The Man Behind the "Viado Verde" (Green Faggot): Herbert Daniel and the Politics of Revolution

When former guerrilla fighter Herbert Daniel published Sonhos para o próximo viagem (Dreams for the next trip) in 1982, it was overshadowed by the immense popularity of another autobiographical account of the armed opposition to the Brazilian military dictatorship penned by journalist and now Federal Congressman Fernando Gabeira. Although both authors used their accounts of experiences in the underground and exile to criticize the parochial nature of the Brazilian revolutionary left, especially its attitude toward homosexuality, feminism, and the environmental movement, Herbert Daniel’s unabashed declaration of his homosexuality set him apart from Gabeira and other memorialists who produced reflections on their past in the armed struggle against the military regime. This paper explores how Herbert Daniel and other writers of autobiographies used their memories to engage in debates in the post-dictatorship era of the 1980s. Their memories of the past served as political tools for reconsidering prevalent values in Brazilian society in the transition to democracy. The first-hand “authentic” voice of the participant in the glorified armed struggle resistance to the military regime served as a legitimizing leverage in questioning long-held values among Brazilian leftists. I also consider Daniel’s own complex and layered set of identities—writer, revolutionary, homosexual, Brazilian in exile—to analyze how political activists from the emergent lesbian and gay movement appropriated and challenged the leftist discourse of the 1970s as they build an independent movement