“Men in transvestite”: Carnival, criminality and “sexual inversion” in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Rio’s Carnival drew the attention of national and international observers to one of its most outstanding phenomena: the “men in transvestites”. Such concern was materialized in the great variety of photographs and travel films that reveal the variety of these characters playing in the streets of the Federal Capital. This presence is so characteristic of the revelry that the authorities admitted in the communication vehicles of the time that they were not able to repress it. This article sought to analyze the construction of the classification “men in transvestites” as a category related to gender and sexuality in two newspapers with wide circulation in the Rio’s press: O Globo and Última Hora in the period of the 1950s and 1960s. In the attention paid by police authorities, the press and specialists such as the doctor Leonídio Ribeiro, a scientific authority called by the newspapers of the time to talk about the dangers that “men in transvestites” posed to public order.