IN THE NAME OF DESIRE, classic of Brazilian gay-male literature

IN THE NAME OF DESIRE
JOÃO SILVÉRIO TREVISAN (tr. João Nemi Neto & Ben de Witte)
Sundial House/Columbia Universty Press
$16.00 trade paper, available tomorrow

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the Name of Desire, first published in Portuguese in the 1980s, is one of the most important Brazilian gay novels. It traces the remembrances of a man who returns to the seminary where he studied as a child. This visit, thirty years after his sudden departure, evokes stirring memories of his time there: his first love, nascent homosexual desire, the metaphorical agony of Catholic rituals, and the physical harm inflicted by peers and priests alike. As he revisits the halls, his memory wanders throughout the seminary, creating a narrative both liturgical and profane.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Questions and responses, never answers. A lust-soaked catechism of discovering gay desire in adolescence. A bitter, angry disappointed-romantic's coming to terms with coming, and with coming out even when you could never be in. Plotless, though not storyless, this is a read with something to appall everyone in its frankness, its sometimes-you-wish-it-was-squeamish physicality. It might not even be all that meaty and of the flesh were it not for the powerful, passionate spiritual longing and desire that runs alongside and shoots through the bodily awareness of Tiquinho.

Being gay in a world where you're surrounded by the thing you lust after, yet are Forbidden to Touch...and at the peril of your soul, no less, if you fail!...pretty much perfectly explains why priestly celibacy is a risible concept. No normal male will pass the test forever. In failing, he is doomed. Expressing his natural desires dooms him eternally.

No wonder a femme like Tiquinho is drawn to mysticism. Its rejection of the body is very appealing to someone who Believes the absurd nonsense that sexual desires will cause the omniscient, omnipotent Sky-daddy to reject him eternally (the mirror of what Earthly parents all too often do). His embrace of his by-definition unrequited lust for Jesus has, as it so often does, the seeds of his eventual sexual awakening. A man is born!

What I think will be a major stumbling block for many people who would otherwise ring like struck bells to this story is its presentation: It's an interview, though between whom exactly I was never entirely settled in my mind about...older and younger versions of himself? himself and Authority as he's internalized it? An unseen interlocutor?...all or none, it's a very reflective way to tell a story. It also mirrors the Catechism, that combination of indoctrination and reflection that is the source of its power. What made me smile broadest was this mirror of catechism and its probing (!) internal questioning, only about gay desire, lust, love, and awareness. What a delicious subversion of the church's intentions for the form of catechism! Instead of indoctrination, catechism as a form of self-discovery, a path to honesty and knowledge not cant and dogma.

A very physical self-discovery. Be aware that you're going to be in the trenches of an adolescent male's bodily awakening. That might not be to all tastes. I resonated with it because I grew up among women who didn't like maleness. I'd say that isn't too terribly uncommon an experience, at least among the men I've known over the decades. What Tiquinho fetishizes and uses as desire focuses are common to many males whatever their sex lives. But they're dealt with in very physical terms. That won't be to all tastes.

A way to interrogate the power of faith to deform while shaping, the power of love to mangle and destroy while forming a spirit, and the brutal truth of male desire's perversion into control and abuse. It is a difficult book to read and a necessary story to hear.