ABSTRACT
As should be clear from the preceding discussion, if increasingly complex gay subcultures and communities have taken shape in cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza (as well as other large urban centers such as Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Recife, Salvador, and, above all, São Paulo) in recent decades, they have not emerged in a vacuum—nor can gay life in any specific location be understood in isolation. On the contrary, each of these sites is clearly part of a broader, interactive system which links different communities in distinct locations through the ongoing flow of capital, people, and ideas. In this chapter, I want to look more closely at how this flow plays itself out, focusing on the question of movement and on the ways in which complex patterns of movement shape the changes taking place in the organization of gay life in Brazil. First, I will situate this question in terms of patterns of migration and population movement that have characterized Brazilian society in recent years and that have clearly played a key role in the transformation of what was once a predominantly rural, agrarian society into the overwhelmingly urban, industrialized (and increasingly postindustrial) society—a society with room for urban gay subcultures and enclaves. Then I look at the extent to which this pattern of dislocations has played into and supported a particular pattern of sexual movement—a migratory flow in which questions of sexual desire and notions of sexual freedom, particularly in relation to men who have sex with men, often play an important role. Finally, I examine the interfaces between gay cultures and communities in Brazil and those of the international, gay world—I focus on the roles of travel, tourism, and even immigration (of diverse types) in interconnecting local and global cultural contexts, and assess their importance in enabling the imagination of sexual worlds.
