Global South Perspectives on Stonewall after 50 Years, Part II—Brazilian Stonewalls: Radical Politics and Lesbian Activism

The riots against a New York City police raid at the Stonewall Inn bar in June, 1969, are often identified as having sparked the movement for LGBT rights, and the commemoration of the riots one year later in June, 1970, inaugurated a series of annual LGBT Pride events that continues to this day worldwide. In this two-part Forum, we reflect on the contradictory effects of Stonewall’s international legacy. In this second part of the Forum, Ferreira and Belmont investigate the ways in which ‘Stonewall’ has been appropriated specifically in Brazil, both during the civil-military dictatorship and in the current fraught political moment. Belmont locates current mismatches between LGBT and queer struggles in Brazil by juxtaposing more mainstream visions of LGBT politics with the margins they create, especially the marginalization of travestis. Belmont exposes the way that dominant LGBT discourse and practices reinforce the continuous violence over dissident bodies and proposes that we look at travestis’ experiences and arguments as necessary contributions to a more radical (queer) politics. In the final contribution, Ferreira recapitulates the political demands of NYC’s Stonewall events and contrast them to the revolutionary claims of what was called a ‘Brazilian Stonewall.’ Considering the protagonism of lesbian movements in such events in Brazil, her contribution analyzes, from a queer perspective, the embrace of a multiplicity of identifications in contemporary lesbian activism. She argues that this move creates potentialities for responding to structural violences, while also speaking to questions such as the judicialization and commercialization of LGBTTI causes and homonormativity.

The One-Legged Chair

Esperanza Tapia is arrested in Arequipa. Daniel Bravo and Tigre move into a safe house outside of Lima whose tenant is an American named Lori Berenson. Miguel Rincon, commander of the safe house, works with Nestor Cerpa to plan a secret operation. Berenson is arrested, leading to a police raid of the safe house.

Sex Researcher

In the years 1934-40, Gershon Legman defined his life’s work and taught himself the skills he would use in his richly productive research career. Moving to New York City after graduating high school, at the height of the Great Depression, he tried to make a career for himself as a writer about sex. Legman was taken on as a sex researcher and bibliographer for the eminent gynecologist Robert L. Dickinson. He also worked as a book scout and courier in underground erotica publishing, shuttling merchandise around for the book dealer Frances Stellof. He learned printing, layout, binding, and book design in the workshop of Jacob Brussel. His first publication as a folklorist, a glossary of homosexual slang, was researched with Thomas Painter for the Committee on Sex Variants, under Dr. Dickinson’s auspices. Also, during these years, Legman aimed to shatter the censorship barriers in literary publishing. He worked as a dollar-a-page pornographer, impersonating Henry Miller, among others. With Brussel, he brought out the first American edition of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and under a pseudonym published his own first book, Oragenitalism, a treatise on oral sex. Both volumes were highly illegal, and when they were seized in a police raid, Legman barely escaped arrest.