Tulio Carella's Recife Days: Politics, Sexuality, and Performance in Orgia

Abstract

Recent research on the little known and insufficiently studied time that the Argentinian poet, critic, and playwright Tulio Carella (1912-1979) spent in Brazil highlights its importance for the understanding of gender performance and constructions of masculinity in Brazilian culture. This essay is an attempt at contextualizing the queer project undertaken by Carella's alter ego Lucio Ginarte in the performative narrative that makes up most of Orgia. Ginarte's symbolic, sexualized occupation of Recife's downtown foreshadows the queering of public spaces and openly affirms the physicality and presentness of interclass and interracial gay sex in Latin America.The events discussed in this essay took place in 1960 and 1961 in the city of Recife, capital of the state of Pernambuco, in Brazil's impoverished Northeast, an area traditionally seen as a leftist stronghold. Carella arrived in Recife only a year after the Cuban revolutionary forces toppled the Batista government. He was in the Nordeste during a particularly polarized period in the country's history, with the right and the Armed Forces identifying Pernambuco as a site of "foreign infiltration" and "communist subversion."Tulio Carella was a visiting professor in the theater department at the Escola de Belas Artes, which eventually became a part of the Federal University of Pernambuco. His tenure there was cut short when after about a year and a half he was arrested and interrogated under torture. 2 Having lost his job at the university, he left the country under suspicion of being a Cuban agent. However, since no charges were ever brought in Recife or elsewhere in Brazil, he was never tried or given a chance to clear his name. The evidence against him seems to have consisted of reports of political comments he made in the classroom and on the streets of downtown Recife, where he enjoyed talking to people of all walks of life, and accusations of engaging in "immoral