How Gay Sex Tourism Is Shaping the Brazilian Dream

93 Wagadu Volume 8 Fall 2010 FIVE FARE TALES AND FAIRY TAILS: HOW GAY SEX TOURISM IS SHAPING THE BRAZILIAN DREAM Gregory Mitchell1 Abstract: This article analyzes the aspirations of michês, straight-identified Brazilian men who exchange sex for money with gay-identified male sex tourists from North America and Western Europe. In so doing, I contrast the exoticizing fantasies of the tourists with the consumerist daydreams of the michês, who often see sex work with men as one of the few routes available to them for consumer consumption and possible migration. Contrary to existing research on Brazilian sex workers, my findings demonstrate that, for the michês, the ability to participate in consumer culture occupies their minds far more than discussions of sex or AIDS. Introduction Gustavo has a nice phone. It has a large screen and a camera with more megapixels than he probably needs. He turns it to face me. “This is my daughter,” he says, showing me a sleepy-eyed infant in a pink jumper. “Her name is Ana. She has a brother, Samuel, who’s three.” Gustavo flips to another photo to show me a picture of him, his common-law wife, and Samuel at nearby Copacabana beach together. The picture quality is good - better than my own phone’s, in fact. He also has naked photos of himself and close-up shots of his erect penis on this phone, which he sends to prospective clients. We decide to do a follow-up interview in week, but he says his phone hasn’t worked in months because of his cash flow problems so there’s no point giving me the number. “But don’t worry. You can find me at the sauna again no problem. I need to work if I am going to get the phone functioning again.” Although straight-identified, Gustavo works in gay bath houses with brothel-style prostitution known as saunas. Working in a © Wagadu 2010 ISSN: 1545-6196 Demystifying Sex Work and Sex Workers 94 sauna can be lucrative. A successful garoto de programa2 in Rio can clear 2,000 U.S. dollars in a month, at least for the brief period when his is a fresh face on the scene, whereas a minimum wage worker earns around 270 U.S. dollars per month for the same hours. But Gustavo, like other garotos, doesn’t want to work every day. He prefers working just two or three days, during which he’ll try to do as many 40-minute programas (sessions with a client) in a shift as he can. He’ll make a few hundred dollars, and then he won’t work again until he runs out of money. Sometimes that means he’s off for weeks. Often, though, he spends the money on expensive clothes, cologne, and electronics. He takes his friends to clubs and buys liquor by the bottle. He buys gifts for his wife and kids, and (I later come to suspect) his girlfriends. But Gustavo’s hair is starting to recede. He looks closer to being 35 than the 25 he tells people. He still does quite well, but garotos de programa are part of a larger category of michês (hustlers) who work in parks, streets, bars, and other less lucrative venues – locales where sauna rentboys eventually find themselves as they age out and become less competitive. Outdoors, programas can turn dangerous for clients and michês alike and offer only subsistence wages. Gustavo knows street hustling may be in his future if he doesn’t start saving in earnest soon. And he knows that he needs his expensive phone working again. Popular portrayals of male sex workers tend to dichotomize the men. On the one hand, newspapers, films, and television shows depict them as dangerous killers and thieves (see Mott & Cerqueira, 2003). But as Kerwin Kaye (2007) has observed in his analysis, they are also portrayed as youth in peril who can be rescued and mentored into being ideal and grateful young lovers. Both archetypes are premised on the assumption that the michê is desperate and dangerously destitute. Thus, clients often expressed surprise when a sex worker3 had an MP3 player, phone, or computer, especially because sex workers in saunas tend to come © Wagadu 2010 ISSN: 1545-6196 95 Wagadu Volume 8 Fall 2010 from and often continue to live in the poor periphery of the city. But even among the low end street michês with whom I’ve worked – men who use sex with gay tourists to scrape out a hand-to-mouth existence – there is a tendency to pass the time talking about the pricey items they plan to purchase one day. This shift to consumerism (both actual and imaginary) stands in stark contrast to the lived experiences of michês in the past. This article is concerned with understanding how michês who sell sex to gay tourists use consumerist daydreams to construct and enjoy possible futures. I argue that daydreaming about purchasing power and participation in consumer society is both an emotion- management technique for michês and also a way in which they rethink their position in society and possible relationship to a globalized world. To do this, I map the historical trajectory of michetagem (hustling) in Brazil across three primary points. First, I examine the case of street michês in the São Paulo of the early 1980s (during the end of the Brazilian military dictatorship), who are the subject of an ethnographic master’s thesis and book by the venerated Argentine poet and anthropologist Néstor Perlongher. Second, I investigate the case of michês in public locales in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1990s (a period of hyper-inflation and economic instability). In doing so, I rely upon fragmentary interview records and other archival materials from a now defunct non-governmental organization (NGO), Programa Pegação.4 In these two earlier historical moments, I observe a reluctance to speak about daydreams and a lack of aspiration to join the segment of Brazilian society that wanted to be part of global flows of commerce and that take pleasure in consuming as an act of leisure. Finally, I turn to my own ongoing ethnographic research, which I commenced in 2006, among approximately 45 michês and 40 clients to demonstrate just how important consumerism and daydreams of participating in it are becoming to michês across a variety of racial and class divisions.5 Employing the work of anthropologists Colin Campbell (1987) and Arjun Appadurai (1996) on imaginaries, I examine how the men rely on a © Wagadu 2010 ISSN: 1545-6196 Demystifying Sex Work and Sex Workers 96 consumerist dreamscape to indulge in the pleasure of dissociative daydreams in addition to or to mitigate the absence of actual consumerism. Present-day Brazil still features a high disparity between rich and poor. This is so despite the fact that after Brazil moved from dictatorship to democracy and eventually conquered its disastrous inflation, it earned its coveted place as one of the four so-called “BRIC countries” (Brazil, Russia, India and China) that Goldman Sachs predicted could topple U.S. economic hegemony. Throughout Brazil’s historical trajectory, shifts in political economy have affected masculine subjectivities in the male sex trade. In fact, I’ve found male sex workers today to be uniquely equipped for helping us to understand the relationship between globalization and masculinity precisely because michês interact so extensively with gay tourists from the U.S. and Europe. This article is concerned with understanding how michês who sell sex to gay tourists use consumerist daydreams to construct and enjoy possible futures. To do this, I ultimately will turn to Colin Campbell’s influential, but now outmoded 1987 book The romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism. I attempt to recover his work, which Campbell wrote in the heyday of Thatcherite-Reaganite free market global capitalism, when the excesses of consumerism were portrayed in films, television, and the media as an essential part of being American. I want to take Campbell’s work and reposition it within the contemporary Brazilian context in order to better understand how the key features of his theorization translate into a globalized sexual economy that he could not have anticipated. I argue that we gain not only a better understanding of prostitution, but also of the rise in consumerism in Brazil at a moment when there is intense interest and even anxiety on the part of the international community regarding the country’s growing geopolitical and economic clout. In so doing, I hope to not only suggest that Campbell’s theory is due for revival, but also to highlight the non-work aspects of michês’ lives and © Wagadu 2010 ISSN: 1545-6196 97 Wagadu Volume 8 Fall 2010 thereby disrupt the unhelpful assumption that sex workers spend their entire days either having, thinking about, or talking about sex. Nomads No More In a poem entitled Michê, the queer anarchist and poet Néstor Perlongher describes how hustlers and clients come together in the meat market of the park (la carroña del parque), where cocks (pinga) are transformed into greasy, lustful dwarfs (enano grasiento y lujurioso) and sex acts are described through floral imagery. Scholars and activists today remember Perlongher mostly for such surreal and erotic poetry, but this poem was not just an expression of Perlongher’s own homoerotic infatuation with hustlers. It is a supplement to his anthropological work. In 1982, Perlongher fled Argentina’s military dictatorship and undertook a master’s degree in anthropology at Brazil’s prestigious UNICAMP university, where he wrote and published a master’s thesis that remains the only book-length study of Brazilian michês (Perlongher, 1987).

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