UC Riverside

During the second half of the twentieth century, Brazilian society struggled with dictatorship, power struggles, and the HIV epidemic. Nevertheless, it was in these years, particularly the 1970’s-1990’s, when gay male artists in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo began experimenting with various media as a form of expressing their sexual identities. While much attention has been paid lately to networks of queer artists in white American and Chicanx communities, scholarship on Brazilian gay artists from this era tends to look at them in isolation, if at all. Through a combination of biographical and formal analysis, I assess the works of Alair Gomes, Hudinilson, Jr., and Leonilson as innovative appropriations of existing mediums for transgressively queer purposes. These artists are each case studies of a distinct moment in Brazilian history: the dictatorship, Gay Liberation, and the AIDS crisis. Through this masters thesis, I begin a project which begins to put these artists into conversation with each other as contemporaries.