SolaceSoul

“By Acyr & Jamie”. isn’t Acyr the one behind Meio Mundo and the short-lived Manhattan Rios? If so, should we expect this new sauna to feature those same kind of garotos (twinks, barely legal, average guy next door builds)? Not my type, but those who love them need a place to go, too.

On my last Barcelona visit, I walked into Sauna Thermas and at the door was a beautiful, muscular man probably in his 20s. I was thinking he was a working boy checking in or out, but he was a disappointed customer who was asking for a refund. He was visiting from USA and thought it would be a regular gay sauna without rentboys. They gave him the address to Sauna Casanova and a full refund.

Not only is the current President in the mold of Donnie Dollhands Drumpf and Duterte, but also Rio’s current mayor Marcelo Crivela is a conservative Pentecostal former gospel singer. However, to everyone’s surprise, Crivela thus far has not governed Rio like some fanatical Evangelical right winger — probably because he knows what’s best for him politically. Trying to turn Rio into something like Salt Lake City would be a cultural and financial disaster.

But is it a sex trade business? Also, just because one business uses or infringes a trademark (in this case, a service mark, but same difference), that doesn’t mean another has the right to use or can get away with it. That’s like saying, “but Dad, Jimmy’s Mom let him smoke dope! Why can’t I? You parents are SO mean!”

The name “Lions Club” will almost certainly run afoul of international trademark laws. Every Brazilian intellectual property attorney will be chomping at the bit, because this would be an open and shit case of trademark violation and brand dilution — as an organization like Lions Club International, with branches in Rio, would find being wrongly associated with a sex business very distasteful. Tell your friends to go with another name. Please. There are companies and legal offices that do trademark searches for a reasonable fee. Other than that, I hope this new sauna is a huge success!

Only two other Presidents went through impeachment: Richard Nixon and Andrew Johnson. Nixon resigned from office right before the House vote (after Republicans went to him privately and told him he would lose an impeachment and removal fight in both the House and Senate. Aaa I’m sure you already know, Nixon was in his second and last term. Johnson became the first president impeached by the House, but he was later acquitted by the Senate by only one vote. Not seeing the writing on the wall, he attempted a run for a second term. but landed 4th on the end ballot in the party primaries — with almost all of his support coming from racist rednecks in Tennessee that liked his pardoning of treasonous Civil War Confederates.

Shamefully, more advanced the USA right now.

The impeachment of Clinton didn’t even start until October 8, 1998, only a month before the midterm elections. In the midterms of November 1998, the Democrats picked up only five seats in the House and the Republicans still maintained majority control. In 2000, which was the next Presidential election post-Clinton impeachment, the GOP regained the Presidency and the House. Looks like the GOP won that battle. And BTW, Clinton was a very popular President, one who won both of his terms by popular vote and who had a 73% approval rating at the time of impeachment proceedings. Donnie Dollhands Drumpf is a one-termer who steadily remains the least popular President in the 60 year polling history, and only “won” by the electoral college (and the help of a foreign adversary). And Clinton was impeached for lying about a fucking blowjob — insignificant compared to the multitude of treasonous crimes committed by the Dotard In Chief. Trump supporters are the absolute worst. No, what’s even worse is a gay (closeted or not) dick-sucking, male hooker-hiring Trump supporter, doing the bid of an Evangelical Right that wants you dead.

It seems he either took your advice, or was already one step ahead of you. Done, done and done. As we discussed earlier. The game never really changes, just the playas, the fans and the arena.

That’s what Trumpsters like to believe, and want others to think. There is no history in the USA of a President being re-elected after an impeachment proceeding.

The prison bodies on that Brazil episode cannot compare to what’s available at 117. Not even close!

Reveillon (New Years Eve) and Carnaval are the most expensive times for lodging in Rio. The High Season, their summer (December to beginning of March) has increased prices, and the weeks to two weeks of Reveillon and Carnaval, the prices are even higher. If Kevie’s major concern was cost compared to the DR, as he seemed to suggest, then that period (even without the difference in airfare) could be prohibitive. A low season (not during their summer) visit would be much less expensive. And it also would not be as crowded.

What’s to like?

Waitaminute. You can believe that muscular macho hétero garotos can tolerate having sex with sexagenarian male prunes for cash, but somehow can’t fathom that they would agree to sit down and share stories anonymously about their experiences for a few hours for pay? Everyone seems to have their own definition of what’s masculine and muscular, or feminine and twinky, but The Geeky Professor did interview and return some grips that he described as the former. Even in the segment featured on the link in the OP: ”Researchers and clients alike have often remarked that masculinity is to the garoto what femininity is to travesti sex workers.4 The essential (and even stereotypical) features of the gender being performed are rendered so completely that they become exaggerations and collapse away from the perfection of the ur- form by virtue of their proximity to it. Whereas travesti sex workers inject silicone to enhance their backsides and breasts into an almost inhumanly perfect shape and size so they can be “better than women,” garotos adopt a hypermacho walk, demeanor, and body. For example, Pacu was a twenty-six-year-old light-skinned garoto who worked in a sauna in Rio. Pacu, whose telltale nickname refers to a species of fish that has a peculiar underbite and is related to the piranha, had such bulging neck and shoulder muscles that he seemed to have difficulty turning his head from side to side. He kept his torso waxed to make sure every rippling abdominal muscle was visible from a maximum distance, but because of the thick, coarse hair on his arms and legs, he seemed to have been naturally hairy otherwise. Although studious in the maintenance of his persona as a “total top” and prolific in his frequent use of mildly homophobic epithets lobbed at clients, staff, and fellow garotos alike, he was more fastidious in his grooming than nearly any garoto I met. He kept his hair perfectly coifed and liberally gelled, ran to the locker room to pluck any stray chest hair that he discovered he had missed, and enjoyed frequent pedicures to stave off damage from the famously grimy and broken cobblestoned streets of Rio that are so at odds with the Brazilian love of flip-flops. Beyond merely being metrosexual or attentive to grooming practices, Pacu tried to embody masculinity, yet his need to conspicuously showcase that masculinity resulted in practices that were not stereotypically masculine. Pacu’s bofedade (butchness) was so artificial that he complained that whenever he went to other businesses near the sauna, he stood out among the other working-class men, whose masculinity seemed natural and effortless next to Pacu’s. The shopkeepers would treat Pacu rudely or give him poor service “because they see my body and they know I’m a boy and they think that this makes me low class.” Alternatively, he worried that they “might treat me badly because they think I’m a bicha because I do this work. But they don’t know I’m a real man [homem] so I would never give my ass.” He constantly compared himself to other garotos in the sauna as well, worrying that someone else was bigger, tougher, more masculine, or more attractive. Just as the clients find themselves in a paradox of queer desire, so too did Pacu find that the cruel optimism of masculinity meant that the more he strived to attain the ultimate bofedade, the more it slipped away because it just isn’t manly to worry so much about manliness. Still, Pacu never wanted for clients, who found in him a macho and avowedly straight guy with rough and not even conventionally attractive features…”

And the irony is that this was far easier to understand than your usual cryptic posts.

Also addressed in the book! ”Some heterosexually identified garotos need to look at straight porn to feel tesão; others close their eyes and imagine the client is a woman.”

Oh, Rioblather, you’re overthinking it, as usual. The simplest, most concise explanation for how the garoto deals with the vast age / appearance gap is in a few lines from Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer”: ”You don't look at their faces And you don't ask their names You don't think of them as human You don't think of them at all You keep your mind on the money Keeping your eyes on the wall” That, and Sildenafil (generic Viagra)! Dont believe me? Here’s an excerpt of a garoto interview from the treatise discusses in the OP: “If it’s a young guy,” Adilson explains, “he gives me tesão, but with an old flabby man [velho todo caído] . . . ooooh, that’s more difficult.” He makes a disgusted face.... “When the boy is there with an ass in front of him and a job to do, it’s luckier to get a hot ass like Cavi did on his first time. Because, oh, first time was horrible! I got this Danny DeVito type. He was American, really short and fat. Holy shit! [Cruz credo!] It was horrible, oh horrible, but I made a lot of money . . .” He trails off in raucous laughter that goes on so long that it becomes infectious and we laugh with him.”

But Pence could never win a national election on his own. Unlike Trump, he has no cult following and can be easily defeated at the polls (assuming there is no election tampering from a foreign power).

Maybe Dr. Mitchell should write a sequel, focusing his research on clients? It certainly might provide him with more academic research funding, paid trips to the hot spots in Brazil and yet another cover for hooking up with garotos! He should be tenured at Williams by now, so taking a sabbatical for research should be par for the course. Nice work if you can get it. Regarding the feminist anti-prostitution theory, there are also feminists and allies who support sex workers’ rights and the full legalization and regulation of prostitution. Most feminists usually ignore the dynamic of male sex work, or just dismiss it as part of the “patriarchy”. These are the same people who would get outraged at 20 year age differences between a 45 year old man in power and a 25 year old ambitious young woman involved in a consensual relationship, but have zero to say about, for example, the “true love” between powerful and influential Glenn Greenwald and his similarly younger, much poorer same-sex partner

Those of us who have already taken that deep dive into reading “Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazil’s Sexual Economy”, the published completed academic research of ethnographer Dr. Gregory C. Mitchell (Chair of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Williams College) are familiar with these passages. But for the newly initiated (or to those who just don’t like reading heady, voluminous academic treatises), this is a pretty damn enticing introductory summary! — The book discusses most if not all of the same topics that frequently pop up on the LATAM forum, including the one that many here dread: age differences and attractiveness: “My first time wasn’t hard at all,” Cavi explains, nibbling at a doughy ball of fried cod. He comes from a smaller city in the interior, and he’s much more shy than Adilson, who talks and smokes constantly. Cavi continues, “See, I got [peguei, “hooked up with”] a client who wasn’t very old, so it was easy. He was thirty-five. Since I have to do this job, it’s better when the ass is good-looking [bonitinha].” Adilson interrupts him to explain. “We all say this: se a bunda é bonitinha, novinha é uma coisa.” Very roughly, this means that if the ass looks good, it’s a much different matter. “Look, if you have a young woman and a very old woman, the young one will still be better. If a gay had to choose between these women, which would he choose?”... “If it’s a young guy,” Adilson explains, “he gives me tesão, but with an old flabby man [velho todo caído] . . . ooooh, that’s more difficult.” He makes a disgusted face... “When the boy is there with an ass in front of him and a job to do, it’s luckier to get a hot ass like Cavi did on his first time. Because, oh, first time was horrible! I got this Danny DeVito type. He was American, really short and fat. Holy shit! [Cruz credo!] It was horrible, oh horrible, but I made a lot of money . . .” —- Another topic addresses is the “aging out” of garotos from the perspective of some (most?) clients: ”Cavi rolled his eyes. “So if you’re sick, you’re in bed, sick with the flu, are you going to start waiting for some client from the sauna to come there and give you medicine? They don’t want to know about you. A gringo wants you when you’re a nice, hot, young boy. When you’re sick? When you get old and you’re not pretty anymore? ‘Fuck you!’ [Foda-se!] That’s what he’s going to say to you.” — Also, he gets into detail about the per formative labor of being a garoto: “I describe the work of prostitutes as performative because their success or failure depends on constructing certain styles of gender that are often rooted in neocolonial variations of archetypes such as the lusty mulata, the Lamacho, the hypersexual masculine black buck (and the dangerous thug from the favela, or slum, its contemporary corollary), the suave Latin lover, and so on.” https://redlightr.io/inside-brazils-gay-sex-tourism-industry/

Possibly a topic related to where this conversation seems to be headed: Six states in the USA will require you to register as a sex offender if you are convicted of being one of the 14% of American men who have solicited someone for sex (no matter the age, and no matter if you are paying or being paid). The Florida House and Senate just passed a bill that requires all those convicted of soliciting a prostitute to be in a publicly published registry. The bill is going to the governor’s desk. https://reason.com/2019/05/09/florida-is-creating-a-new-sex-offender-registry-just-for-prostitution-customers/?amp

Hmmm. Something is going on with that article. Because the same article is listed at the CBS News page, and the AP is listed as the original source from June 5. But in the CBS version that extra paragraph is not included:

Where are you getting your information that it is four? According to this CBS article: ”Applying for citizenship based on eligibility as a green-card holder was also out: When he was 21, Schreiner was convicted of statutory rape for having sex with a 14-year-old.”

It may not be hard if you are a US citizen with a passport and have the right documents. But in this case, he does not. ”Entering the country through the back door with a citizenship certificate that refers to him just as "Fernando" has been an obstacle for civil registration officials. Another is that there is no original record of his birth, a common situation of adoptees and other poor people in Brazil.”