As many of you know, I have been working on a project related to Brazil. Part of it has to do with the gay history of Brazil. Having enjoyed several great trips there, I am often amazed at the way gay guys, or sauna guys, view being gay or gay sex. To that end, I needed a bit of research on it and this is the result. It will bore most of you to tears, but I thought I would share here anyway. Happy sleep.
Oz
BRIEF HISTORY OF HOMOSEXUALISM IN BRAZIL
In any given culture, tribe, country, nationality or population, it is a well known fact that about 10% of its people are homosexuals, a fact established by canonic, orthodox Science a long time ago. What is difficult to understand is why, to this day, academic circles still resist to accept and study this reality. Of course we can trace the origins of this discrimination policy to our Judeo-Christian heritage, who elected homosexualism as the most odious of crimes that can be committed by men, worse than sexual violence against children, matricide, cannibalism, genocide and even deicide, all crimes considered sins while homosexualism is considered “nefandum!...”.
Apparently, one of the reasons for this attitude almost universal against homosexualism is the erroneous belief that homosexualism is a lifestyle people choose to live, the condition itself is a conscious choice made by these 10% of the population at some point in their lives. Sort of like going to the market and choosing beef or chicken for the day’s meal, this deviant creature is someone that woke up one day and decided to express an homosexual behavior when, until the day before, he was a perfectly happy and integrated heterosexual. How could the majority of humanity come to this conclusion is a fascinating mystery, to this very day. Anyone who is a homosexual knows there is no choice on the matter, for homosexualism is a characteristic 10% of the population are born with, same as our eyes color or the color of our skin.
This brief diatribe, in no way intended to be conclusive, will take us back to Pre-Colombian America, where the history of homosexual practices can be observed through sculptures, drawings and ceramics representing homoerotic scenes, besides myths preserved in the oral memory of natives, registered in manuscripts. Chronicles written by the first Europeans to make contact with the Native Americans are another important source of information on this subject, so we’ll be visiting those sources.
Gonzalo Oviedo (Historia General y Natural de las Indias, 1535) reveals that the appetite for the “nefarious vice” was common not only around the Caribbean region but also in Terra Firme, along the coast of what we know now as Venezuela and Colombia “where many Indians, male and female, were sodomites”. In certain parts of this vast territory Oviedo observed that “ the Indians carried with them a piece of gold jewelry representing a man on top of another one, on that diabolic and nefarious act of Sodoma. (…) I saw one of these jewelry pieces weighing twenty pesos of gold, very well carved, apprehended on the Port of Santa Marta, at the coast of Terra Firme, in the year of 1514. (…) Therefore, whom ever value such jewelry and with it compose its own person, will certainly use such evilness routinely with no second thoughts, something that should be considered ordinary and common”.
In 1552, Francisco Gomara mentioned the presence of homosexual icons among Native Americans in Sant Anton, Mexico: “ … it was found, between some trees, a little idol carved in gold and many others made of clay, representing two men mounted on top of each other, à la mode of Sodoma”. At the time of the discovery of the Yucatan Peninsula, the Spaniards found several Mayan sculptures, apparently used in cults devoted to homosexual love: “ … there were many clay idols, some with demonic faces, others with female faces, many more with bad figures that looked like they were practicing sodomy with each other…”.
In Peru, the Spaniards found – and melted – countless gold statues representing sexual intercourse between two men. Currently we can still find many ceramic pieces, water containers, bowls and dishes in which very detailed pre-Incas artists sculptured, in clay, explicit homoerotic scenes. Some three percent of the famous collection of erotic ceramic owned by Family Larco, predating 1000 A.D., are realistic representations of acts of sodomy taking place among men.
More recently, in South America, in the Andean region, archeologists found sculptures and other objects confirming the practice of homosexualism in the New World, way before the arrival of the European colonizer.
Besides the Mexican idols and the Peruvian ceramics, the collection of Mayan Codes, like El Chilan Balam, El Popol Buj and the Mayan Prophecies, are very important pre-Colombian sources for the research of homosexual practices in the three American continents. In the Aztec pantheon, for instance, the goddess Xochiquetzal, an hermaphrodite deity, was a protector of love and sexuality non-conductive to procreation. In her male representation, as the god Xochipilli, he offered protection against sexually transmitted diseases and was the guardian of male sexuality.
Antonio Raquena, the first researcher of the “ sexual anomalies among Native American Indians” concludes: “ accepted or rejected, honored or severely chastised, according to the nation where it was practiced, homosexuality was present from the Bering Strait to the Magalhães (a.k.a. Magellan) Strait”. There are countless testimonies by writers, travelers and missionaries describing the presence of homosexual Indians and transvestites among tribes and nations of what we know now as North America, where their presence was even reproduced in drawings, in the 17th Century.
Among the Native Americans of Brazil there is strong evidence that homosexual practices were part of the mainstream culture, socially accepted before the arrival of the Portuguese colonizers. Among the Tupinambá, a tribe scattered through most of the Brazilian coast line, homosexual Indians were called Tibira, while the lesbians were known as Çacoaimbeguira. According to the Descriptive Treaty of Brazil (1587), the lesbians Natives were “ … very fond of the nefarious sin (…) and the one playing the male role consider herself valiant and calls such bestiality a positive quality. (…) In the sertão settlements these men have public tents, offering their favors as public women”.
Another chronicler of the time, Gandavo, describe the lesbian Indians, in 1576: “ some of them never knew men in any way and would not consent to any men, even when threatened to be killed. These (women) abandoned all female traits and routines to imitate men, performing male duties like they weren’t females. Their hair is cut male style and like any men they go to war and hunt, always in the company of other men. And each one of them has a woman to serve them with whom they claim to be married to.” It is very possible that these very masculine female Indians were mistaken by the Spaniards as the legendary Amazons, a myth successfully propagated through the centuries, though there was never any evidence that could be used to corroborate its veracity.
Among the Guarani nation the Guaicuru and Xamico, tribes located along the Paraguay River, homosexual Indians were found up to the end of the 18th Century: besides acting as transvestites, these gay Indians were totally identified with the life style of the opposite sex. “ (…) These Indians serve others as women, dress like women, work as women, urinate in a sitting position, speak like females, take husbands for whom they care very much and, once a month, go through the ridiculous act of pretending to be menstruating, not eating certain foods, like women, no
fish or meat but only fruits and hearts of palm, going every day to the river carrying a bowl to wash themselves”. The Brazilian Native ethnic groups for whom there are plenty of documentation attesting the practice of homosexuality are Bororó, Camaurá, Cubeo, Guayakil, Guaicuru, Guatos, Kainagaig, Mehinaku, Nhambiquara, Panaré, Tenetehara, Tubira, Tupinambá, Wai-Wai, Xamiko, Xavante and Yanomani.
In spite of violent persecution headed by the Holy Inquisition, European homosexuals found, in the New World, the possibility to practice their sexuality with much less repression than back home. This was possible due to the vast extension of the new territories, the nudity and more liberal sexual life of slaves and Natives, added to the much more lose moral of social undesirables, condemned to exile in the Americas, or who simply crossed the ocean in search of better luck. Other factors also contributed to the facilitation of homosexualism in the recently discovered territories, like for instance, the Holy Inquisition Tribunal of Lisbon sending to Brazil 18% of sodomites condemned to exile. According to some historical sources, the first European sodomite to set foot in the Americas was Estêvão Redondo, a young lad who was a servant for the Governor of Lisbon, D. Manoel Telles. Redondo arrived in Olinda (Northeast of Brazil) in February of 1549, condemned to a lifetime in exile. Another notorious case was that of surgeon Felipe Correia (1558), “an homosexual with obvious cross dressing tendencies”.
As for the involvement of the Catholic Church in homosexualism, this is nothing new, as far as the Americas are concerned: in 1548, among the seven cases of sodomy registered in Guatemala, we can find Deacon Juan Altamirano and his accomplice Friar Jose de Barrera.
Back to Brazil, during two visitations made by the Holy Inquisition of Lisbon to different northeastern Capitanies, between 1591 and 1620, 44 cases of sodomy were registered. Among the denounced 61% were white, 24% were of mixed race, 9% and 6% were blacks and Indians, respectively. Their occupations varied from General Governor of Brazil (Diogo Botelho) to priests, sugar plantation owners, public workers, military men, students, servants and slaves. Close examination of more than four thousand denounces and four hundred sodomy processes archived in the Tombo Tower, in Lisbon, revealed that 283 referred to Brazilians or Portuguese residing in Brazil at the time, accused of practicing “Sodoma’s sin”: among those, 32 were charged and among these 11 were condemned to five years of jail time, others were sentenced to life in prison, and six were exiled to remote areas of the colony or to Africa.
So far no evidence was found that sodomites in Brazil were condemned to death but in 1613 a Tupinambá Indian suffered a most cruel death, ordered by the French invaders. Instigated by capuchins missionaries, the French tied this poor Indian to a cannon, his body completely destroyed by the fatal mortar as a means to “purify the land of all its evilness”. Later on, in 1678, a young black slave was killed “for committing the sin of sodomy”.
When it comes to lesbians, the Holy Inquisition of Portugal excluded, in 1646, ‘sodomia foemiarum’ (female sodomy) of the list of crimes included in its jurisdiction, so most cases of females processed by the tribunal took place up to the end of the 16th Century.
The love that dare not say its name had adepts in all classes, races and ethnic groups of Colonial Brazil, practiced in rich mansions or miserable slave shacks, and also among poor whites; in churches and monasteries, in rural or urban areas, including sporadic contacts and one night stands with different partners or stable relations, some lasting for decades. In spite of civil and canonic draconian legislation against the crime of sodomy, there was room in Colonial America for the emergence of a gay sub-culture, sometimes timid and clandestine, sometimes aggressive and assertive, accommodating even the challenging exhibitionism of transvestites.
The first transvestite in Brazil was a Congolese slave, Francisco Manicongo. A slave of a shoemaker in Salvador, Manicongo was denounced in 1591, during the Holy Inquisition of Lisbon’s visit: “ he refused to dress as a man, following the customs observed in Angola and Congo, where the ones that serve in this nefarious sin as patient women are called quimbanda…”.
After the end of the Portuguese and Spanish inquisitions their respective offices in Hispanic Latin America and also in Brazil are closed, with the repression against homosexuals assuming different routines. Researches done in Brazil, considered one of the least homophobic countries in Latin America, reveals that among all social minorities gays and lesbians are the most hated, a hatred manifested on a continuum including from verbal insults and depreciative treatment in the mass media, to physical violence in the streets, arbitrary arrests and even murderers. In the last fifteen years more than 1200 homosexuals were violently assassinated, victims of homophobic crimes, an average of one murder every five days!...
In order to defend themselves from this silent genocide, and also against the daily discrimination they are forced to live with, gays and lesbians are organizing themselves in movements, aiming to conquer the same human rights heterosexuals are naturally entitled to. In 1978 Brazil enters the scene of the struggle for citizenry for homosexuals with the the emergence of the first organized gay group, Somos, founded in Guarulhos, a working class city located east of São Paulo City. Somos Group quickly spreads to other states in the country. One year after its foundation a faction of this group organizes the LF Lesbico-Feminista, launching a bulletin called Chanacomchana.
At the time the First Brazilian Homosexual Congress took place, in 1980, the country already had more than twenty organized gay and lesbian groups; today they are more than fifty, from the extreme north to the south border of Brazil. The internationally famous Gay Group of Bahia (Grupo Gay da Bahia) was founded in 1980 by anthropologist Luis Mott and other notables in the gay and academic scene of Bahia, today the most combative gay entity in the whole South American continent. In Brazil, only three states and 73 cities included, in its local constitutions, any discrimination based on sexual orientation. It doesn’t look like much, taking in to consideration the size of the country, but it is a great victory for Brazilians homosexuals as a whole who, until the mid 80’s had absolutely no legal protection against discrimination.
This article thanks Brazilian anthropologist Luis Mott for his excellent research on the History of Homosexualism in Latin America.
cc MaleEscortReview.com 2006
