"Doing the social": Friendship, "tesão" and sociability in Recife's gay community

Abstract

The paper presents the results of ethnographic research, carried out through participant observation and interviews, in the gay community of the Metropolitan Region of Recife. It analyzes the modes of sociability based on the emic categories “fazer a social”/doing the social, “pegação”/flirting and “suruba"/orgy. In the community, friendship and "tesão"/horniness are emotions co-existing to sociability, and the conversation by words and gestures are their greatest expressions. The condition for sociability to be established is the breakdown of the search for conjugality, the content of heteronormative sociation.