allen young - gay gringo in brazil

If anyone decides to make a gay liberation button in Brazil, it won’t even need words, just a picture of a deer. For reasons which no one seems to know, the word for deer (veado) in Portuguese is the equivalent of the English word faggot. Rio de Janeiro (population four and a half million) and São Paulo (population six million) are probably the gayest cities on the continent, but Brazilian society finds its strongest words of contempt in the vocabulary used to describe homosexuals. This is a factor, as in other societies, which teaches gay people self-hatred and is basic to gay oppression.

Take the word veado. In Brazil, there is a very popular numbers racket called the animal game. Bets are taken on the basis of numbers from one to twenty-five, with each number corresponding to an animal, from A to Z. This helps illiterate people—more than half of Brazil’s population cannot read or write—to participate in the gambling. In the animal game, number one is the avestruz (ostrich), and number twenty-five is the zebra. Number twenty-four is veado (deer), and consequently that number has the same connotation—faggot. When a young man is twenty-four years old, he is likely to say he is twenty-three or twenty-five. Some buildings go from the twenty-third to the twenty-fifth floor.

The other most hostile word in Brazilian slang is bicha, which doesn’t really have any other meaning, and is the word used to describe an effeminate homosexual, or, more specifically, a guy who likes to get fucked. Its equivalent in English is a combination of femme/faggot/queen/fairy.

Brazilian gay people have their own word to describe themselves—entendido (entendida for lesbians). Entendido means “someone in the know” or “someone who understands.” It is very much of an underground gay word, perhaps the way the word “gay” was twenty-five years ago in the U.S. The average straight Brazilian does not know this special meaning of entendido, since entendido is also used in the language in other ways. Brazilians have heard about the Gay Liberation Movement, since articles about it have appeared in their newspapers and magazines, so now, in addition to the word entendido, some Brazilians are using the word “gay.” This is especially true among Brazil’s growing freak population, which follows developments in the U.S. counterculture with special interest.

Brazil is important to me because I am enchanted with the spiritual and physical beauty of the land, the people, the tropical culture, but especially because an important part of my own development as a gay person took place there. Rio de Janeiro is a beautiful city in the tropics, with green hills rising dramatically from the blue-green ocean and the sandy curved beaches below. It was there in Rio that I first said to myself, “I am a homosexual,” and it was there that I first made love with another man with a full sense of the joy of gay love.

When I first arrived in Rio in July 1964, on a Fulbright scholarship, I was a very frightened closet case. Tucked away in my pocket was the name of a Brazilian psychoanalyst which a New York shrink had obtained for me from some international directory on a shelf in his office. I was going to get cured. The cure I got, however, came not from the shrink (whom I saw five days a week for three months—all in Portuguese!) but from inside myself, with the help of Rio’s ubiquitous gay population. At every turn I met wonderful, warm gay people. And by spending a good deal of time looking at the near-naked people on Copacabana beach, I understood clearly just what my own sexuality really was and how foolish and repressive it was of me to continue with my psychoanalytical “cure.”

Dutifully trying to be straight, I had called up a young woman I’d met at the Fulbright Commission office and asked her to go out with me. She said no to the date but invited me to a party at her place and I got involved with her crowd of friends. Within a few weeks I realized that at least two of the men in the crowd were gay, and we gradually opened up to each other. I was ready. They introduced me to the frenzied gay world of Rio—the cruising on the streets and inside movie theaters, the bars and baths, the gay world’s vocabulary and customs. There was much I found shocking and distasteful—not the homosexuality but the alienation and compulsiveness which is intrinsic to that ghettoized gay world provided by straight society. But I was glad to be coming out of the closet. It was my first contact with the gay world anywhere, the first time I discovered the humanity of gay people, the first time I accepted my own sexuality fully.

Quite obviously, being away from my old friends and family and so many other factors which enforced my straightness, I was in a better position to come out. (I know of many other people who have had to travel far from home in order to come out.)

I was still unwilling, however, to tell any straight friends about my gayness. The friends I chose, I should add, led the kind of double life that I was about to begin. It was another form of closetry that I was entering, though I didn’t fully understand it at the time.

One of my friends, João Carlos, came from a lower-middle-class family and lived in Grajaú in Rio’s unfashionable north zone. He lived a lie on many fronts. He borrowed cars and told people it was his car. He said he lived in Leblon (a ritzy neighborhood in the south zone). He had a romantic relationship with a beautiful young woman, the daughter of a French diplomat. He hated himself for being poor and being gay. João Carlos saved up a supply of sleeping pills, rented a room in a cheap hotel, and, on November 1, 1964 (known in Brazil as “the day of the dead”), he ended his life. João Carlos’s suicide was a heavy experience for me, coming only two months after my debut in the gay world. I felt that my own frenzied life was not so different from what his had been, and I got scared. I abstained from it all for a while to think things over, but I concluded that João Carlos was wrong and that whatever problems I was having, I was too committed to enjoying and treasuring life.

A few weeks later, I found another circle of friends, somewhat more stable and more to my liking. We all became very close, and to this day I consider some of these friends among those human beings nearest and dearest to me. They taught me much about the sense of community and closeness and the will to survive which is a basic part of gay liberation.

I spent a year in Brazil on a Fulbright, went to Chile on another scholarship (there, gay life was much more limited and difficult), and then returned to Brazil for another year to work as a teacher in the American High School. I left Brazil in July 1967, and I’ve always wanted to go back for a visit. I finally made it this year. I spent a total of seven weeks in Brazil this past winter, most of it in Rio, with brief visits to São Paulo and Salvador (Bahia).

The nature of my recent visit to Brazil was, of course, influenced by the fact that I had developed, in the intervening years, something of a “gay consciousness.” I was openly gay in most circumstances this time. Just about the only times I had to hide my gayness, in fact, was as a favor to some of my old gay friends, all of whom were still into hiding their gayness from straight friends. This became a source of conflict between us.

It wasn’t only my consciousness about not hiding that was involved. I had learned and experienced more than that from gay liberation. Several of my friends continued to speak about bichas (femmes) with incredible contempt. I objected, argued, explained, but they were set in their opinions. And then there was their view of monogamy. I was, of course, anxious to meet new people. But my friends were jealous; the presumption was that I was a sexual rival. My ideas about breaking down the separation between friends and lovers, about a more free sexuality, were threatening and were not accepted.

Many younger gay people are breaking out of these molds. I met several gay freaks who had a different approach to their gayness. There was still some element of closetry in that they didn’t feel 100 percent free to tell their straight friends, but they said they didn’t care if their straight friends knew, that they should be able to figure it out themselves. Many of these straight freaks thought of themselves as bisexual, but generally objected to labeling. They were not into pure monogamy, nor were they into role-playing. I had the impression that these gay freaks think of themselves as quite separate from the existing gay world, even to the extent of not using the term entendido, preferring the English word “gay.” Many of them had not been to any gay bars because, they said, they didn’t need them.

I couldn’t decide how to respond to such an attitude. On the one hand, I believe that gay liberation means relating to other gay people outside of the bars, as the bars are a kind of closet. On the other hand, I felt that many of the Brazilian gay freaks were finding it easy outside the gay world because of their youth and beauty, and I also questioned the way they sought to divorce themselves from the gay world. It reminded me too much of my own feeling, which lasted for many years, that I did not want to be associated with “faggots.”

Many of the straight Brazilians I knew, either freaks or intellectuals, responded well to my being openly gay with them. The heavy anti-gay attitudes in the culture, I felt, could be easily eroded. These attitudes are not so essential to Latin culture as many people seem to think, largely because Latin culture, unlike Anglo-Saxon, has never pretended that homosexuality doesn’t exist. In fact, it may be more realistic or logical for Latins to accept homosexuality in the context of gay liberation than for them to attempt to eliminate homosexuality (as the Cubans are doing).

I say this because the presence of at least some form of homosexuality is an integral part of Latin culture, and gay liberation offers the possibility of that presence becoming a constructive, progressive force (as opposed to the oppressive, male-chauvinist type of homosexuality permitted under fascism).

But Brazilians are still pretty hung-up about sexual roles. Many Brazilians believe in the bicha/bofe (femme/butch) dichotomy and try to live by it. It is, of course, a reflection of the male supremacy in heterosexual relations.

The hierarchy between the masculine and the effeminate male is even clearer in Brazil than it is in the U.S. In Brazil, the average person doesn’t even recognize the existence of the masculine homosexual. For example, among working-class men, it is considered all right to fuck a bicha, an accomplishment of sorts, just like fucking a woman. I met a few gay guys who used to go down to the World War II memorial near downtown Rio to give blow jobs to the soldiers who stood honor guard there. The soldiers were in no way compromising their masculinity, even to their colleagues. This type of homosexuality of course usually involves no emotional commitment, at least on the part of the bofe. It is nevertheless a common way for Brazilian males to express themselves homosexually.

The gay world in Brazil reflects the racism of Brazilian society, though I wish at the outset to stress that the racism in the gay world is not worse than among straights; racism permeates Brazilian society. Virtually all of my Brazilian friends are white and middle-class, which is perhaps an indictment of me, but I prefer to think it has more to do with circumstances than consciousness.

During my first visit to Brazil, there was one mulato named Renato who hung around some of the time with my friends, and the way my friends viewed Renato was, “He’s mulato, but he’s a pretty nice guy.” Sometimes, rather than call him mulato or preto (black), they’d call him moreno (swarthy), as if that were preferable.

Now, these are people who thought of themselves as being opposed to racial discrimination, who categorized themselves as leftists of some sort. One time I told my friend that I had tricked with a black guy, and he made a face, confessing to me: “I’m a racist when it comes to sex.”

This year I met a black guy in a gay bar, but early in our conversation he tried to explain away his very dark skin, saying something about having been in the sun a lot: “I’m dark as a Negro.” I was running my fingers through his hair (in Brazil, kinky hair is known as “bad hair”) and was saying that I liked it. Then, as if he understood that I wasn’t fitting the stereotype of a racist North American, he said, “I see you’re not a racist. Well, it’s true, I’m black, but I’m a racist anyway—I don’t like Japs.” The incident dismayed me, but it reminds me of so many other incidents revealing the complexity of racism in Brazil (even though Brazil’s official line is that the nation exemplifies racial equality).

While more than half of Brazil’s population is what we would call black or brown, the predominately white gay world maintains white European beauty standards, with only the slightest allowance for African and Indian influence. While the beauty standard of the gay world in the States is also predominately white, I believe there is much more awareness of the beauty of black people. This is no doubt a result of the black liberation movement and the rejection of racism by so many North American black people, and the hard lessons so many whites have begun to learn.

In many ways, I found the situation of gay people in Brazil to be similar to that of gay people in the U.S. Brazil is a capitalist country run by a fascistic military dictatorship. The military men who run the country typify the male supremacist theme in Brazilian culture and politics. Women are totally powerless, excluded altogether not only from ruling the nation but from most aspects of Brazilian life.

Within the military, so it is said, there is a good deal of homosexuality, but it is of the super-masculine militaristic type associated with male supremacy. It is totally divorced from the kind of homosexuality envisioned by the gay liberation movement. In its official pronouncements, of course, the military men pay homage to God, country and the nuclear family.

Among the several movies that have been banned in Brazil is Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Open, proud, role-free homosexuality, or what we call gayness, is not tolerated anywhere. As for the bars, the baths, the cruising on the streets, they seem to be tolerated, at least in the biggest cities. In Salvador (population eight hundred thousand), however, the city’s only gay bar was harassed by police and forced to close.

Gay people generally are compelled to stay in the closet by the same forces at work in the U.S. Many people end up on psychiatrists’ couches (if they can afford it), or in mental hospitals. I heard of several people who had been murdered by Midnight Cowboy rough-trade or hustler types.

I just got a letter from a Brazilian friend who told me about a friend of his who had committed suicide, someone I had met briefly in Arembepe, a beautiful, idyllic fishing village near Salvador, on my last visit to Brazil. He plunged to his death from the Lacerda elevator, which connects the Upper City of Salvador with the Lower City, shouting, “I’m human! I’m human, too!” He’d been picked up by pigs the day before and held for twelve hours, part of an overall campaign against “hippies.”

In Brazil, long hair on men is still seen as effeminate, so that being a hippie and being gay are not as separate as they’ve become in the U.S. (I don’t want to give the false impression that straight freaks in Brazil are totally open to gayness. Two gay brothers were being affectionate on the freak beach in Ipanema, a section of Rio de Janeiro, and one straight freak came up and started kicking sand on them, saying, “Get out of here! This place isn’t for faggots!”)

There are so many other ways, subtle and direct, that anti-gay oppression is perpetuated in Brazil. “Vai tomar no cu” (“Take it up your ass!”) is still one of the two worst curses you can utter in Brazil. (The other terrible curse is “Vai pela puta que pariu”—“Go back to the whore who bore you!”) These two curses illustrate the close relationship in a male-chauvinist society between the denigration of so-called passive homosexuality and the way women are categorized as either good (virgin, wife, mother) or evil (whore, slut, old maid, lesbian). There are two ways to put down a man: accuse him of being womanly, or accuse him of being the offspring of an evil woman (whore).

Though I couldn’t find out for sure, I don’t believe Brazil has sodomy laws as such. Cross-dressing is illegal, except for the carnival period, and, I was told, two men holding hands in a public place would be subject to arrest on some sort of morals charge. Certainly anyone who is a schoolteacher, or in any “sensitive” field, cannot be openly gay.

In sum, the pattern of oppression and repression is pretty much the same as in other capitalist Western societies. Political dissidents of all types are subject to severe repression, including torture, and it is clear to me that any attempt of gay people in Brazil to organize (hold meetings, pass out leaflets, etc.) would be met with instant police repression.

If a gay group ever is formed in Brazil, I’m quite certain that it will have a very radical political perspective, that it cannot fail to make the connection between gay oppression and imperialism. I’ve met hundreds of Brazilian gay people and the overwhelming majority think of the United States as an imperialist country which has victimized and exploited Brazil. In fact, on many occasions I was put on the defensive for being a North American, a situation I fully understood and actually welcomed. (On my most recent visit, this did not occur so much, but that is because Brazilians now tend to assume that a young North American is an enemy of Nixon and not his emissary.)

Such a gay group, however, might have problems with the traditional Brazilian left, should this left ever be allowed to function again. One gay friend, a closet case who despises his homosexuality, thinks of himself as a Marxist-Leninist and told me that gay liberation is “fascistic.”

The awareness that gay people in the U.S. and elsewhere are fighting against oppression, however, is having a definite effect on the consciousness and daily lives of at least some Brazilian gay people. The pattern of sexist oppression—from the straight world and inside the gay world—is beginning to change and erode.

 A feminist movement is beginning to function in Brazil, looking for ways to integrate women into the process of national development. Rosemarie Muraro, one of the leading Brazilian feminists, told me that she believed that the progress of feminism would definitely break down the taboo against homosexuality in Brazil. The women of the revolutionary Puerto Rican group, the Young Lords, once wrote in a position paper that “machismo is fascism.”

If that is true, it is perhaps in the struggle against machismo, as carried out by Brazilian women and gay people, that Brazil’s fascist regime may be overturned.