Tentative Transgressions: Homosexuality, AIDS, and the Theater in Brazil

Afterword

As this study of homosexualities in Brazilian theater began to take shape, some obstacles seemed more daunting than others. The cautious nature of the theatrical representation of homoeroticism and homosexual transgression in Brazil has presented a particular challenge. In attempting to locate such tentativeness under the diverse guises it has assumed, I had to challenge the received wisdom of Brazil’s theatrical history, defying some of the major canonical icons, playwrights, and critics alike. As I dug deeper, I was repeatedly surprised at how firm their grip was on the artistic establishment during the key modernist period. And as I considered (mostly in chapter 2) how the introduction of modernism in Brazilian theater was related to the exclusions it entailed (mainly of the works of João do Rio and the transgressive nature of so much of the teatro de revista tradition), I became increasingly aware of the connection between the dawn of modernity in a peripheral society and what is rejected and reduced to noncanonical status. Such intersections uncover the range and pull of the repressed side, a vitality that held a special, forceful fascination for the playwrights (foremost among them Oswald de Andrade and Nelson Rodrigues) Brazilian modernism chose to induct into its ranks. Within the Brazilian theatrical tradition, Nelson Rodrigues occupies a commanding role as innovator. As a playwright, novelist, and cronista, Nelson always operated as an instigator of transgression. But his works, including his plays, impart the often disconcerting suggestion that transgression , however enticing, is always a glaring aberration and that transgressors , however prevalent, are ultimately sick. Chapter 2 thus considers how Afterword 171 it was that the man who was hailed the greatest Brazilian theater author of the twentieth century and perhaps of all times was not quite above portraying homosexuality as an odious deviance. Nor did his scorn for difference seem to bother those who worked in the early 1980s to rescue Nelson’s career following his demise and that of the military regime he had supported. Sábato Magaldi (1990: 36),1 the revered critic and editor of Nelson’s complete works as well as the architect of his rehabilitation, speaks of Serginho’s coming out in Toda nudez será castigada as a wallowing in “a perversão do prazer masoquista” (the perversion of masochistic pleasure). Oswald de Andrade, a playful parodist, against-the-grain social critic, mocker of the knowing and the smug, author of mordant drama, unraveler of deep-woven cultural patterns such as antropofagia, and deft expert on Brazilian culture, could still deny homosexual men and women a relevant presence on the Brazilian stage. But like Nelson, the paulista playwright was for all his exclusionary practices still enticed by the transgressive pull of what he rejected. I have given considerable attention to the theater of these two modernist authors, as well as to that of their neorealist successor, Plínio Marcos, because together they form a vast body of iconoclastic works whose feverish search for artistic truth exploded Brazilian bourgeois conventions. Together the works of these three playwrights provide a privileged look into two related issues. The first is encapsulated in what Paul Julian Smith (1992: 219) terms “the process of disavowal by which a dominant culture expels those ‘deviants’ whose existence it seeks to deny.” The second is the increasingly strong belief among minorities that speaking for others, as the heterosexual Nelson, Oswald, and Plínio Marcos did for homosexual men and women, is “arrogant, vain, unethical, and politically illegitimate” (Alcoff 1991–92: 6). Still, despite the clearly exclusionary treatment of difference in their plays, the theater of Oswald, Nelson, and Plínio Marcos offers some strong explorations of homoeroticism and homosexual experience in Brazil, for example through the character Arandir, whose life is changed in the wake of the pivotal kiss in Beijo no asfalto and the charged interactions between Veludo and Vado in Navalha na carne. Aside from these mostly distorted, reluctant representations, Brazil’s modernist and neorealist theater had little to say about same-sex relationships . With Lúcio Cardoso and others unwilling or unable to offer a response to these warped portrayals in a corpus that could have constituted the first sensitive representation of the homosexual experience on 172 Afterword modernist stages, a gay-accented theater had to wait several decades until tentativeness began to give way to a more direct, though not always more effective, approach. I...