Dancing With the Devil in the City of God: Rio De Janeiro on the Brink

by Juliana Barbassa

  There were a few travestis making a splash in high fashion, a rarefied world far more accepting of gender ambivalence. Lea T, a stunner with plush lips and marked cheekbones, had been the first, joining the ranks of Paris couture label Givenchy in 2010. But I wasn’t interested in the Gisele Bündchens of the transgender world. I wanted to know to what degree these contradictory aspects of Rio were reflected in the lives of travestis not protected by fame, class, or money.

  I gave Luana a call. She agreed to see me, but she warned: “I don’t do boring and I hate dumb questions.”

  It was easy to pick out Luana’s sobrado: it was the hot pink heart of Lapa, a gaudy bauble among pastel neocolonials. Some of them still had the chipped, weathered fronts they’d worn for decades, but many had been completely redone and housed the bars, nightclubs, and restaurants that drew thousands to the neighborhood every night.

  The metal gate in front was graced with a larger-than-life portrait of the diva herself in a black dominatrix getup, breasts ballooning above a corset that highlighted her waspish waist. The graffiti artist rendered her in bright red lipstick, lounging on a plush red throne with a tiny crown sitting at a jaunty angle on her head. Her eyes, narrowed and looking askance at the viewer, conveyed the same message I’d picked up during our short phone conversation: She’s the queen of queens. Step gingerly when you walk into her realm.

  I rang. A buzzer clicked and a door swung open, revealing a narrow, dark hallway. The stairs leading to the second floor were so steep I couldn’t see the landing above. Only when I reached the top and turned left, toward the living room at the core of the century-old house, did I see Luana and the others. Reclined on couches, sitting on the dining room chairs, balanced on the edge of the table itself were most of her tenants, the twenty travestis who lived in the rambling townhouse’s eighteen rooms, plus the caretaker who doubled as a bouncer—a large lesbian with a crew cut who came and went with a silent nod.

  Luana rose to greet me. I recognized her from the graffiti: the same piercing eyes, now in sapphire contacts, the thin, disdainful eyebrows and the commanding height. Her hourglass silhouette was wrapped in a floor-length purple sheath with a deep décolletage. She flung her tresses around to the side in a practiced whiplash move, tilted her head, and extended a hand: “Welcome to my office, querida.”

  Office wasn’t the first word that sprang to mind. The space felt like a cross between a college dorm and a cabaret dressing room. The walls were covered with a profusion of posters of actresses, models and singers—Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, the samba star Alcione, and the Rio drag queen Lorna Washington—all orbiting a large photo of Luana herself in full stage getup, all feathers and glitter.

  At 5 p.m., the house was just starting to stir. One tranny sipped her coffee slouched over the table; a half dozen piled on the larger couch like puppies. Others traipsed back and forth, hair mussed, sleepy-eyed, in tank tops or slips. Luana introduced me. There were Cariocas in the bunch, but many more were immigrants from other states or other countries trying their luck in the big city. All worked as prostitutes and paid for a room in the big house.

  Luana made that clear: they paid rent and no more. “I’m a landlady, not a pimp,” she explained as we settled down to talk.

  From our couch she kept an eye on all that went on, scolding like a den mother when the chatter opposite got too loud. “Is your little conversation more important than ours?” she fired at the youngsters. They shut up, doe-eyed. “Não, madrinha.”

  Madrinha, godmother. It was clear the fifty-four-year-old Luana was much more than a landlady. I would see over the course of the evening how she could be mother, father, nurse, role model, and therapist. The young ones got advice and limits; some of the older ones, with varicose veins and lopsided, out-of-date boob jobs, got discounts on the rent. It was also clear she ran a tight ship: when she spoke, they listened; when her coffee wasn’t hot or sweet enough, someone popped out of their chair to fix it.

  Order restored, coffee just right, I asked my question again: what did all the new safeguards and laws mean to her and her tenants? She relaxed out of the straight-backed, on-the-offensive pose she’d taken so far, leaned back, and ignored my question. She’d start where she wanted to start: at the beginning.

  She grew up knowing she wanted to be something else, something other than a boy. At first, she thought she wanted to be a woman. Her idols were Hollywood actresses; her daydreams were about men. Later, she learned that wasn’t it, either. Over the years she molded herself into the person she wanted to be, “the best and the worst of all genders.”

  “People say we lead a vida fácil, an easy life. Easy life, hard life, I don’t know. But I chose it. Look what a wonderful thing: I am Luana Muniz. God gave me the sensibility of a woman, the dick between my legs, and a brain. I made myself into this amazing person you see here today. I’m fifty-four years old, forty-three of them [spent] working as a prostitute. Can’t deny there were some very hard times. But I don’t regret it.

  “These girls, on the other hand,” she said, flinging a bunched-up napkin toward the gigglers, “they don’t know hard. Their life is mamão com açucar.” Papaya with sugar.

  Luana was raised in a traditional, middle-class home. Her mother, a public servant and her father, a lieutenant in the army, had adopted her as a boy hoping she’d grow up to be a doctor.

  “They ended up with yours truly,” she said. “Poor things.”

  By the time she was eleven, she ran away from home and began trading sex for cash. There weren’t many other jobs for the likes of her, then or now, she said. Her parents went out to find her the first two times she ran. By the third escape they let her be.

  She started turning tricks at Praça Tiradentes, four blocks away from the hot-pink house she now kept.

  “Lapa was the crib of the Brazilian travesti,” she said. “Those who were here then are all gone, but I can speak for them. It was hard. They had to be aggressive, carry knives, fight. Men would come here to beat us up, for fun.”

  The military dictatorship years were the hardest, she said. Police would slap them around or throw them in jail, where they could be forced to clean up the place or to have sex with officers. Luana herself was once handcuffed to a lamppost on that very street and left there to be pelted with refuse, spat on, and called names by those passing by.

  “It was painful back then. Really painful. It makes me sad to think about it. Now I am not afraid of men with guns anymore. Rats, elevators, and airplanes, yes. But not of any man,” she said. “A travesti has to know how to defend herself.”

  She grabbed her purse and pulled out a short, black club with a wrist strap.

  “This is Cristal. I carry her wherever I go. And then there’s this,” she said, reaching between her breasts to fish out a thin tube of pepper spray—illegal for civilian use in Brazil. She raised her eyebrows, tucked the tube back in.

  “We couldn’t go out during the day, we couldn’t show our faces. Now I know what we do is not against the law,” she said. “Back then, we just took it.”

  The violence in the streets played an important role in the exodus of Brazilian travestis to European capitals. Thousands left dreaming of acceptance, money, and fame—Luana among them. She went to Paris in 1980 and became “a moneymaking machine,” servicing up to sixty men in an evening, between customers and voyeurs, and always charging in advance.

  She was back to Rio a year later, “victorious and tacky as anything,” carrying a Louis Vuitton bag full of dollars, with her first pair of breasts filling out a modest C-cup bra. She’s now on her fourteenth pair, and they’re big enough to overflow two DDD+ cups—if she wore a bra.

  Over the next two decades she traveled back and forth as Brazil weathered its dark years and Lapa continued to crumble. She watched gay rights organizations gain their footing, even worked in one for a few years. But the trannies she knew, the sex workers
who came from God-knows-where to make a living on Rio’s sidewalks, they were still outcasts, she said.

  “On Farme, the gays are rich, they’re engineers, they take vacations,” she said. “We could get sick and no one cared.”

  The whispering of the young travestis on the couch opposite had gone up a couple of notches, and now they were laughing hard enough to miss the narrowing of Luana’s eyes. A fraction of a second later—thwack!—they jumped back. A ring with some two dozen keys attached had smacked the wall between their heads.

  They looked up, startled into silence. Luana reached out her hand, purple porcelain nails extended in their direction.

  “Here, here. Give them back to me. I warned you: have some fucking respect!”

  Turning back to me, she continued: “We needed our own organization. So I created one.”

  Through the Association of Transgender Sex Professionals, which she made official in 2006, Luana connects travesti sex workers with welfare workers and health care providers, helps them plan for retirement, and provides funerals that families can’t, or won’t, cover. There were three that year, she said.

  This is not to say things haven’t improved, she said. They have. The relationship with the police is entirely different: they no longer persecute trannies and they don’t demand kickbacks “because they know they’re not getting any,” she said. She has a strong enough relationship with law enforcement that during a recent crime wave in Lapa, Luana led a petition of business owners and residents asking for an emergency safety plan, and they got one.

  As she talked, a young travesti tried to slink out the door. She was a wisp of a person, thin as a boy, nineteen years old, with a cloud of chestnut curls. Luana grabbed her by the hand as she passed, exhaling her impatience audibly.

  “You’re going where? To the market?” Luana gestured with disgust at the strips of spandex she wore as a skirt and a bustier over her budding breasts, then sent her back to change.

  “These girls go out half naked. . . . They take it all for granted,” she said, shaking her head. The neighborhood was changing fast; there were a lot of new people around, serious businesses like banks, not just the old bohemian crowd. It was best to be careful.

  By this time, there was a steady parade through the living room to the shower as the girls got ready for the evening. It was time for me to go. I walked out with Luana, who needed to get medication for a sick tenant and resolve a territorial dispute between two trannies.

  It was dark out; Lapa’s lights were on, music and laughter poured out of bars and clubs, rhythms mixing promiscuously in the crowded cobblestoned streets. Once Rio’s underbelly and the hangout of the marginalized, Lapa was now riding a wave of gentrification. I brushed past college girls, happy-hour office workers, and gaggles of tourists looking for refurbished samba joints that now charged twenty-dollar entrance fees. The travestis were there, too.

  They were already striking poses on the corners, these über-women with their dramatic eyes, silicone breasts, and hard bodies. I thought about the other prostitutes I’d met and the forces pushing them aside, and wondered how long these travestis would hold on to their turf.

  With Luana gone—and she would tire of being on the front lines eventually—what chance did they have of defending their stretch of sidewalk? I drove away and watched them diminish in the rearview mirror, tall in their platform shoes, still and statuesque in the swirling crowd, silent flesh-and-blood icons of this marvelous city.

  * * *

  I. The broad picture was grim, but the rights movement also scored some early victories: in 1985, the Grupo Gay da Bahia pushed the National Health Counsel to remove homosexuality from the roster of sexual deviations. During the elaboration of Brazil’s new Constitution in 1987 and 1988, a Rio-based LGBT group lobbied hard to include sexual orientation in the section that forbade discrimination on the basis of “origin, race, sex, color, and age.” It was not included, but the discussion raised awareness; protection from discrimination was written into several state Constitutions, and later became law in over one hundred cities, including Rio.

  II. The rise in LGBT murders was broken in 2013, when there were 312 murders, or one every 28 hours, according to the Grupo Gay da Bahia. The hint of improvement suggested by that dip was dispelled in the first, violent month of 2014, when there were 42 murders, or one every 18 hours.

  III. Rio’s demimonde had these antiheroes, among them Madame Satã. Born João Francisco dos Santos in Pernambuco, where his destitute parents reputedly tried to trade him for a mare when he was a boy, he’d found a home in Lapa in the 1930s and earned his nickname from a winning Carnaval costume. He was unabashed about his homosexuality, a friend of samba composers, and an ace with the knife, which he used against police and tough guys in defense of the neighborhood’s transgender people and prostitutes.

  CHAPTER 14

  DIGNIFIED LIVING CONDITIONS

  The favela of Metrô is long and slender, squeezed into the narrow strip of land between the six-lane Radial Oeste highway and the tracks that serve the subway and railroad. The first residents were workers who came to build the tracks in the 1970s and stayed; over time, their conglomeration of houses became a part of the urban landscape, much like the railroad tracks they built. Most Cariocas zoom by without a second glance. If they notice the community at all, it’s for the auto mechanic shops that line its outward face. It’s a cheap place to get an oil change. But that’s not what drew me there.

  The favela is also within view of the Maracanã, so close its residents can follow soccer matches just by listening to the cheers that rise from the great concrete bowl. The stadium would host the final game of the World Cup and two years later, the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics. The city had plans for the neighborhood: a $63.2 million overhaul that included new access ramps into the arena, parking lots, a bike lane. A PowerPoint presentation by the public works department laid out details in January 2012.

  Favela do Metrô was not in the picture.

  As I approached the community, I stopped by a larger-than-life graffiti mural on one of the outer walls. It showed a boy wearing a Brazilian soccer jersey and crying. Next to him was a soccer ball whose black-and-white pentagons blurred and morphed into the cavities of a skull. In case the message wasn’t clear, a banner above spelled it out in elaborate cursive script: Destruirão minha comunidade por conta da Copa—“My community will be destroyed because of the Cup.”

  I stepped into one of the residential lanes, trading the whoosh of high-speed traffic for the cacophony of children playing and television chatter. The houses were modest but solid, made of brick, some plastered and painted, some bare, all of them narrow, tightly packed, two or three stories tall. A gaggle of kids chased after a ball in a small, open area that doubled as their playground and public square. From open doors and windows came the smell of frying garlic. It was lunchtime.

  In spite of the life in its streets, every alley bore signs that the destruction predicted on the graffiti outside was already under way. Metrô looked like it had been bombed. Some homes stood intact while the houses next door or opposite had been reduced to piles of brick and cement mixed with rusting rebar and broken glass, coils of severed wires and crumbled plaster. Sometimes a second story was smashed to bits, but the bottom floor was untouched.

  The houses that still stood all had a number and the initials SMH, for Secretaria Municipal de Habitação, or Municipal Housing Department, spray-painted on their outside wall, along with a number. They were next.

  The World Cup and, in particular, the Olympics, were billed as transformative forces that could revamp the city’s infrastructure and provide the impetus and the funding to remedy old deficiencies. After a couple of years back home, I realized their impact was uneven and not always positive. In the high-rises in Ipanema, it helped fuel the ongoing real estate speculation, even as it drew more tourists; a
mong the sobrados of Lapa and the port region, it brought urban renewal but also a wave of gentrification that was changing the character of the bohemian neighborhoods. The condomínios of Barra were experiencing a construction boom that was already proving unsustainable.

  Rio’s favelas were also undergoing tremendous change. Even during the recent economic bonanza, their population had grown faster than the city’s as a whole, according to the 2010 census. They were home to one in five Cariocas, and there were more than one thousand favelas in the city.

  After decades of minimal attention from authorities, these communities were the focus of several highly visible public policies. I wanted to see up close how these unfolded; what happened in communities like Metrô, how it happened, and how residents were treated throughout would give real insight into the city’s broader transformation.

  Rio’s biggest handicap had always been inequality. This was manifested not only in income gaps, but also through vastly unequal access to public services and resources, even to basic civil and human rights. The treatment of rich and poor, even by state agents and institutions such as the police force, the legal system, and elected officials, had throughout history been grotesquely imbalanced.

  Favelas are a physical manifestation of this chasm. They concentrated Rio’s, and Brazil’s, poorest and most disenfranchised citizens. I looked to these communities for an answer to one of my most fundamental questions: was the ongoing transformation going down to the bones, altering the structures that funneled resources, rights, and opportunities to some and not others, or was it a facelift that wouldn’t affect the scaffolding underneath?

  City government had announced two directives touching on favelas in the euphoric months that followed Rio’s Olympic bid victory. Together, they could have a dramatic impact on the face of the city and on the lives of favela residents; over time, they would provide my answer.