Gender, Sexuality and AIDS Prevention in Brazil
Klein, Charles
As in many parts of the world, AIDS first arrived in Brazil in the early 1980s through sensationalistic media coverage of a mysterious North American "gay plague" or "gay moting...
...There has been considerably less agreement, however, as to how HIV prevenVOL XXXI, No 4 JAN/FEB 1998 27REPORT ON SEXUAL POLITICS tion programs might best address specific questions around gender and sexuality...
...No doubt it will depend to a great extent on how Brazilian civil society develops in the current neoliberal climate...
...These experiences have made it quite clear that AIDS prevention is not solely about behavior modifica- tion, but is also a project that requires a critical under- standing of-and perhaps substantial changes within- Brazilian sexuality and sexual politics...
...They would continue, they said, their quest to find a "real man" who would take care of them sexually, and perhaps emotionally and financially as well...
...In such a context, the utility of most safer sex campaigns is identified AIDS education as one of the key familyrelated issues they wanted to address, along with other issues such as divorce, child support, employment rights and health more generally...
...Work groups and other activities originally developed by AIDS organizations to promote AIDS prevention have emerged as important sites for ongoing discussion and debate on a wide range of issues, ranging from sex- ual identity and violence to the various ways in which HIV and AIDS relate to gender and sexual hierarchies in Brazil...
...Other participants openly derided the bofe panquecas-roughly, "studs who flip," the seemingly masculine, straight men who once in bed turn over and want be penetrated anally...
...As an independent group, they were one of the few organizations in Porto Alegre that specifically focused on the concerns of low-income women...
...But sometime after 1992, partially in response to the shifting priorities of international funders, many organizations began to target programs toward specific social groups such as women, transgendered persons, and gay and bisexual men...
...a regular work-grout Darticitant, was murdered while working on the streets in January, 1994...
...At the other end of the spectrum were wives, who were assumed to be monogamous and "clean...
...Over 80 people participated in the march, many carrying picket signs with expressions such as "a fag isn't a beast," "travestis are citizens," and "prostitution is also work...
...At the same time, nearly all travestis classify themselves as homosexuals or bichas ("fags...
...Clients and police officers frequently beat up on travestis, and many travesti sex workers rob clients when they refuse to pay, or incorporate theft into their regular sexual-economic exchanges...
...In this play of eroticized rule breaking, erotic "transgressions" and sacanagems may in fact reinforce existing social roles and the hierarchies they support, rather than threaten the underlying gender and sexual power relations that structure everyday life...
...And despite some differences of opinion regarding the causes or origins of homosexuals and travestis, nearly all work-group participants agreed that while one might be born a homosexual, one must become a travesti...
...Bahia, the sign reads, This growing involvement of "You Know How to travestis in Porto Alegre's politi- Avoid AIDS...
...esteem building and individual and collective empowerment cultivated through more than five years of GAPA-directed travesti work groups, constitutes an important step toward breaking the veil of silence surrounding violence against travestis in Brazil...
...And since government health officials did not initially produce HIV/AIDS-related educational materials or implement coordinated AIDS awareness campaigns, NGOs became the most important AIDS educators in Brazil...
...actives" or nonhomosexuals...
...tive, AIDS and gay activists have been working together As a result, the Brazilian gay movement remains largely, on the Homosexualities Project on an everyday basis though by no means exclusively, a middle-class phewithout any significant difficulties...
...This raises the question of whether travestis might not be dependent on, rather than co-partners with, GAPA...
...In the late 1980s and early 1990s, most educational materials were directed toward the general population...
...This point that safer sex between women and men is fundamentally a question of gender power was not lost on the group of female, community-based legal outreach workers with whom I worked in Vila Santos and several other vilas in Porto Alegre...
...Except for contraceptive purposes, to suggest using a condom would be tantamount to a charge of infidelity, which could in turn place a woman in jeopardy of physical or emotional violence and of losing her socially valued, albeit constraining, position as wife and mother...
...Not only did it capture media and popular attention, but it was the first time that a group of travestis montadas-that is, dressed and made up as women-took over one of Porto Alegre's most important postdictatorship public forums...
...Unlike in the 1980s and early ficult years ago-illustrates the strength of this emergay movement...
...Facing such a daunting who have sex with men...
...As the project's official name suggests, it has sought to reach out to all men who have sex with other men, including those who do not identify themselves as homosexual or gay...
...Subsequent discussions in the work groups revealed that the perpetrator was a client who regularly frequented the locale where the killing occurred...
...3 These include a mapping of the homosexual social spaces in these two cities, street outreach at these identified locations, and the production of a video entitled "Men," consisting of the life stories of three homosexual men...
...netheless, despite such impressive accomplishs and the significant public and media attention ed on homosexuality and gay culture, there are contradictions and ambiguities within the contemy gay movement in Brazil...
...By late stream organizations, they will have to address the strong 1994, the Homosexualities Project had become the most misogyny that characterizes many aspects of the travesti dynamic activity at both ABIA and Pela VIDDA, with subculture...
...Yet, most were unaware of their own HIV status...
...In 1983, Markito, a renowned for "men who h, fashion designer whose homosexuality sex with me was common knowledge, became the first Brazilian public figure to die from HIV-related illness, bolstering the connection between AIDS and homosexuality in the Brazilian popular imagination...
...gay" model is closely linked to the existence of a consumer-oriented Brazilian "pink economy" centered on commer1990s, when relations between AIDS NGOs and homo- cial establishments, fashion and gay tourism, which may sexual rights groups in Rio de Janeiro were at best tenta- be more about making dollars than progressive politics...
...The most troubling aspect of this HIV risk-reduction strategy is that it intensifies the risk of HIV transmission from husbands to their own wives...
...Such distinctions, whatever their erotic values, involve a series of social and moral evaluations on the proper roles of different types of women and men in society...
...tion's HIV prevention activities with dubitable, since their emphasis on negotiated sexuality, condoms and sacanagem does not address the underlying gender inequalities that shape most sex relations between women and men in Brazil...
...And there remains the question Some gay male leaders seem more concerned of what is lost and gained in organizing around gay and other sexual "identities...
...with assimilating into mainstream Brazilian For if the "traditional" system of culture than with the more difficult task of active/passive sexuality supports a series of troublesome power relationships, the changing gender and sexual hierarchies in Brazil...
...In this manner, the Homosexualities Project can be seen as both the product of and a key player behind an emerging Brazilian gay movement, and it is this interconnectedness to and interdependence on the many spaces that constitute contemporary Brazilian gay culture that ultimately explain the project's success...
...This description of differing female and male conceptions and practices of sexuality was evident in my yearlong study of a low-income community in Porto Alegre, which I will call Vila Santos...
...Cris Loura's death was the latest in a series of at least five murders of group participants over a 12month period...
...But given the myriad forms of socially and institution30 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 5 S S sREPORT ON SEXUAL POLITICS other men, and that few Brazilian HIV/AIDS prevention programs seriously and systematically addressed the specific issues that AIDS raises in the lives of these men...
...Travesti presence in the political sphere continued in the months immediately following the march...
...Like their counterparts in North America and other parts of the world, these pioneering groups quickly developed a wide range of activities to raise AIDS awareness, counter media misinformation and mobilize civil society in response to the epidemic...
...Given their quite literally constructed genders and bodies as well as their everyday work as prostitutes, it is not surprising that the travestis at the GAPA groups provided nuanced insights into Brazilian sexual culture...
...But regardless of their interpretation of the active/passive system, nearly all agreed VoL XXXI, No 4 JAN/FEB 1998 29REPORT ON SEXUAL POLITICS that travestis occupy a unique category that is conceptually distinct from biological women, male to female transsexuals-men who have their penis removed surgically and have vaginoplasty-and "male-gendered" gay men...
...The gay media's coverage of the activities of the Homosexualities Project has also helped solidify a growing, self-conscious community of gay/homosexual/queer individuals...
...To begin with, the lian gay movement remains primarily driven by and centered on male issues, although to a lesser t than in the 1980s...
...numbers of Brazilian men were continuing to If the Homosexualities Project has been a great sucbecome infected with HIV as a result of having sex with cess, as nearly all participants and organizers would argue, the question remains as to whether the project has had an equal impact among men AIDS prevention is not solely about behavior who position themselves differently in terms of the three systems of Brazilian sexuality dis- modification, but requires a critical cussed earlier...
...Travesti prostitution zones are characterized by high levels of violence...
...Equally uncertain is whether some gay leaders are more concerned with assimilating into stream Brazilian culture than the perhaps more diftask of changing the many levels of gender inequality that characterize Brazilian society...
...By early 1994, the outreach workers had severed formal ties with THEMIS...
...The result is recurring cycles of violence in which many clients think that travestis are violent criminals, and travestis fear that clients and the police will harass, beat or kill them...
...All those involved considered the mobilization a great success...
...At one end of the spectrum were prostitutes, "loose" women, homosexuals and travestis (male to female transgendered persons who frequently take female hormones and have silicon implants, yet retain male genitalia)-all of whom, by virtue of their association with sex and sacanagem, were NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON SEXUAL POLITICS presumed likely to be HIV positive...
...39, No...
...In this sense, the outreach workers have positioned AIDS education within larger issues of gender and family, rather than simply exhorting condom use as the only solution to preventing HIV transmission...
...Like the GAPA travesti work groups, the Homosexualities Project staff sought to contextualize HIV prevention within the larger contexts of the lives of men who have sex with men...
...The third system is derived from North American ideas of identity-based sexuality-homosexual, gay and now, queer...
...Vila Santos residents consistently made reference to the existence of sexual double standards (both critically and favorably) which tolerate if not encourage extramarital male sexual activity at the same time they castigate women who engage in such behavior...
...Project porar...
...As a result, the group gradually incorporated AIDS education into its various activities and projects...
...Heidi, a travesti who witnessed the murder, reported the crime and the killer's identity to the police, but little was done in the way of investigation, and the prime suspect was never apprehended...
...Holding together these distinct conceptual subsystems are ideas of transgression and sacanagem, roughly translated as the thrill of doing what you are not supposed to and getting away with it...
...Growing anger over these killings and police inaction prompted the members of the group, led by coordinator Suzanna Lopes, to organize a protest march to pressure the authorities and to direct attention to the problem of violence against travestis...
...919-929...
...As international funding became increasingly available to local groups, the NGO model Charles Klein is visiting professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh...
...Safer sex involved determining whether one's partner was certo-normal, reliable and presumably HIV negative-rather than knowing his or her actual HIV status...
...the weekly gay cultural space and theater workshops consistently bringing together more than 80 men of mulAfter a decade of AIDS prevention work, it had tiple sexual identities and from diverse socio-economic become clear to many AIDS activists that large backgrounds...
...Over the course of the weeks that followed, Lopes and other GAPA staff people reached out to Porto Alegre's human rights, feminist and progressive legal communities, and many organizations and political leaders joined the mobilization...
...During my initial fieldwork with these groups political organizations, including many gay and women's during 1991 and 1992, organized discussions and activrights groups, overcome their long-standing reluctance to ities related to homosexuality had been surprisingly incorporate travesti-related issues into their regular polit- rare-if not a bit taboo-even though a majority of ical agendas...
...Given their literally constructed genders and bodies GAPAhas worked closely with trav- estis since its founding in 1989, as well as their everyday work as prostitutes, when the group launched its initial travestis provided the workshop organizers with condom-distribution programs...
...In other words, Vila Santos residents used a variety of social criterion as markers for a person's HIV status...
...The connection between AIDS education and empowerment around gender/sexual politics is even more striking in the case of gay men and travestis, where AIDS prevention in general and AIDS NGOs in particular have played critical roles in facilitating the growth of emerging "gay" identities and communities in Brazil...
...PM of AIDS activism and AIDS prevention grew quickly, and by 1994 there were more than 500 AIDS NGOs throughout the country...
...Like the work of the neighborhood outreach workers in Porto Alegre, the Homosexualities Project and the GAPA work groups for travesti sex professionals demonstrate that AIDS NGOs and AIDS education programs have played a pivotal role in the development of gender/sexual identity politics in Brazil...
...In a second system, scientific categories define sexuality in terms of the biological sex of the partner-heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual...
...At the same 31REPORT ON SEXUAL POLITICS on issues tied to gay lifestyles and identities, the project a few staff went along with these desires, facilitating collec- ing g; tive discussions in which HIV and AIDS per se were not No given as much attention as might be expected within an ment HIV/AIDS prevention program...
...While travestis were the spark behind the protest, it was primarily leaders from GAPA and Porto Alegre's human rights community who did most of the actual organizing that made political action possible...
...But whether this emerging travesti political collectivity in Porto Alegre will continue in the future is uncertain...
...The centrality of violence in the lives of travestis was painfully highlighted when Cris Loura...
...Several of the outreach workers completed a training program organized in early 1994 by the Support Group for AIDS Prevention (GAPA) as part of a pilot project to encourage neighborhood- rather the NGO-based AIDS education...
...Exactly how these tensions will play out within Brazilian gay communities-and between gay political activists and other progressive social movements-remains to be seen...
...But by the end of the focus first year of the project, issues related to HIV and AIDS many began to be raised with increasing frequency...
...And, while they recognized that one cannot reliably ascertain HIV antibody status based on physical appearance, most Vila Santos residents espoused a safer sex rule of thumb in which condoms were considered necessary only when the partner's sexual or social status was uncertain...
...Over the years, most Brazilian AIDS activists have been united by a belief that frank, accessi- ble and sex-positive information about HIV transmission (as opposed to promoting abstinence) is one of the best ways to reduce the spread of HIV...
...This incipient organizing around the issue of AIDS has been a crucial catalyst to gay activism in Brazil...
...The vast majority of adults in Vila Santos were knowledgeable about HIV transmission and safer sex and were generally alarmed at the rising number of HIV cases in their community...
...The fact that a proposal to legalize some form of same-sex unions is being seriously considered in the Brazilian federal legislature-a possibility that would have been unimaginable Yet, there is also a line of sexual politics within the emerging Brazilian gay community that offers "gay culture," rather than rigid political ideologies or sexualidentity constructions, as a means to both unsettle heteronormativity and to bring together all kinds of Brazilians, including heterosexual women, who might wish to change the existing gender/sexual order...
...But the increasingly open discussion of sexuality brought about by the AIDS epidemic, and the incredible growth in AIDS NGOs, gay rights organizations, and other activist groups that has occurred as result of mobilization around the HIV/AIDS epidemic, are helping lay the groundwork for the development of a sexual politics in which gender equality, sexual autonomy and sexual self-determination may become realities...
...Within this context of a rapidly spreading, sexualized and stigmatizing epidemic, the first Brazilian AIDSrelated nongovernmental organizations (AIDS NGOs) emerged in the mid-1980s...
...When the outreach workers opened a Family Support Center in Vila Santos in early 1994, for example, they specifically travestis have mainly consisted of biweekly work groups in which participants discuss questions related to AIDS, travesti and sex-professional identities, violence and the batalhathe "battle" of working as a prostitute...
...Gender, Sexuality and AIDS Prevention in Brazil 1. Richard G. Parker, Bodies, Pleasures and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991...
...Another interesting development that has occurred over the course of the Homosexualities Project is the shifting weight given to explicitly HIV-related issues, such as safer sex and HIV positivity...
...Their work has also included extensive collaboration with medical institutions and time, during the first year of the project, many of the discussions that occurred within the project's activities centered on questions related to what it means to live as a homosexual/gay/bicha...
...The protest took place on August 23, 1994, beginning at GAPA's offices and ending at Democratic Square, where a popular agit-prop street theater group presented an antiviolence skit...
...Anthropologist Richard Parker has described at least three coexisting and often contradictory systems of sexuality operating within Brazil, which may or may not be operating in any particular situation.' According to the active/male versus passive/female model common to Mediterranean cultures, men who assume the "active" or penetrating role in intercourse with other men are not considered to be homosexual, whereas their "passive" partners are, and as such are more or less placed in the symbolic domain of women...
...Most work-group participants began by setting forth the basic attributes of the active/passive system outlined above...
...As a result, in 1993, the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association (ABIA) and the Rio and Sdo Paulobased Group for the Valorization, Integration and Dignity of AIDS Patients (Pela VIDDA) founded the "Men Who Have Sex With Men Project...
...While many women in Vila Santos know or suspect that their husbands or primary partners are having extramarital affairs, they often feel powerless to do anything in response...
...Like many vilas in Porto Alegre, Vila Santos consists of self-built housing on illegally occupied land and is characterized by low levels of infrastructure (in 1994, there was only one paved street in a community of more than 5,000 people which itself was part of a larger series of contiguous vilas containing approximately 15,000 residents), high levels of poverty, and greater than average morbidity rates in comparison to Porto Alegre as a whole...
...Accordingly, when many participants wanted to focus VOL XXXI, No 4 JAN/FEB 1998 ally sanctioned physical, economic and symbolic vio- gay organizations, the production of AIDS education lence that most travestis experience on a daily basis, materials geared specifically toward men who have sex changing the status quo will require the construction of a with men, the training of peer educators, an expression"politics of space" that goes beyond the confines of the ist theater workshop, a weekly gay cultural space, safer GAPA work groups and the prostitution zones and into sex and sexuality workshops, and a large-scale research the many fields of power in which gender and sexual project related to sexuality and HIV/AIDS among men hierarchies are (re)produced...
...2 That is to say, in order for there to be "bad," desirable women who "do it all," there need to be "good" wives who do not...
...Another tension among Brazilian AIDS educators and activists has centered around how to develop sex-positive, HIV risk-reduction campaigns while simultaneously promoting equality and sexual self-determination for women and sexual minorities, given that Brazilian erotic culture embodies-and, in fact, eroticizes-gender and sexual inequalities...
...As in many parts of the world, AIDS first arrived in Brazil in the early 1980s through sensationalistic media coverage of a mysterious North American "gay plague" or "gay moting safer cancer...
...staff were pleased with this development, since it Brazi demonstrated that rather than parroting safer sex rules, men as often happens at one-time AIDS education panels and exten' safer sex workshops, the men who regularly participated tive c in the project's activities were now consciously trying to rights integrate HIV/AIDS-related issues into their sexual and chang social lives as a whole...
...archie The Homosexualities Project has also had an impor- male tant impact on the organizational development of the gay mains community in Brazil...
...The "okay" sign refers to cal life, itself a product of selfanal sex...
...They further demonstrated their commitment to link AIDS education with other more general concerns at the 1994 International Women's Conference held in Rio de la Plata, where they stimulated a lively discussion of AIDS-related issues...
...His dissertation, AIDS, Activism and the Social Imagination in Brazil, received the Horace R. Rackham Distinguished Dissertation Award...
...This in turn highlighted the critical role of violence in the lives of travestis, most of whom work as prostitutes on the streets...
...Heidi testified in a public hearing on sex work, while a regular participant from the travesti work groups was appointed as the alternate representative for the sex-professional seat on the municipal Commission on Human Rights and Against Violence and Discrimination...
...This in turn will require that other ABIA...
...Soon thereafter, the seemingly neutral epidemiological term "risk group" assumed increasing importance in public discourse, with "bisexual" men, prostitutes, intravenous drug users, transfusion recipients, and anyone seen as "promiscuous" gradually joining "homosexuals" as members of a more general category of those at risk of infection and transmission of the virus...
...In spite of the fact that many men had sexual relations with other men's wives, few men seemed to believe that their own wives would have such affairs...
...task, travestis will likely need to form alliances and The Homosexualities Project has also prompted a coalitions such as those which occurred in response to number of interesting changes in Pela VIDDA and Cris Loura's murder...
...As a result, while the project was certainly open to the participation of men who did not identify themselves as homosexual, the emerging emphasis on gay identities suggested that the concept of "Men Who Have Sex with Men" neither resonated strongly with most group participants nor succeeded in attracting large numbers of nonhomosexually identified men to the project's activities...
...And if travestis are to work with main- group participants were self-identified gay men...
...The work groups undoubtedly remain a critical space where travestis can reflect upon their lives in the hopes of imagining and creating a more just future...
...and the owners of the growing number of gay commercial establishments in these communities...
...3. The following agencies have provided financial support for the Homosexualities Project: the U.S...
...But many participants raised questions about why supposedly "real men"-meaning their clients, many of whom are married--desire and engage in sexual practices that are supposedly inappropriate, such as taking the "active" role in oral sex and the "passive" role in anal sex...
...In fact, it is unlikely nomenon that may not be including poorer Brazilians or that the project would have taken hold in Rio de Janeiro those, such as travestis, who may not fit into the assimiwithout the extensive support of local gay organizations lationist project...
...Agency for International Development (USAID), the MacArthur Foundation, the Inter- American Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the joint World Bank/Brazilian federal government AIDS program...
...While some travestis suggested that the active/passive system was not an accurate description of reality, others said that they would starve if they did not anally penetrate their clients, since so many of them sought the "passive" role...
...With the support of several international foundations who began to fund NGOs and gay groups involved in AIDS prevention among men who have sex with men in the early 1990s, this project has developed an impressive and unprecedented array of activities in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo...
...The fact that the project is commonly referred to as the "Homosexualities Project," rather than the "Men Who Have Sex with Men Project," highlights the degree to which it has become associated with identity-based ideas of homosexuality and gayness...
...The Porto Alegre outreach program began in 1993 under the auspices of the Legal Assistance and Gender Studies Group (THEMIS), a feminist NGO which organized an in-depth training program on basic legal rights for women leaders from lowincome communities...
...Over the course of the years, the organizanuanced insiahts into Brazilian sexual culture...
...Since its inception, a majority understanding of-and perhaps subtantial of the project's participants have identified themselves as gay or bichas rather than as chanaes within-Brazilian erotic culture...
...There is also a generalized political discourse that emphasizes gender/sexual equality and working against sexual double standards and homophobia...
...While sacanagem plays a critical role in organizing Brazilian sexuality, it is not a gender-neutral concept, as Donna Goldstein has argued, and is strongly linked to the role that Brazilian women play as "boundary setters" who lay down the rules which men then try to break...
...In order to understand how Brazilian AIDS NGOs have responded to such challenges, and to assess the at times ambivaTra lent, if not equivocal, sexual politics of prostitute their HIV prevention programs, it is neces- Rio de Jani sary to step back and consider in more detail some of the general characteristics of Brazilian erotic culture...
...Through various group discussions and exercises, including the drawing and writing of life histories, it became evident that while the first steps toward becoming a travesti pre-dated becoming involved in sexualeconomic exchange, the two were clearly related, and much of the physical transformation and acquisition of travesti and homosexual subcultural knowledge occurred within the context of the batalha...
...This may help explain the relalearth of cooperation between gay and women's organizations, despite the fact that both seek to :e the structure of gender relations and sexual hieres in Brazil...
...2. Donna Goldstein, "AIDS and Women in Brazil: An Emerging Problem," Social Science and Medicine, Vol...
...7 (1994), pp...
Vol. 31 • January 1998 • No. 4
