Gay truckers

“I will cherish it forever. But they can get downright ugly when talk turns to “queers” on the CB radio – from mindless tittering, to discomforting rhetoric, to particularly violent reactions flavoured with homoerotic subtext. But for Schmid, it’s his way of life.

“I love the freedom,” Schmid said.

I miss them every day.”

And the impact of this lesson has been tried and true. He’s recently finished a collaboration with a professor from Pacific University on trucker languages, specifically the way chicken haulers talk to each other.

The term “good buddy,” once a popular way of addressing another male driver (after movies like White Line Fever, Convoy, and anything with Clint Eastwood and a monkey) is pejoratively used to mean gay trucker.

Thousands of people visit their social media pages from around the world and connect with each other, including a vocal German bus driver and a man from Africa trying to create more queer visibility in his area.

Coffey-Loy said many people contact him directly for support. Schmid and Coffey-Loy also host the Big Gay Trucker Podcast, where they interview people who need advice or want to discuss taboo topics.

Coffey-Loy said meeting people from different walks of life, including trans people recovering from surgeries while on the road, inspired him to create TDN.

“It just opened me up to a whole group of people that just needed representation,” Coffey-Loy said.

As it turned out, we became his number one produce-hauling team.”

 

Anderson’s academic credentials are also in order.

Gay Truck Driver is part of the dating network, which includes many other general and gay trucker dating sites. “I get paid to go see the country. On Monday, they typically start a load in Jacksonville and then drive to New Mexico, Chicago, Baltimore, Tennessee and end up back home in Palm Coast, Fla., by Friday.

Coffey-Loy missed a family member’s funeral in West Virginia because he was in New Mexico and couldn’t abandon his load.

“He had already been buried before I could get back,” he said.

It’s a different way of life, but it’s not an impossible one. Another year, they handed out condoms to promote safe sex on the road and were met with backlash –– yet they went through a whole box on the first day.

“We didn’t want to be apart from each other, so that’s what made trucking work for us.”

Bobby Coffey-Loy

The team behind TDN may be small –– about eight people –– but Schmid said their reach is wide.

“It’s such a crapshoot to find someone heading the same way, within range, who happens who happens to venture off of Sesame St.” Sesame St is the nickname for the the main channel everyone is on.

Besides a stint as a student at a Lutheran Christian College, much of Anderson’s adult life has been spent behind the wheel (he’s 36).

That is, they’ll start talking and dropping subtle hints. I’ve spent New Year’s Eve in New Orleans, I’ve spent it in St. Louis and this year I spent Christmas out in California exploring.”

Schmid is the vice president and senior diversity officer of LGBTQ+ Truck Driver Network (TDN), a nonprofit he runs with founder Bobby Coffey-Loy.

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18 U.S.C. But he told us straight out that he might not hire us because of that.