Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Gay characters on Brazilian TV


Eloisa over at the great blog The Good Blood has posted another good "culture watch" post.

 "Insensato Coração (Foolish Heart) is the new religion telenovela now on air in Brazil, with a whooping six gay characters. Yet to be seen is the treatment that those characters will have (in previous Brazilian soaps, gay characters either die or are unhappy or grotesque or...), but for now, what activists are asking for is the first gay kiss of Brazilian television."
Go check it out.

Hopefully these days will soon be behind us.


"Secretly" - A Vintage Montage Of Guys Together from MJS on Vimeo.

10 comments:

Corinne said...

let's hope Globo does not chicken out again. There was a lot of expectation for a gay kiss in the novela "America" a few years back, but they cut it out at the last minute.

Nina said...

man on man or woman on woman???

That stupid show Big Brother had a transgendered (what I was told-- no idea she was REALLY cross dresser or another identity). She was kicked off first, wow imagine that.

I try to do LGBT awareness subjects at school, you would not believe the reaction from my kids. It's so shocking.

Corinne said...

@Nina,

try showing Carandiru to a class full of macho police officers. I show segments of it in our section of prisons and have to fast forward through the marriage ceremony, otherwise the room just erupts with inappropriate noise and comments!

Jim said...

Corinne - yeah, I remember that rediculous last minute pull. Whatever...

Nina - yes, there was a trans woman among the contestants of BBB11 and apparently she got voted off before it was really known by all that she was trans. Ironic.

(BTW, a cross dresser is generally a straight man who dresses as a woman for fun -- not the same universe as transexuals.)

I had good luck with pro-LGBT messages in my English conversation classes. But then, I was the elephant in the room (so to speak) so the kids may have been biting their tounge. Keep at it - perhaps the school just needs more examples of your work to set a new norm among the students.

Corinne - tough crowd, for sure!

Nina said...

I know the difference between cross dressing and trans..... But some people don't know like i.e. my family who told me about big brother. My definition of cross dressing is a little different. I am not an LGBT identity, but I did LGBT studies (a third major) and a big supporter, my professors have always pushed to open identities.

Some people do cross dress in many different ways, in the documentary called "Paper Dollars" shows a group of transsexuals cross dressing for their weekly show. Their identities were all varied and the film was really fluid. The documentary is from Israel and the group was from the philippines. It was really good. But it posed a lot of questions, why are transsexuals cross dressing? And it wasn't just during shows.

As far as big brother, one person said "a male who got an operation" and the other said "a he dressing like a she". Never saw the show, so I didn't want to step on toes.

Jim said...

Rest assured, I was not being critical, just siezing a teachable moment for readers.

There was (perhaps still is) a restaurant/club in San Francisco that featured waiters/performers who were generally gay guys who dressed as women. They billed themselves as female impersonators. So they were certainly not drag queens, but also not trans folk.

The world is a big place.

I have been attracted to the pan-sexual perspective some promote. It's hard to explain to some, but easy and ever-expansive to understand for others.

And it will not be appearing on national TV anytime soon. ;-)

Nina said...

No, I never thought. I feel really far from any sense of LGBT here, which has been a big part of life. So sometimes, I feel like I no longer know what the hell I'm talking about.

Nina said...

The restaurant sounds amazing!

Jim said...

Here's their website. Every 30 minutes or so one of the waiters performs on the runway bar. Good fun!

http://www.asiasf.com/index.php

Jim said...

I should say that the performers prefer the term female illusionists.

It's a fun club.