My life is made up , as most people’s, of challenges. They just change but never cease to exist. My nature is very determined therefore I’ve always attempted to embrace these many challenges as stimuli rather than impediments. I feel challenged and this is motivational. Professional challenges are substantially informed by personal conflicts and now , at 45, my main challenges involve strengthening my curriculum by pursuing doctorate studies in Theory and History of Art. I see this PhD as a contribution to my old age. I tend to be too hard on myself but it would perhaps be unfair to ignore the many successes I’ve had in life, the biggest of which being my having overcome difficulties pertaining to these moments in which I reinvented myself. After teaching English for more than a decade , I decided to do an MA in Literary Theory , which provided me with the possibility of starting an intellectual move , teaching at tertiary levels. I am currently the head of a Fashion Design course , which was accredited with the highest possible credentials by the Brazilian Ministry of Education, I have also curated art exhibitions which proved immensely rewarding on a personal level. I feel better looking now than I did when I was younger but it is particularly cruel to age as a gay man in Brazil and there resides my new challenge which is inevitably coupled with my intellectual journey…

The gay community in Brasília is big, for there are many civil servants here…diplomats coming from all over the world as well as gay men who come here to earn more and live comfortably and more freely, but we live in an artificial city, which was planned and this ends up affecting people’s relationships. I find the gay community here to be far too stereotypical and homogeneous in addition to being artificially “cold” and segregational as regards class and standards of beauty.

(With regards to my coming out story) Difficult yet resolute, I do not partake of the view of living one’s life as a lie. It took me a long time to actually feel that I could live my homosexuality. I was 23 years old when I first had sex with a man and it took me another two years before I could tell my whole family in a somehow tempestuous manner, for I decided to leave home to live with my boyfriend, whom I passionately loved. I was bullied throughout my childhood and especially in my adolescence but it all contributed to making me stronger albeit a bit melancholic. I do believe that my connexion with the Arts stems from the pain of feeling threatened and belittled by the world. Therefore, my coming out is part of my victory over this past of humiliation but equally the past which shaped who I am and I mostly like it.