Mário de Andrade and The Kidnapping of Sexuality

Abstract

After decades of secrecy, in 2005, the Comptroller General of Brazil authorized the opening of a letter from Mário de Andrade to Manuel Bandeira, in which the author discusses his homosexuality. The reception ranged from expectations on the theme (Silviano Santiago), through institutional reluctance (Casa de Rui Barbosa), to the relativization of the issue (José Miguel Wisnik). Since then, eroticism in Mário de Andrade has emerged from the gray zone of silence and gained greater appreciation, as evidenced by the edition of Seleta Erótica de Mário de Andrade (2022), organized by Eliane Robert Moraes. Supported by queer theory, this text seeks to problematize the reception of the letter, working with the hypothesis that sexuality in Mário de Andrade was “kidnapped” by the public sphere – in the technical sense that the author lends to the term. It begins by exposing the manifest homophobia in Mário’s contemporaries; it directly addresses the letter and its reception context; it proposes furthermore a reading of Mário’s poem Girassol da Madrugada as a poetic strategy for enunciating sexuality; and concludes by formulating the issue of “kidnapping” based on a discourse held by Paul B. Preciado for a society of psychoanalysts.