ABSTRACT
Like any highly complex society, Brazil is a kind of patchwork quilt of cultures and subcultures that seem to intersect and intertwine in the flow of daily life. This intricate weave of cultural systems is as characteristic of sexuality as of any other aspect of Brazilian life, and Brazilian sexual culture can be seen as built up out of an almost endless range of distinct cultural frames that overlap and interact in remarkably diverse ways—and that are ultimately central in shaping the sexual experiences and understandings of different individuals (see Parker 1991). Responding, perhaps above all else, to a complex interplay between continuity and change, between tradition and modernity, in the uncertain world of the late twentieth century, these multiple cultural frames seem often to both contradict and yet at the same time intersect one another, opening up not a single, unique sexual reality, but rather a set of multiple realities (see Parker 1991; more generally, see Parker and Gagnon 1995). And nowhere can this multiplicity be seen more clearly than in the case of male homosexuality, which, in Brazil at least, must be characterized less as a unitary phenomenon than as fundamentally diverse—a case, at the very least, of a variety of somewhat different homosexualities rather than of a single, unified homosexuality (see Fry 1982; Parker 1985, 1987, 1989; Trevisan 1986).
