When I started teaching at the foreign-language school in the mall, I must have walked past the Leviâs store on five different occasions, waving back at Henrique and his friends until amid a good amount of chuckling, they started exaggerating their gestures and yelling, âVem cĂĄ! Vem cĂĄ!â (âCome here! Come here!â). With some hesitation, I entered the tiny clothing store. Between my broken Portuguese and their limited English, we arrived at the heart of the misunderstanding: an opening and closing fist with the palm facing out signifies âcome hereâ for most Brazilians, while for me, it meant nothing more than a cordial, if childlike, wave of hello. Red with embarrassment and feeling flustered, I did my best to nod, smile, and supply them with a âlegal!â (âcool!â) or two. Henrique, who I had met just a few weeks earlier on my way into the mall, smiled and handed me a black flyer covered in neon script with the word âINFINITYâ written in big white Atari 2600-style letters across the top.
Fig. 1.1
Teresomewhere, by Krista Chael 2009
Around 11 oâclock the following Saturday night, Henrique and his friend Mariel picked me up to go to Infinity: a rave. After no more than ten minutes of trying to keep up with their conversation, I watched Mariel pull into a parking spot in front of a worn-down apartment complex on the corner of a busy intersection. As we climbed a set of stairs, Henrique asked me if I liked cerveja (beer). âClaro!â (âOf course!â) I replied, feeling thirsty and still unaccustomed to Teresinaâs incessant heat. Mariel pulled out some keys and opened a door.
âYou are welcome. My house,â Mariel said in English with a chuckle of uncertainty about her execution. She flipped on a light switch and directed us into her glowing ultraviolet living room complete with fluorescent posters, a few neon dream catchers, and fluffy floor cushions. Henrique promptly kicked off his flip-flops and offered me a cigarette as Mariel disappeared into the kitchen. By the time she returned with a tray of beers, Henrique had managed to put on a CD and explain that we would spend some time hanging out at Marielâs before going to the rave. After chatting about the eccentricities of Marielâs apartment, trying to locate ourselves in relation to the rest of the city from her living room window, and listening to a diverse selection of music, it was after one in the morning. âBora?â (âShall we go?â), said Mariel.
The drive took us back in the direction of my apartment and then onward to the outskirts of the city. Within a matter of minutes, there were no longer any stop signs or street lights or roundabouts, only gravelly roads of dusty ochre and denser patches of what looked like giant-sized ferns jutting up out of the earth. Once we turned down the dark forest lane, parked cars lining both sides signaled we had arrived. A dark-skinned, slender, older-looking man in tattered clothes and flip-flops walked into the dusty beams of our headlights. He motioned us past him, pointing to a spot a bit further down the lane. Once we were parked, we began walking toward a light hanging on a brick wall near a small crowd of people. Henrique led us through the opening in the wall past a stocky security guard dressed in black. After presenting our tickets, Mariel motioned for us to follow her as she headed into the dark, candle-lit labyrinth of sandy soil, twisted trees, and the sound of quick drumbeats playing in the distance.
Infinity was quite similar to a number of other festas (parties )1 hosted by this particular community back in 2003. They often took place a good distance from downtown and the East Zone on the property of a country house. The number of attendees would range anywhere from 200 to 500. Festa producers would use their contacts to find someone willing to rent a weekend home for a small fee. During the festa, the house would remain locked up, and the producers would transform the grounds with creative applications of dim lights, stretched Lycra, beanbag chairs and a number of other borrowed and rented decorations, from glow-in-the-dark streamers to psychedelic posters of Hindu deities, all in the attempt to create a handful of distinct environmentsâa dance floor, a beanbag lounge for relaxing or making out, and an area reserved for food and drink. The dance floor, always ruled by a deejayâusually from Teresina but occasionally from some larger, more well-known city, like Fortaleza or Rio de Janeiro, would be marked by a clear open space made of grass, concrete, or bare earth in front of the turntables.
Throughout the night and into the morning, deejays would play mostly electronic music, specifically, Trance and House. Beneath lofty crown-shaped babaçu palms and a glittered black sky, lone bodies moving in harmony to the beats of the music would populate the dance floor. Often with closed eyes, whether sober, drunk, stoned, or tripping, people would bounce, swing, float, twist, and jump, losing themselves in the moment. At times, they would find themselves watching one another, engaging in a spontaneous dialogue with their movements, often accompanied by smiles and laughter. In the other environments and in the dark spots between them, friends would chat and couples and strangers would cruise, flirt, and make out with same-sex and opposite-sex partners.
As the early-rising equatorial sun started to lighten the sky and the festa began to wind down, Henrique, Mariel, and I found ourselves among about two dozen people gathered a ways away from the action on a large concrete patio near a swimming pool. Most everyone convened there seemed to know one another as they sat talking to one another and sharing their last beers, joints, and cigarettes. Raquel, the producer, sat barefoot cradled in her girlfriendâs arms, talking to one of the deejays who was standing with a CD case in one hand and his girlfriendâs hand in the other. A shirtless man named Bruno in linen pants kicked his feet up into a handstand for his friend SĂ©rgio to catch and the two began to walk around the perimeter of the pool laughing. When one girl yelled, âHey, where is JoĂŁo?,â a lanky man with glitter in his short curly hair responded in a highly affected and effeminate manner, âI think he found himself a macho man, sweetie,â inciting a brief roar of laughter.
From that moment onward, I would develop close relationships with a number of these people and become increasingly more incorporated into their galera (clique)âa continually fluctuating community of no less than 200 people with whom I have engaged on and off over the course of 15 years. Though a fair amount about the galera has changed since I first came to know it in 2003, the sketch above touches on much that remains at its core: a shared desire for and participation in unconventional experiences and sensations via novel types of social events, ambiances, music, design, art, and performances. A community centered on avant-garde esthetics, cultural appropriations of distant worlds, and experimentation, the galera carves out a space in which numerous unorthodox approaches to community, placemaking, belonging, gender, and sexuality are encouraged to flourish. A queer form of belonging, indeed.
Somewhere Nowhere
When preparing to move to Teresina to teach English in 2003, there was little available on Teresina at the university library in the city where I was livingâonly a few scientific studies about things like ground water and tropical diseases. There was even less available onlineâno Wikipedia pages, no YouTube videos, no online newspapers, no climate indices, only a few photographs. I distinctly remember one of a colonial-style building lit up at nigh...