LAMPIÃO DA ESQUINA NEWSPAPER

JORNAL LAMPIÃO DA ESQUINA

Address: Rua Joaquim Silva, 11, sala 707, Centro, Rio de Janeiro, RJ
Themes: Homosexuality and Dictatorship; Political-Cultural Resistance and Memory
Translated to the Portuguese by Lara Norgaard

Launched in April 1978, Lampião da Esquina was one of the most important Brazilian newspapers for the LGBT movement. It began in the context of the promised “roll back” of the military dictatorship, a period marked by the revocation of the Fifth Institutional Act (AI-5) and by the release of a limited amnesty program. Winston Leyland, editor of US publication Gay Sunshine Press, visited Brazil during the period to select short stories for a forthcoming anthology of gay Latin American literature. Inspired by Leyland’s experiences and visit, eleven intellectuals came together and created Lampião.

The paper’s masthead was made up of: journalist and painter Adão Costa, writer and journalist Aguinaldo Silva, journalist and film critic Clóvis Marques, writer and visual artist Darcy Penteado, art critic and journalist Francisco Bittencourt, writer, journalist and organizer of the first anthologies of LGBT literature Gasparino Damata, journalist and film critic Jean-Claude Bernadet, journalist and lawyer João Antonio Mascarenhas, writer and filmmaker João Silvério Trevisan, and professor and researcher Peter Fry. Beyond this core group, the paper collaborated with Leila Míccolis, Alexandre Ribondi, and others.

Lampião, however, was not the first paper to represent queer identities. Before the paper’s founding, there had been at least 32 small publications on the topic, concentrated in the states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Bahia. Additionally, the Brazilian Gay Press Association, founded by Anuar Farah and Agildo Guimarães, functioned from 1962-1964. The organization’s main goals were to circulate these smaller publications and promote queer media. However, Lampião was different from these other papers in its technical production, printing methods, and national distribution. While the other publications were almost always involved with artisanal production and small-scale circulation within LGBT communities, Lampião, despite major distribution challenges, produced and printed an average of 20 thousand copies, monthly.

Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, the city of Rio de Janeiro contained queer enclaves like the Clube Sírio-Libanês in the Mauá Plaza and in the São Cristóvão neighborhood. In the 1960s, these spaces multiplied in a movement that coincided with the increased political polarization in Brazil and the coup in 1964. The many LGBT social spaces that had been formed became spaces for repression under the ensuing dictatorship. Included in these spaces are Rua do Passeio, Avenida Nossa Senhora in Copacabana, the Avenida Central building, Flamengo beach, and Copacabana beach. Indeed, Lampião’s founding coincides with the organization of the first LGBT activist groups as well. One of the paper’s roles was to communicate the addresses of these groups to readers, as well as to spread the word and support the establishment, ideas, actions, and meetings of the organizations. The newspaper also published pieces written by Latin American, European, and North American activist groups, magazines, and newspapers that discussed nonconforming gender and sexuality identity in these other cultural contexts. In this sense, Lampião took on a catalyzing role, inspiring the formation of politicized groups that began to gradually articulate a demand to the end of discrimination against LGBT people in Brazil.

From 1978-1983, the newspaper published 38 issues, along with three special editions, two of which included the best interviews, and the other the best essays. According to the publication’s editors, Lampião was a newspaper for minorities that discussed issues rarely mentioned in the mainstream press and that upheld pleasure as a fundamental right.

The paper mainly focused on institutional and police violence against the LGBT community, activism by gender-nonconforming groups, transexualism and drag, male and female prostitution, and economic and macro-political issues. But the paper also discussed issues related to black Brazilians, women, and indigenous peoples. Even though it faced some resistance from these other groups, Lampião published important articles about the black and feminist movements.

The paper suffered dictatorship persecution throughout its short and important existence. It was the target of a yearlong state investigation, accused of attacking good morals based on the 1967 Press Law (lei n^o 5.250 de 9 de fevereiro de 1967). It was not, however, the government’s first attack on public conversations about sexuality, though there did not previously exist any law against discussing homosexuality. The magazines IstoÉ and Interview and the journalist Celso Curi suffered state persecution similar to that of Lampião.

Lampião extensively discussed Celso Curi’s case, starting in its first issue. According to the case file, Curi broke article 117 of the Press Law – that is to say, he went against good morals in his column, published daily in the newspaper Última Hora in São Paulo. The charges also stated that the journalist promoted the meeting of “abnormal” people. The column began in 1976 and was denounced in March 1977. The case had a statute of two years before it would be archived. Right before reaching that deadline, the judge Regis de Castilho Barbosa absolved Celso Curi of all charges.

Similarly, nine journalists responsible for publishing the December 1977 article entitled “Gay Power” in the magazine IstoÉ were formally accused of encouraging homosexuality. The magazine Interview went through a related trial. Both, however, were absolved.

As for Lampião, the editors of the newspaper had been denounced since the publication of the fifth edition. The case was widely discussed in the publication itself, which allowed for the creation of a defense commission, organized by the Somos group in São Paulo. The case also inspired innumerable letters of support from readers, artists, and intellectuals. In addition to launching the investigation, the Federal Police often intimidated the editors with surprise visits to the paper’s newsroom and calls to appear at the Department of Social and Political Order.

Repression against the queer community did not begin under the dictatorship. It had existed since 1945 and involved the censorship of various groups, targeting theatre and film producers, musicians, and visual artists. During the dictatorship established in 1964, repression enacted on moral grounds against non-heteronormative and cisgender movements often functioned alongside political repression. While the latter would root out anything viewed as “subversive,” the former afforded a certain didactic backing along the lines of Christian morality and the traditional conception of the family, considered the “heart of resistance against the advancement of spurious ideologies.” The following is a confidential report within the Ministry of Justice in which the idea of the traditional family linked Lampião’s content, as well as actions of the LGBT community, to “communist interests”:

[…] in addition to the propaganda that the newspaper publishes, the support given to homosexual activities is noted. That support is based almost entirely on support from leftist-controlled media. This, along with the homosexuals’ goal to build movements and “occupy their deserved place” – in politics – could be considered highly communist when proselytizing on the topic (Arquivo Nacional, SNI: BR_AN_RIO_TT_O_MCP_PRO_1135).

Fortunately, due to the opinion of state attorney Sérgio Ribeiro da Costa, the charges of case 24/78 were dropped 12 months after the case began. The charges lodged against journalists and newspapers, however, prove that the military dictatorship did persecute homosexuality, even if that persecution did not amount to crime in the penal code. The dictatorship largely used morality to attack the press in the same way that it used vagrancy laws to incriminate, extort, criminalize, and penalize LGBT individuals.

But persecution against Lampião did not end there. Antônio Chrysóstomo, one of the newspaper founders, was arrested in July 1981, right when the newspaper would release its final edition. Chrysóstomo was charged with raping his adopted daughter, Cláudia Pinheiro Santiago. With no material evidence, Chrysóstomo was judged based on his political activism and on being openly and proudly gay. The trial against Lampião was used to incriminate him.

One year later, after spending nine months and fourteen days in jail, Chrysóstomo was absolved of the crimes. He died only a few months later due to mistreatment while incarcerated. Before he passed away, he wrote a play, Olho no olho, na qual, in which he tells his side of the story. Because of financial difficulties and Chrysóstomo’s sentence, Lampião abruptly closed down.