Customer Reviews

Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture)

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Covering developments between 1890 and 1980, Green's book is the best place to begin to understand the appropriation of public space by gay male Brazilians. Besides seeming to have read everything written by or about male homosexuality in Brazil (his book's apparatus occupies more than a hundred pages), including archived forensic and psychiatric case records, Green draws on seventy life history interviews and a cache of illustrations from across the twentieth century.

Green shows that the gap between representation of rigid (masculine-active) bofe and (feminine-passive and frequently transvestite) bicha roles and how Brazilian males lived their sexualities increased during 1960s, and subsequently has been challenged in public discourse, but that behavior and purportedly universal norms were already noncongruent during the 1930s. Besides cataloging a history of growing bicha pride and steady bofe bashful ambivalence, Green also shows that bicha prominence in carnival is a tradition that is relatively recent, emerging during the 1950s, and suppressed for a few years at the beginning of the 1970s.

Green sensibly stresses the emergence during the 1950s and 60s of first bicha and then gay publications. The American homophile movement then also involved only a few determined individuals and fugitive publications. Rio's famed beaches have been important as places where men of varying economic status who are sexually interested in men meet - and socialize, and develop group consciousness, as well as engineering sexual liaisons. Brazilian gay clubs, bars, and restaurants cluster near beaches with gay enclaves.

It's indeed the most important register on brazilian homosexuality ever done. Green is a genius and this book must be read not only by homosexuals, but all kind of people that would like to understand a little about the gay subculture in Brazil. The author is brilliant and deserves our respect.

Anyone working on gender and sexuality in the Latin American context ought to take a look at this comprehensive history...doesn't only assume a social constructionist viewpoint but that of Brazilian scholars as well...check it out!

I used this book during my senior thesis as one of my main sources. The way it is put together is excellent! Would highly recommend this book to anyone pursuing studies of homosexuality or eugenics in Latin America.