Veneno anti-homofobia: poesia e homoerotismo masculino

Abstract

In 1990, the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from the International Classification of Diseases. In Brazil, in 1999, the Federal Council of Psychology, besides considering homosexuality a legitimate variant of sexuality, prohibited psychologists from making any effort to “change” the sexual orientation of their patients. However, the heterocentric cultural regime still perpetuates pathologizing discourses and practices, creating the illusion that only reproductive heterosexuality is “natural”, “normal”, and “healthy”. In this context, the present work proposes to study contemporary Brazilian poetry, focusing on writers from the Northeast who metaphorically use disease and cure in poems that address male homoeroticism. The objective is to investigate how poets “re-describe” love between men, disturbing and transforming the prevailing order. The aim is to map and analyze poems published from the 1970s to the present day, starting with Falo, a book by Paulo Augusto, released in 1976. Besides the poet from Rio Grande do Norte, the following authors were found and studied: Paulo Azevedo Chaves (1988, 2012, 2014); Marcelino Freire (2002, 2018); Rui Mascarenhas (2007, 2011); Raimundo de Moraes and his heteronym Aymmar Rodriguéz (2010, 2014, 2015, 2023); Araripe Coutinho (2013); Amarildo Felix (2013, 2021); Assuero Cardoso Barbosa (2014); João Gomes (2018); Marcio Junqueira (2018); and Guilherme Ramos (2018). Assuming an interdisciplinary approach, we will draw from reflections from different fields of knowledge, considering studies in literary theory and poetry, philosophy, history, sociology, among others, to ponder the poem and its dialectic of mirror/resistance to ideology; ilness, cure, and their metaphors; the attempts at pathologizing and depathologizing dissident sexualities and genders; HIV, aids, and their representations in Brazilian literature; and discussions on relevant aspects for the investigation of the verses analyzed here, such as irony, parody, metalanguage, lyric poetry, and other literary genres, eroticism, description, reading, and pornographic discourse. In summary, it was observed that the poets examined in this thesis put the heteronormative regime in tension, as they expose sexuality as a social artifact, regulated and punished daily, and invert the fantasies of the prevailing social order, presenting compulsory heterosexuality as a sick body or a disease. Considering Derrida's (2005) concept of pharmakon, it was also noted that love between men assumes ambivalent meanings: sometimes it is a remedy, healthy, normal, and fertile; other times it is a poison whose effect is beneficial. In the latter case, male homoeroticism is, on the one hand, afflicted by the “illness” of lyric poetry, such as love, eroticism, and solitude, affirming both the equality and the difference of the gay man in relation to others; on the other hand, it is an anti-homophobia poison, with the very experience of writing and reading understood as a pharmakon. Thus, the writers from the Northeast, voices of multifaceted contemporary Brazilian literature, imagine societies, poetics, and ways of existing and desiring that are different (and transient) from those invented by the dominant discourse.