Acceso usuarios
David Blackmore
Since Brazil's transition toward democracy in the 1980s, scholars have been hard at work unpacking the complexities and contradictions of censorship over the course of the country's civil-military dictatorship (1964-1985). Cultural production in general faced shifting levels of scrutiny and suppression over the course of those 21 long years. When we look more closely at the publication of books, we find that censorship of literary texts ebbed and flowed over the course of the military regime, but not always in the ways we might predict. Zeroing in further on fiction with a central focus on male homosexuality, we see that these complex patterns of censorship led to a small explosion of queer publication in 1975 and 1976, what I call a queer "mini-boom." One of the more notable texts that appeared during this window is Gasparino Damata's Os solteiroes, a short story collection that centers on queer male experience in the years just before the 1964 golpe militar. The stories have their share of wild sex, usually between older, homosexual men and their younger, straight-identified consorts, but the stories are more interested in the failure and bad endings of these queer relationships than they are in the sex itself. And, in a sly way, the stories align the bad endings of queer wild times with the bad beginnings of the dictatorship itself. Informed by the work of queer theorists Jack Halberstam and José Esteban Muñoz, this essay will examine Damata's stories through the lens of two different temporalities: on the one hand, the timing of the publication of the volume within the larger historical trajectory of the censorship of queer literature (that is, during the queer "mini-boom"), and, on the other hand, when exactly the action in the various stories takes place. In lining up moments of private queer crisis with moments of political change and increasing repression in Brazilian public life, the volume manages to skirt both "political" and "moral" censorship and mount a creatively oblique queer challenge to the repressive forces of the military regime.
