E viveram felizes com mais gente: a experiências de casais gays no mercado sexual.

Abstract

This thesis articulates the experience regarding the sexual market of gay couples who live in the city of Rio de Janeiro. My reflection starts with Michael Pollak´s ideas on homosexual lifestyle in the 80 s. His sociological investigation presents a homosexual scenario surrounded by stigmas and its impact on the possibilities of expression of affectivity and sexuality. The author named as sexual market the locus of strategies that, at that point, emerged as a quick, efficient and anonymous way for gay people to engage on sexual trade. On the other hand, the maintenance of stable conjugality was then uncertain because of the lack of social references that could support this kind of relationship. And also because of the existence of a sexual market that, separating sex and affection, presented itself as a simple way to stablish immediate contacts. Rationalizing sexual relationships, the sexual market offered sexual pleasures without socials and moral commitments. After decades since Pollak s reflections on the subject, we observe how notions of conjugality of gay men, just like the expansion of the sexual market, could modify themselves to permit an intersection between these two dimensions. As a method, we use demi-structured interviews with seven gay men in stable relationships searching for articulations that could lead us to the understanding of agreements previously established between the partners and their possible relations with the sexual market. Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to understand how couples in an open relationship reconcile the seductions of the sexual market inside a proposition of union that allows the articulation of affection and sex with other people with no threat to the cohesion of the couple.