When Brazilian rock legend and heartthrob Cazuza died on July 7, 1990, from complications due to AIDS, thousands of fans trailed the coffin to accompany Cazuza to his final resting place. They waved album jackets, singing Cazuza’s songs. The fact that Cazuza shared his final death rite with thousands of fans, however, was not unusual. Cazuza’s followers had participated for years in his process of coping with death, which Cazuza had expressed through vivid song lyrics.

As extraordinary as the circumstances surrounding Cazuza’s death was his life. Tanned, handsome, charismatic, and privileged, Cazuza was the enviable, fantastical boy from the neighborhood of Ipanema, the seat of Rio de Janeiro’s upscale lifestyle. Cazuza had floundered in his youth, dropping out of school and spending his days, unemployed, at the beach. Yet when Cazuza found his life calling in music, he abandoned his vapid lifestyle. Instead, he pursued his dream of making music, even through the debilitating effects of AIDS, inspiring his generation and country at large with his brave comportment.

The AIDS Panic

Cazuza is merely one person, albeit a famous one, who was forced to navigate his way through the trying social and medical realities of living with AIDS in Brazil during the 1980s and ’90s. The arrival of AIDS in Brazil in 1983 threw many established customs into chaos, most notably the spirit of sexual liberation that had preceded AIDS’s emergence. Initially referred to as a “gay cancer” or “gay plague” because its first victims in Brazil were gay men, HIV/AIDS caused widespread panic and fear because it was poorly understood, incurable, and virtually untreatable, traits people customarily ascribed to cancer and plagues.

AIDS became synonymous with homosexuality, so many gay men felt the need to re-examine the consequences and implications of being openly gay in the face of AIDS. Some men who had once proudly declared their homosexuality abruptly crept back into the closet, fearing that being openly gay would label them as carriers of HIV and, consequently, as social pariahs. Some gay men mobilized to fight against AIDS, strengthening their networks and uniting against the clearest threat to have ever descended upon them. They demanded rights for the ill and decried the commonplace notion that homosexuality implied AIDS, and vice-versa. While many men who were seropositive shrunk from admitting to their disease, others openly admitted their serostatus, encouraging dialogue and refusing to live and die as outcasts.

Cazuza’s Private Life and Sexual Freedom

Cazuza would come to embody much of the conversation around (homo)sexuality and AIDS that would consume Brazil in the late 1980s. He got his start in a garage band called Barão Vermelho (“The Red Baron”) that played in all of Rio de Janeiro’s major venues and secured a record deal soon after forming. Barão Vermelho‘s self-titled first LP in 1982, of which Cazuza was a major lyricist, situated the band firmly in Brazil’s hippest music scene. From then on, Cazuza became iconic of his generation, a beloved celebrity who lived a life of luxury but responded with humility to his fans.

Cazuza, however, had a wild side that created trouble. Awash in fame and wealth, Cazuza began to drink through rehearsals and use drugs copiously. He was erratic, irritable, and chronically late for appointments. Onstage, Cazuza cursed at his audience. His bandmates grew increasingly frustrated with Cazuza’s careless and reckless behavior; Cazuza grew increasingly frustrated with what he considered Barão‘s limited artistic vision. Cazuza split from the band in 1985, the same year that the first glimpses of a dark, looming illness had already begun to present themselves.

As a freshly minted rock star, Cazuza experimented as freely with his sexuality as he did with drugs. Even before he had joined Barão and gained access to every kind of temptation, his mother, Maria Lúcia “Lucinha” Araujo, recalls that when he was 18 years old she became suspicious of Cazuza’s sexuality and sexual behavior. Snooping through Cazuza’s personal possessions, she discovered an “excessively affectionate” card to a male friend. When she asked him point-blank if he was gay, he answered ambiguously:

Listen, Mom, I’m not one thing or another because nothing is definitive in life. You could say that I’m bisexual, because I haven’t made my choice yet. One day I can like a man and the next, a woman. So don’t worry about it (Araujo 108).

Here Cazuza describes “bisexuality” as a liminal ground that served as a buffer for someone like him, who had ostensibly not yet decided whether he was straight, gay, or neither. Cazuza had relationships with both men and women. He made easy references to kissing girls and having girlfriends, but he neither ascribed to being gay per sé nor denied his interest in men. Cazuza’s stance on his sexuality is important in two ways. First, Cazuza’s bi- or pansexuality worked almost like a policy of inclusion: by publicly acknowledging relationships with men and women, he did not confine himself to any kind of sexual stereotyping, which resulted in his ability to produce music that reached out to a very diverse audience. One important example is one of Cazuza’s most famous solo songs, “Brasil” [“Brazil”], which offers the refrain “Brazil, mostra sua cara” [“Brazil, show your face”]. This demand, in context, seems to have been Cazuza’s demand that Brazil be absolutely forthcoming and truthful, about everything from politics to sex. The second way is that when Cazuza came to deal publicly with his seropositivity, he would be able to defy the notion that AIDS was purely a gay man’s disease; though he slept with men, he was not necessarily identified, by himself or others, as gay.

The Politics of Disease

Although Cazuza’s music had been politicized from the outset, it grew only more so with his diagnosis of HIV/AIDS. His song “O Tempo não pára” [“Time Doesn’t Stop”] reveals very telling details about Cazuza’s struggle with HIV/AIDS, including his anger at his illness (“I’m strong, I am by chance /My machine gun full of injuries”), questions about his reputation and sexuality (“They call you a thief, a fairy, a stoner”), and critiques about the elite classes:

Your pool is full of rats …

It’s kill or die

And this is how we become Brazilian

They transform the whole country into a whorehouse

Because that’s how we make more money 

O Tempo não pára is also extremely hopeful, publicly attesting to the fact that Cazuza would continue fighting for his life because nothing will stop for his disease:

But if you think

That I am defeated

Know that I am still rolling the dice

Because time, time doesn’t stop

After this album, Cazuza’s popularity soared. In fact, one of his biographers, Luiz André Correia Lima, argues that Cazuza’s work began to get more notice precisely because of the common knowledge of his illness.

With the news that AIDS was killing him slowly, people began to pay more attention to the content of his songs, maybe because they were morbid and because of the sensationalism that surrounded his public admission (Lima, 26).

While this claim may be true, Cazuza did not publicly admit to being HIV-positive until about one year before his death, on February 13, 1989, in a famous interview for São Paulo’s leading newspaper, Folha de São Paulo. The story made the front page and sparked an incredible deluge of media coverage. Cazuza, who admitted to being HIV-positive in part because he had demanded honesty from everyone else in his music, presented himself as a role model, for others with AIDS and for all of Brazil:

I sing a song that says, ‘Brazil, show your face.’ If I don’t show mine, I won’t be consistent with myself (Alexandre, 299).

I say that I have AIDS because I want to show these people that they must not despair. I have AIDS, and I continue working, producing, composing (Galo, 8).

Cazuza’s public admission of seropositivity had not, however, been as matter-of-fact for him as he may have portrayed to the media; in fact, his admission was a stark turnaround from the year before. At the end of 1988, journalist Marília Gabriela had asked Cazuza if he was HIV-positive, expressing the rumors that had been circulating since the days of his first hospitalization in 1985. Cazuza denied the allegation. Cazuza’s reasons for having denied his HIV were completely understandable: the prejudice and stigmatization of people with AIDS were extremely pronounced in 1988. In fact, Cazuza himself would help change that paradigm of blame and guilt by bravely taking a public stance on his illness. Cazuza’s openness came with a high price, however: not only did the media bombard him with interview requests, but Cazuza became the subject of a morbid fascination that at times even eclipsed the attention paid to his music.

Although Cazuza weathered difficult times after his admission of seropositivity, his position as an openly HIV-positive person ultimately came to serve as a model and inspiration for many people, HIV-positive and HIV-negative alike. In an article on July 26, 1989, Veja (“Look”) Magazine singled out Cazuza as one of the people in Brazil who bravely stand up, not only as AIDS victims but against an inevitable defeat:

Contra o stigma, o trabalho [Working against the stigma]

AIDS overshadows the daily lives of thousands of Brazilians who, in general, hide their illness due to the stigma it carries. There are, however, some with AIDS who not only admit their condition but confront the illness trying to give a normal course to their activities … For these AIDS sufferers, AIDS is not a ghost from which one should flee, but an enemy that must be faced.

Indeed, Cazuza changed the ways in which HIV/AIDS were discussed and understood in Brazil. He proved that instead of submitting to AIDS, people with AIDS—gay, straight, or bisexual—could continue to be productive, even famous members of society. According to author and literary critic Marcelo Secron Bessa, Cazuza had become the “face” of AIDS in Brazil. He was a pivotal figure in a shift that saw people with AIDS talking about themselves in the media, rather than other people talking about them. Cazuza was instrumental in doing so because he was already famous and had the attention of many followers. Most important of all, his impact fomented widespread discussion of AIDS, effectively demystifying the disease and turning it into a topic of household discussion.

Sources

• Alexandre, Ricardo. Dias de luta: o rock e o Brasil dos anos 80. Brasil: DBA, 2002.
• Araujo, Lucinha. Só as mães são felizes. São Paulo: Editora Globo, 1997.
• Cantore, Jaqueline. Interview by Author. digital recording. Brooklyn, 14 February, 2009.
• Correia Lima, Luiz André. Cazuza: lenda e legenda dos anos 80. Londrina: Editora UEL, 1997.
• Galo, Ana and Marilda Varejão. “O Drama (e o Desabafo) de Cazuza.” Manchete, 13 May, 1989.
• Knox, Paul. “Fans Follow Cazuza to Grave, Rock Singer Brazil’s Best-Known Victim of AIDS,” The Globe and Mail. Rio de Janeiro: Bell Globemedia Publishing, 9 July, 1990.
• “O vírus dobra o astro.” Veja, 26 July, 1989.
• Secron Bessa, Marcelo. Os perigosos: autobiografias & AIDS. Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano Editora, 2002.
• Utzeri, Fritz. “Vírus pequeno provoca ‘câncer-gay.’ ” Jornal do Brasil, 21 June, 1983.