Next Stop: the Old Country...

When I immigrated to Brazil, I had to make a pact with my parents to help them accept the decision. I had to agree that every year, Vini and I would honor the American tradition and travel back for Thanksgiving with the family. It made my mother a little more willing to let go, and not dwell on the five thousand mile distance.

Alas, for the first year my parents elected to visit us in São Paulo for the holiday and we had a big, raucous holiday meal at Claudia's apartment on the other side of Jardins. My dad and I even chipped a few golf balls at a local hotel, and banished his fears about the cuisine in Brazil with a mere visit to a churrascaria. (Dad's not big on travel. Which made the whole visit more poignant.)

But this year is all about returning to the Old Country. We'll be spending a few days vacationing in California before we head east for the holiday. It'll be Vini's first real American Thanksgiving, and my first as an émigré. And oddly enough, this will be the longest single visit home to the United States since I left in March of 2007. So for me, this will be a milestone on various fronts.

I have this feeling in my gut that I will arrive in the U.S. feeling far more foreign than native. That will erode a little, of course, when I get on the line for U.S. citizens at passport control in Dallas-Fort Worth, and Vini and I are separated. Once we arrive in L.A. and are driving through West Hollywood, I'm sure all the gay-ghetto vibes will come crashing through as well. When we stroll around the mall with Mom back east in the thrall of the Black Friday sales mania, I will be choking on the fumes of Americana and all the memories of childhood will fill my head to the rim. And no question -- the first morning at my parents' house, when we're all in the kitchen having breakfast, I will crack my first native New Yorker accented words, and Vini will duly mimic me.

But no matter. Slipping back into the skin of the old me is as easy as slipping into a martini. But only the skin. Everything inside, all the DNA, is re-arranging at a steady pace. I crossed the 50% mark of feeling Brazilian at some point in 2008; it's unmistakable, even though the shape of it is hard to fully describe. As I sit here this morning, typing this in my home, I am more Brazilian than American on the inside.

So what will this mean as I head to the U.S. for this two week visit? We'll see. I know that the ways in which my family interacts with each other is something ingrained in the culture of our lives back there. Moving to Washington wasn't enough for me to shake it; perhaps only to see it more clearly and resist it. But I would always find myself somewhat drawn in inevitably. And it would be painful.

But Brazilians are, by their very nature, strictly averse to conflict and confrontation. It was first evident to me in business dealings, where a Brazilian interlocutor would never say "no" even if he meant "no". This is unbearable for American businessmen, who value clarity, efficiency and getting to the point. Ironically, though, when it's turned onto the personal side of the coin, there is a bit of a reversal.

Americans seem to stage all sorts of proxy battles in their family lives, and vent their repressed emotional spleens on each other over usually ridiculous and trivial matters. It's because they don't want to get to the point, or often because they won't even allow themselves to see what the point is to their anger, their regret or their fears in the context of a family relationship. They too often fall back on the nagging, the bickering, the taking things out on each other.

Now, sure, Brazilian families have their share of fucked-upness. But I have never seen family members go at each others' throats here, certainly not during holidays. I do see an enormous amount of physical tenderness, of affectionate hugging and touching. Of effusive praise and adoration, and of extremely low tension and a lot of laughter at the dinner table or in the back yard. I can honestly say that I will have to repress my desire to be affectionate to my family members when I'm back there next week. My mother is the only one who loves to hug and touch. It will feel strange.

I am blessed that Vini will be with me all the way through. I'll always have someone to whisper asides to in Portuguese, someone who will understand and feel much the same as I will from moment to moment.

And as much as I'll be very happy to visit the country I was born in, I will be equally happy to make my way back home.

Tuesday A/V (Saturday Edition): Missing Dave Chappelle, and Subversiveness

As this decade drags on to whatever conclusion it might have, I'm thinking that it would be a tragedy if the only flashes of subversiveness remembered from the 00's would be associated with Michael Moore. In all, it's been a disappointingly conformist decade.

But I was reminded this morning that for a brief and fleeting moment, we had Chappelle Show.

Few of his original satirical bits are as outrageous, or as timeless, as "Knee High Park". I still howl at this one. (Warning: this is the uncensored, unbleeped, absurdly NSFW version. For some reason, the bleeped broadcast version seemed edgier and dirtier, though.)

Landouar Murder: Killer Gets 27 Years in Prison

The end of the sad and horrifying story of the murder of Gregor Landouar on the night of last year's record-breaking São Paulo gay pride parade has come. The perpetrator of one of the more notorious anti-gay murders in Brazil in recent years received a sentence of 27 years in prison (and since neither life sentences nor the death penalty are options in murder cases, this is probably the strongest sentence possible.)

It was a killing that sent a chill through the gay community living in and around the Jardins neighborhood, one which was initially denied as being a hate crime by the media and even gay leaders themselves. Landouar, a French tourist, was approached outside a high-profile gay hangout called Ritz by a group of "punks" shortly after the pride parade had ended a few blocks north on Avenida Paulista. Without warning or any provocation, Landouar was brutally stabbed and left on the sidewalk in front of horrified onlookers. He died of his wounds.

The São Paulo state police investigated the crime thoroughly and efficiently, and managed to nab the killer -- Genésio Mariuzzi Filho, then a 24 year-old member of the Devastação Punk gang who went by the nickname Anthrax. Genésio confessed that he had bought a knife from a supermarket in the neighborhood (Pão de Açucar on Brigadeiro Luis Antônio, highly patronized by gay residents), and that he and his gang walked through the neighborhood, witnessed gay Brazilians kissing in public and was "revolted", and that he would kill the first person he saw, which was Landouar.

Indeed, in today's coverage, Genésio continues with his immoral, unrepentant attitude. He told reporters that the killing was "silly" and that it was the first time he'd ever attacked anyone with a knife before:

"I had the bad luck that he (the victim) was French. It came out in the media. It was the only time I ever stabbed anyone. ... I'm not a psychopath. I'm not cold. I'm not calculating."

Perhaps not calculating, but clearly a sociopath, a cold-hearted criminal, and he's going to pay. And what's more, his astounding disconnect with what Brazilian society is willing to accept in terms of homophobia is the promising aspect of this. We all know a deep sense of homophobia permeates Brazilian culture, but for once the organs of societal justice -- from the cop on the beat all the way up to the judge in the courtroom -- fell squarely on the right side, almost as fiercely as Genésio fell on the side of evil. There was not a drop of let-up in finding, capturing, convicting and sentencing this monster for all of Brazil to see, as well as a broader crackdown on anti-gay gangs who threatened the area. The state and city governments deserve great credit for what they did, and what I hope they continue doing.

I'm very proud of my new adopted home country. And I walk proudly through Jardins as well. I also owe the police, the city government, and the neighborhood of Jardins an apology for my angry posts at the time, accusing all of them of insufficiently caring about this murder. I was wrong, and what's more, I was ignorant. There was much still for me to learn about my new home when this happened. And I am glad I was dead wrong.

Let this be a lesson -- much like the outrageous gay-baiting done by failed PT mayoral candidate Marta Suplicy, which led to a landslide defeat at the polls -- that there is an ever encroaching limit to what paulistanos will put up with on this score.

PHOTO: Members of Devastação Punk gang members on display after their February 2008 arrest by São Paulo police for their roles in anti-gay attacks in Jardins. (Anderson Prado/DISP)

BACKGROUND:

• Murder at Ritz (June 11, 2007)
  
• S. Paulo Newspapers Report Murder as Possible Hate Crime (June 12, 2007)
• Pride Parade Leader Laments Violence, Lack of Police Support (June 12, 2007)
• Landouar Murder: Eyewitness Gives Details to Newspaper (June 12, 2007)
• Another Murder on the Streets of Jardins (June 23, 2007)
• Jardins Attacks: Is It an Organized Murder Campaign? (June 24, 2007)
• Landouar Murder: "Punk" Under Arrest (August 3, 2007)
• Confirmed: Landouar Murder Was an Anti-Gay Murder Directly Linked to Gay Pride Parade (November 9, 2007)
  

Almost Brand New

In January, I wrote about the building going up next door to ours in our ecclectic little corner of Jardins. I have always had a sort of angry relationship with it. The week we moved into our apartment, they broke ground on it and made my arrival in our new home an agonizing experience for months.

A year ago, when my parents visited for Thanksgiving, it was still very much in progress, and seemed like it was the construction project that would never die, given the snail's pace of the work and the primitive techniques being used.

But as I hinted at in January, once the tide of my own adjustment to life in São Paulo, in my marriage, in my career and in my own skin began to turn, so did my feelings for the building next door. I felt like we were suddenly a weird set of twins who only began to recognize each other as adulthood set in. (And all sorts of even louder construction work began inside my own building and the pounding and grinding and sawing and hollering workmen was more of an afternoon delight at much higher, surround-sound decibels than my old morning jackhammer serenade off the starboard side.)

Well, now it's nearly finished. And I'm delighted at what I see out the guest room window. It's an 18-story luxury condo building. Each floor appears to be one huge unit (the standard for all new buildings in Jardins) with a sweeping terrace at the front, and balconies off the master bedrooms in the back. The main terraces alone are about the size of my entire ex-apartment in Logan Circle, and they are this marvelous sort of indoor/outdoor style that each owner can opt to turn into a glassed-in den or set up like a front porch with ceiling fans. And the penthouse is ... well... it's basically a mansion in the sky.

They've even finished the new sidewalk out front, which until this week has been a crumbled mess that Clancy and I would have to navigate every morning during our first walk of the day. After a year and a half of hardship, it feels luxurious to just be able to walk down the street again! Clancy even peed on a new lamp post in front. They've almost finished the exterior wall to the grounds, and the garage gate has been installed. The lobby windows are being delivered this morning.

It is always like this, isn't it? I mean, for buildings - and for life. It's always such a noisy, messy experience getting the damn structure in place. But when the finishes start being put in, there is such a great thrill about all of it. You just forget everything you went through to get there. And then when the people move in, and the place comes to life, it's so endlessly interesting and absorbing that all you can think about is the future, never the past. Never the path here. Never the sound of the workmen or the hammers.

Now I just have to start plotting my strategies to make friends inside, and get invited to a fantastic party and look across the street at my old classic seven here and aspire to my own brand of São Paulo greatness in the great beyond in front of me.

The Mistaken Peek

After deleting him from my blogroll a while back, I made the mistake of peeking at Andrew's blog this morning. I thought maybe the prosiest self-appointed crusader for gay marriage rights would have posted something really thoughtful and incisive about the stinging defeat of Proposition 8 in California. No such luck.

As I later realized I should have expected, Andrew's blog can basically be paraphrased thusly:







See Hope
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Another photo of wonderful, cheering hope-thinkers in the streets of another American city Tuesday night. I'll probably be up all night again, tossing and turning, as I ponder my own joy.


Marriage
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So sad about 8. Oh well. The dream and the struggle etc. etc. We will prevail someday.


Palin Puke
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Here's an even BETTER video on why the Governor of Alaska is a stupid cunt. It's far better than the one I posted eight minutes ago. Enjoy!