From closets to basements

the collective memory of dissident bodies in public spaces

Abstract

This essay proposes to guide the occupation of urban territory by LGBTQIA+ people, as well as to question the conditionalities of the right to the city for those who are sexual and/or gender dissidents. The monstrification of subalternized bodies is not a recent practice, but a direct inheritance of the colonization process that attributed – notably to black and indigenous people – the sub-human status as a destructive prerogative. From this, I discuss how the insertions and purges of LGBTQIA+ bodies from the urban space take place, placing this discussion specifically in the city of Salvador, Bahia, from establishments aimed mainly at the lesbian and dyke local population. With the portrait of the bars Caras & Bocas and Sapoti, I question the visible and invisible geographical barriers that vilify the right to public affection and to dissident collective memory, built from and by means of socialization spaces compulsorily boycotted by heteronormative civil society.