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Book Reviews: Uncovering Brazilian History and the Social Construction of Sexuality

Beyond Carnival is a fascinating book that fills a void in Brazilian history and studies of sexuality. Drawing on extensive archival research and oral histories, James Green vividly traces the social and cultural history of male homosexuality in Brazil’s two major cities—Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo—from the late nineteenth century until the late 1970s. He ably relates this history to the political, economic, and social transformations in the country and ties it to the history of gender and masculinity. Participating in local events since the 1970s, Green captures well the complexities of Brazilian culture by going beyond carnival, that is, beyond the exotic vision of a stereotyped Brazilian sexual permissiveness. He demonstrates that male homosexuality, though decriminalized by the Imperial Penal Code of 1830, was subject to medico-legal control, police violence, and social stigmatization, even during carnival. This control was directed especially at the poor, blacks, and Northeastern migrants. At the same time, Green examines the resistance and the construction of a male homosexual subculture by the subjects themselves, arguing that its principal characteristic was the appropriation of urban public space. Excluded from the patriarchal family, they appropriated the parks because of their access, as men, to public space. However, being subject to scorn, they also created an alternative private space— support networks that Green calls “counter-casa” (counter-home). From this gender perspective, Green reelaborates the class-based dichotomy of casa (home, space of rights) versus rua (street, space of exclusion) originally formulated by the anthropologist Roberto DaMatta. Since political regimes did not have a decisive impact on the development of this subculture, Green organizes the six chapters chronologically following the social transformations that redefined gender relations and the use of public space in Rio and São Paulo. The narrative begins with the belle époque in Rio, between 1898 and 1914. As the then-capital of the republic grew, a male homosexual subculture emerged, one that was not yet self-affirmative but already manifested itself in the public plazas. Although sodomy remained decriminalized, “effeminate” men were routinely