The sex-drive factor

Press, 17 August 1983, Page 12

The sex-drive factor

By 1

MARTIN WALKER,

, of the “Guardian,” in Sao Paulo

Brazil must be the only country in the world where the neon sign “drive-in” means neither a bank nor a cinema. In Brazil, a drive-in is for sex, physical testimony to the curious intensity of the country’s passion for the automobile. A drive-in is a large, walled carpark. No roof, and small, gar-age-like cubicles where a car is Earked. There is a curtain to draw ehind the car for privacy, and a bell on the wall to order drinks. That is it: no bed, no couch, just a little privacy and the romantic environment of the car, to be hired by the hour. There was a theory that the drive-ins would die away as Brazilian morals relaxed, as it became possible for an unmarried couple to check into an hotel; but they persist. There is even a drive-in for people too poor to bring their own car. The owner fills his garage spaces with old wrecks that lack engines. The car is the thing. The drive-ins have even survived the astonishing explosion in Brazilian pornography, and the city news kiosks are now festooned with the kind of gay and bondage magazines that even Soho still wraps in plain brown covers. In this curious way, porn is a symbol of the abertura, the policy of political liberalisation. Indeed, state funds helped get the Brazilian industry under way,

when public investment in local film companies unleashed a flood of soft porn comedies that whetted the public appetite for more. Porn magazines in Portuguese are not the kind of product that can be supplied overnight from the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon exports. The result was a wave of rather faded magazines from Portugal itself, where a thriving pom industry was one of the first fruits of the army coup that toppled the oidd fascist government in 1974. Portugal’s craze for the more exotic fruits of publishing freedom lasted for a few years, and then the publishers were left with large stocks on their hands until the, Brazilian market opened up. Curiously, there has been no public outcry against the porn trade. The Church has ignored it, and the women’s lib movement in Brazil is too divided among warring political factions to unite against porn. “For us, it is a very marginal question,” says Maria Fuentes, a feminist campaigner in Sao Paulo. “There are more fundamental issues for us, about abortion and about political freedom. But the generals may find the pom useful, to keep the conscripts quiet in the barracks.” The issue of sexual liberation has now emerged in Brazil in a rather odd way, in the person of Herbert Daniel, who was known as

the last Brazilian exile. A former urban guerrilla in Brazil in the early 19705, Daniel went into exile in Paris, where among other things he worked in a gay sauna, and has now stormed the Brazilian best-seller lists with a book titled Alligators and Werewolves, which is said to come from an old and quite incomprehensible Brazilian proverb. “Women with women breed alligators. Man with men breed werewolves.”

Apart from his political past, Daniel has caused a stir because his book is seen as an attack on the Latin male’s heritage of machismo. These days, says Daniel, only the promiscuous homosexual is truly macho, because only he dedicates himself to the maximum possible number of sexual encounters with the maximum possible number of strangers, or to use Daniel’s macho phrase, conquests. What everybody wants to know, in the wave of television and press interviews, is what was the sex life of the guerrillas? Orgies among the Kalahnikovs, passion amid the plastic explosives? Well, no. According to Daniel for seven years he subliminated his sexual needs in the revolution. The guerrillas were a very puritan lot. Except, from time to time, they would go off to a drive-in, he confides shyly. ‘