Emergences

I have been teaching during the past few years at the Department of Arts and Communication of the Universidade Federal de São Carlos, a public university—which means, in Brazilian terms, a high-standard school, with a highly selected student body who do not pay fees of any sort (private colleges and universities in Brazil hardly sponsor any kind of research). I am a founder and currently the president of Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos de Cinema e Audiovisual (Society for Cinema and Audiovisual Studies)—SOCINE. I have also acted as a council member of the Associação Mix Brasil, which promotes the Festival Mix. The association also promotes community activities, such as the Mix Jovem (or Mix Youth), whose screenings and debates about gender and sexuality in the poorer areas of São Paulo have drawn large audiences (these screenings are usually of Brazilian-made short features selected from those shown in the Festival Mix programs).

There has been quite a change in the way gay and lesbian issues have been considered in Brazilian academic environments. One brief example: two years ago, when a (very) small homophobic graffito was found in one of the men's toilets at the university where I work, the head of our department called me and asked me to provide a course on the politics of identity in audiovisual media. The course went very well, and since then it has been offered in every term in response to student demand. Moreover, in the past fifteen years there has been a flood of works dealing with (homo)sexuality and (trans)gender themes in the regular conferences of history, communication, literature, social sciences, and arts—and, amazingly enough, a great number refer to film, video, or television. Master's theses and PhD dissertations have dealt with it. SOCINE has also regularly featured panels on homosexuality. (Audiovisual culture, by the way, is deeply rooted in a country that still features low levels of literacy.) This scene has produced, in the last ten years, at least two important biannual academic events: the Fazendo Gênero international conference on gender and sexuality, held in the city of Florianópolis, which gathers thousands of scholars and students, and the conference of Associação Brasileira de Estudos da Homocultura (we know, the name does sound weird, but in English translation it means Gay and Lesbian and Transgender Studies Association), or ABEH, which has specialized in queer studies.

The audiences of gay, lesbian, and transgender screenings in major Brazilian cities are mostly made up of college students, and many of them claim to have found inspiration there to produce their own works. No wonder the number of experimental videos made in Brazil and screened at Festival Mix has grown so much. Digital media have also helped a lot, in terms of budget and visual resources.

One could argue that the gay- and lesbian-themed television sitcoms and shows from the United States have had some impact on the formation of these audiences and potential filmmakers, but in Brazil one cannot underestimate the impact of the gay and lesbian characters that have dotted the plots of primetime telenovelas. They have raised issues that have reached different media and social classes. They have been discussed in sympathetic newspaper editorials and have provoked the biblical anger of fundamentalist groups. At the same time, they have also shown lifestyle alternatives to youngsters and their families. It is also important to note that some of the most important telenovela authors in Brazil are openly gay.

Last year a prime-time telenovela showed the conflicts of two gay characters, one of them a butch rodeo cowboy, the other a butch youngster who was in love with the cowboy but who wanted to work in the fashion industry as a designer. The rodeo circuit shows have reached large audiences in Brazil for the past several decades, and it is worth recalling that this telenovela was on the air long before news of Brokeback Mountain ever reached the Brazilian media. While the episodes were being aired, there was an ongoing polemic about these characters and whether they should be shown kissing in the last...