Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America

9. Desire and Revolution: Socialists and the Brazilian Gay Liberation Movement in the 1970s

2 3 9 Socialists and the Brazilian Gay Liberation Movement in the 1970s James N. Green  In 1993, as part of a graduate school exercise at ULCA, James N. Green wrote a “self-interview,” reflecting on twenty years of participation in the struggle against authoritarianism and for gay rights across the Americas. In the early 1970s, while a member of a radical Quaker group, Green joined solidarity groups that advocated against torture and repression in Brazil and Chile. His quest to merge sexual and political identities was central to his activism in the United States and in Latin America. As this book was being realized, the editor approached Green and asked him to revisit this testimony to transnational solidarity and to reflect again on this history and specifically on how transnational activism played a role in the gay rights movement in Brazil. The original self-interview has been revised, edited, and reproduced as a narrative piece threaded through with new insights. It highlights the need for further scholarship related to sexual liberation movements in Latin America Desire and Revolution 9 2 4 0 J a m e s N . G r e e n and their relationship to political change. Moreover, Green’s experience sheds light on the complicated relationship between transnational social movements and political organizing.  The year 1978 was an exhilarating time in Brazil. The air was heavy with the feeling of imminent political change. After a decade of harsh military rule,1 everyone seemed to know that the demise of the generals’ rule was approaching. Hundreds of thousands of metalworkers lay down their tools and struck against the government’s regressive wage policies . Students filled the main streets of the states’ capitals chanting: “Down with the dictatorship.” Radios played previously censored songs that hit the top of the charts. Blacks, women, and even homosexuals began organizing, demanding to be heard. During the long, tropical summer that ended 1978 and rang in 1979, I joined a dozen or so young students, office workers, bank clerks, and intellectuals in the city of São Paulo who met weekly. Rotating from apartment to apartment, sitting on the floor for lack of adequate furniture, we plotted the formation of the first homosexual rights organization in Brazil. Alternating between consciousness-raising and discussion groups, we debated the most recent antigay statements in the tabloids and coordinated a response from our newly founded group, Action Nucleus for Homosexual Rights. Every month, we poured over the new gay monthly publication Lampião da Esquina, produced by a collective of writers and intellectuals from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo that declared itself a vehicle for discussion on sexuality, racial discrimination , the arts, ecology, and machismo. This first wave of the Brazilian gay and lesbian liberation movement burst onto the national political scene in 1978–79 but then shrunk to a handful of groups five years later. During the mid to late 1980s, a cluster of people sustained the ideals of the movement while at the same time struggling to respond to the AIDS crisis.2 In the 1990s, a new generation of activists emerged. Today, Brazil has one of the most dynamic LGBTQ movements in the world. As a historian of Brazil and a leading participant in the most important Brazilian gay liberation organization during the movement’s initial period, I had an insider’s knowledge and access to sources that allowed me to write about various aspects of this history.3 Yet I faced a challenge in narrating a history of that movement. How can a former leader of a social movement examine the events she or he helped shape with enough distance and circumspection to provide an adequate account of what took place? How do one’s subjectivity and D e s i r e a n d R e v o l u t i o n 2 4 1 personal stake in recounting the past color interpretations? Academic protocol for historical articles written for peer-reviewed journals or edited collections usually demands “objective” distancing of the author from the subject, and the reader rarely gains an insight into the back story of why the author chose the topic or what his or her involvement in the subject may have been. The historical profession tends to disdain anthropological participant-observant narratives in which the author is positioned within the research endeavor. In writing this self-interview, I chose...