Between sex, art and activism: erotic and political economy of Darcy Penteado’s (1926–1987) literature

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the relations between artistic production, homosexual political activism and sexual practices based on Darcy Penteado’s (1926-1987) trajectory. The hypothesis advanced here is that Penteado’s literature not only represents daily life in the homosexual ghetto in São Paulo, but also emerges from networks of sociability, desire, money, artistic prestige, and actictivism that cross the boundaries between intimacy and public sphere. Methodologically, a triangulation is carried out between archival ethnography, literary analysis and interviews. Thus, it is proposed to analyze how Darcy’s movement among São Paulo elite, the world of visual arts, the ghetto and homosexual activism composed an asymmetric circuit of exchanges, or an erotic and artistic economy permeated by different regimes of morality, by the ideal of discretion and by the production of multiple social categories organized around markers of difference.