Erotic engineering in Brazil

In Rio de Janeiro, travestís make high drama from tough lives

A Ru Paul lookalike in a lace microskirt is plying her trade on the Avenida Augusto Severo in downtown Rio de Janeiro. Very tall, with radically enhanced eyelashes, hair extensions and a plunging décolletage. There are other travestís to be seen all along the Avenue, silhouetted by the street lights. The sidewalk is their catwalk. They step out in satin hot pants, leather bikinis and denim cut-offs, in carmine lipstick and six-inch heels – the international uniform of showbiz-style hookerdom.

Cross-dressing is transcultural phenomenon, but the startling visibility of transgendered sex-workers on the streets of Rio and other Brazilian cities is unique, rivalled only by those in Mexico City. They are easier to find than filles de joie – ladies of the night – or michês – male hustlers – or drug dealers, or agents of the jogo do bicho, Brazil’s illegal numbers game. They are the most ubiquitous of all purveyors of illicit pleasures. In Brazil, travestís and their clientele are an inescapable part of the economy of sexual desire.

During carnival in Rio a wide array of cross-dressers of all shapes and sizes is in evidence, in the street and on the floats of major samba schools. There are local carnival groups that parade entirely in drag. But these are amateurs, out for the day. None of them would want to be called travestí, a word that, in Brazilian Portuguese, signifies a sex-worker who is, to a greater or lesser extent, transgendered. For professional travestís, on the other hand, the partial inversion of social order that is a feature of carnival – and the pursuit of pleasure that accompanies it – are a year-round phenomenon; this is their mode of livelihood.

What do men want?

What is it that their clients want? It’s been suggested that travestís shape themselves consciously – to a greater extent than other sex-workers – in the image of the sexual fantasies of their clients (who are mostly, but not exclusively, male). The living dolls on the Avenida Augusto Severo are brought into being by the fantasies of the conservatively dressed middle-aged men who peer from the windows of the cars that cruise along the avenue of an evening. In this sense travestís are designer sex objects, walking embodiments of the desires of those who seek their services, the soi-disant straight men in their cars.

Who takes on a role like this? In Brazil a poor uneducated gay youth from the boondocks doesn’t have many choices; becoming a travestí is one. As with castrato opera singers in eighteenth-century Italy, or eunuchs in the court of Ottoman Turkey, gender modification offers a chance of escape into a different life – risky, but with a deceptive element of glamour. In Brazil there are just a few travestís who have managed to transcend the sex trade, becoming national celebrities, courted by public figures and fêted in the salons of Rio and São Paulo. But most lead the harsh lives of sex workers everywhere. And to play the role, they may subject themselves to painful and sometimes life-threatening surgical procedures, often self-administered: nips and tucks and hormones and injections of silicone to simulate female secondary sexual characteristics.

What Brazilian travestís do not generally go in for is surgical gender reassignment. Sex change operations have been illegal in Brazil until quite recently, despite the country’s early reputation as the world capital of cosmetic surgery. But this is not the only reason travestís don’t go further towards a transgendered state; it is also, they will tell you, because a full male-to-female transexual is not what their clients are looking for. Some of these clients may want travestís to perform a straightforwardly receptive role. But others are looking for a sexual partner who is both male and female, a paradoxical combination, a sexual chimera, a fantasy of polymorphous perversity, one who has the look and feel of the female (or a certain culturally conditioned notion of the female) and the penetrative capacity of the male.

Travestís say that a significant proportion of their clients incline to the receptive role in sex, but – either to save appearances, or for some more complex reason – their whim is to act this out with someone who is visibly female. Travestís are thus, to employ the blunter language of Boogie Nights, the Hollywood movie about the porn industry in California, ‘chicks with dicks’.

Land of pantomime, land of carnival

Body modification of one kind or another is a cultural universal, found everywhere, whether in the form of male circumcision, female genital cutting, body piercing, or facial scarification, or in more recent manifestations such as cosmetic surgery and body-building. Cross-dressing, likewise, is a global phenomenon. And transgendered people who embrace both are increasingly visible in the sexual arena. These days, in telephone boxes in London’s West End, among the bouquets of leaflets advertising sexual services, it’s not hard to find ads for Brazilian-style trans sex-workers, and online too. What we don’t see much of in Britain at this point is a Brazil-style visible public subculture of semi-transgendered, street-walking filles or fils de joie. In Paris and Rome they are easier to find.

Travestís are an alarming notion for straight people of a certain generation – a feature of the new sexual landscape that stands out among the other moral shocks of modernity. This is perhaps because in Britain cross-dressing has traditionally been domesticated as stage entertainment, in drag shows or pantomime, our cosy British version of carnival. In Britain transvestism is desexualized by panto, made safe for family entertainment. In Brazil, on the other hand, where sex is theatre, cross-dressing sends a clear sexual signal.

I used to live in Brazil and go back there whenever the opportunity presents itself. I’m glad, though, on balance, that Britain is the land of pantomime rather than the land of carnival. And I’m thankful that, being gay, I did not also grow up poor and ill-educated in the Brazilian backlands, with life as a transgendered, big-city sex-worker my only route out of rural poverty and prejudice. The lives of most Brazilian travestís are rough. But in the nightly show on the Avenida Augusto Severo they create a spectacular masquerade out of the grim constraints of their lives. ★