Challenging National Heroes and Myths: Male Homosexuality and Brazilian History

Abstract

For many foreign observers, from Buenos Aires to San Francisco and Paris, Brazil is a tropical paradise where uninhibited and licentious Brazilian homosexuals are free to express sensuality, sexuality, or camp. Lenten Mardi Gras festivities have come to represent an alleged cultural and social toleration for homosexuality and bisexuality in that country Apparent permissiveness during Carnival, so the stereotype goes, symbolizes a sexual and social regime that unabashedly accepts fluid sexual identity, including male-to-male sexuality.