought maybe you would like a blow job.”

Well I couldn’t believe it.  I hesitated for a second and after it sunk in what he had said, I took my hickory and whomped him over the head with it.  It was a good crack, like he had blood coming out of his forehead eh?  So after a second, he fell backward into the lot and I got out.  I walked around my truck and his eyes had rolled back into his head.  He was pretty fucked up eh?  So I’m thinkin’ “aw shit.  He’s screwed” and wouldn’t you know it, a cop car comes off the offramp with his cherries flashing.

So It’s a state trooper or whatever eh?  He gets out of his car, walks up the side of the truck and sees buddy there laying on the ground twitching around and me with this hickory in my hand.

“What happened here?” he says

“Well officer.  This guy came onto me and sexually kinda come onto me and I’m not that way so I said no.  I told him to get the hell out of my truck and I guess he slipped and hit his head on the way down.” I told him.

“That’s your story?” He said to me eh?

“Yup.”

So the trooper looks at the guy down on the ground and by this time he’s starting to come around and makin’ kinda loud noises.

“You wanna press charges then?”

“You know what officer?  I’m just driving out here, I’m from Canada and I don’t really wanna go through the trouble.”

So the trooper looks at the guy on the ground and just lays a fuckin’ boot to his head eh?  Just fuckin’ *CRACK* like it looked like it hurt.  Guy starts makin’ more loud noises and the state trooper looks down and says,

“Dirty faggot.  You should get out of here then and keep on your rout.  You don’t want to be late for your delivery down the road.”

And so I fucked off.  Oh man, they’re everywhere down there; fuckin’ homos.  You ever hear on the CB, “Anyone lookin’ for a good buddy?” you don’t give those fuckers a come back.  they’ll fuckin’ hunt you down and insist on doin’ something if you reply.

So it’s a hell of a story and like I mentioned, considering where it came from, I don’t doubt its veracity.  It may be exaggerated in some bits seeing as embellishing a story is as natural among truckers as it is among Klingons recounting their battles against Star Fleet when there was no alliance.

Too nerdy to be a trucker?  Possibly.

Anyway, whether or not the story is true doesn’t really matter.  It’s equally as disturbing either way.  I joke from time to time about how “the gay” has infected my blog or about how I fear being raped in a dark ally by a marauding band of interior decorators but these are just humorous asides.  I have nothing at all against homosexuals and I’m frankly flattered if I get hit on by a fellow.  I’m not afraid of homosexuality but among the trucking profession, homophobia and the worst kind of fear is typically expressed through anger or even violence visited upon those who own up to being what they are.  Essentially, admitting openly to being homosexual and accepting something that takes some courage to admit to yourself to begin with is violently discouraged in the trucking industry.  Not only is it sad, it’s frankly a little shocking to my conscience.

There have been many conversations in which I fall silent or recuse myself from completely because not only will I fail to make any friends, I may quite easily make some enemies.  Whether it’s a professed desire to kill homosexuals, burn East Indians to death locked in mosques or how it is that Canada is being ruined by foreign cultures, there are many disturbing ideals that are carried throughout the trucking industry by many drivers.

I can’t end it there however.  I can’t just leave it at this or you’ll think trucking is a terrible cesspool for the most outrageous ignorance about.  While I may not be able to say this is the exception rather than the rule, I can say that these odd ideals are faced frequently with common sense and individual admissions that perhaps these ideas are not the right ones.  In other words, get drivers together in a group and you’ll hear stories like the one above.  Talk to them individually and you may get something much more reasonable or even entirely different.  In the trucking industry, I have met the most extraordinary people around in some cases and in others, just an average Joe.

The trucking industry is full of people and people are no different in the end really from job to job.  I’m not trying to make truckers out to be ignorant people fuelled by hate because we’re not.  I think it’s important however for the industry to recognize that there are a number of counterproductive prejudices that run deep within the profession that haven’t had a chance to be dealt with by and large.  Why that is, I’m not sure but it’s obvious that they are ever present.

So to end this lengthy post, I’ll leave you with a fond childhood memory that produced many a laugh.  Thanks to Saturday Night Live and creators Robert Smigel and JJ Sedelmaier, you too can enjoy an episode or two of The Ambiguously Gay Duo featuring Gary and Ace.

Ambiguously Gay Duo – It Takes Two To Tango – Watch more Funny Videos