Pissed Off Putas

“The prostitute isn’t a slut, nor is she the product of untamed capitalism but rather the direct result of a society terrified of confronting its sexuality and thus feels profoundly threatened when a prostitute shows her face,” editorialized Gabriela Leite in the inaugural issue of Beijo da rua, the newspaper she cofounded in 1988 to serve Brazilian sex workers and their allies. Leite, born in 1951 in São Paulo, left behind promising university studies and a middle-class social milieu to become a prostitute, first in the bohemian neighborhoods of her native city and later in the storied red-light district of Rio de Janeiro. After helping to stage massive protests against police brutality in the waning days of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Leite went on to found, together with Lourdes Barreto, the Rede Brasileira de Prostitutas in 1987. As part of the groundswell of grassroots activism surrounding Brazil’s return to democracy in the mid-1980s, sex workers formed a national network of activists confronting not only repression and criminalization but also the more nebulous forces of social conservatism, hypocrisy, and shame. Among their more notable efforts was a successful collaboration with Brazil’s Ministry of Health to design culturally sensitive, accessible, and non-stigmatizing HIV-prevention materials. 

In the 1990s and 2000s, sex worker organizations proliferated across Brazil, and Leite and her colleagues continued to demand not only the full decriminalization of prostitution but also an end to the stigma that so doggedly adheres to those who live and work outside the confines of chaste, bourgeois respectability. Rather than straightforward labor organizing, Leite advocated a brand of politics that emphasized cultural projects, which included a playful clothing line, disease-prevention campaigns involving theater and peer health education, and collaborations with academics. In 2008, with an eye toward cementing her legacy, Leite published a memoir reflecting on her life in her characteristic style: cheeky, flamboyant, yet also contemplative and politically trenchant. In October, Duke University Press will publish my English translation of the memoir, titled Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore: The Story of a Woman Who Decided to be a Puta. The volume is prefaced by an essay from famed sex worker activist Carol Leigh, a friend and colleague of Leite’s, and an introduction I coauthored with fellow scholars of sex work Laura Murray and Esther Teixeira. My hope is that the book festively introduces this provocative and iconoclastic figure, a genuine organic intellectual, to English-speaking audiences and, in doing so, expands our notion of grassroots feminisms from the Global South. Leite’s heterodox and irreverent views on sex, work, and sex work evince a nostalgia for the free-spirited permissiveness of the past, a skepticism of the sanitized technocracy of neoliberalism, and a tenacious hope for a liberated future. As she wrote in 1990: “I know that sometime in the future, the day will arrive when we won’t be afraid of sex anymore, a day in which we won’t fear the contradictions of life, a day in which we won’t shy away from being present in our lives. I think that this is when we will have achieved freedom.”

—Meg Weeks

Excerpts from Daughter, Mother, Grandmother, and Whore: The Story of a Woman Who Decided to be a Puta by Gabriela Leite, translated by Meg Weeks

The Prostitute Speaks 

In the early 1980s, Rio had just elected Brazil’s first Black city councilwoman, Benedita da Silva. In 1983, she went personally to Vila Mimos¹Vila Mimosa is Rio de Janeiro’s red-light district, the successor to Mangue, the city’s storied prostitution zone, active from the nineteenth century to the late 1970s. together with Maria Alice, president of the residents’ association of Cidade Nova, to invite us to participate in the first Conference for Women from the Favelas and Urban Periphery. I accepted her invitation immediately…

The first Conference for Women from the Favelas and Urban Periphery took place in a huge warehouse in the Centro de Convivência do Metrô, which was right next to Vila Mimosa. There, we found about 500 women who had been convened by Benedita. There was the progressive state representative Lúcia Arruda and the now-deceased Ângela Borba, a supremely competent feminist, widely recognized and admired to this day. The meeting was also attended by Beth Lobo, who had a radio program geared toward women that was multimedia in a time before we even knew what that was.

At the time, however, I didn’t know any of those figures. I was just there to listen, and that is precisely what I did. I spent one whole day listening to women of diverse backgrounds speaking about their living conditions. There were women from the favelas, who lived without sanitation services or basic conditions for survival, completely abandoned by the state. There were domestic workers there, too, who had just started to organize themselves politically. There were agricultural workers from the Baixada Fluminense and many more. We were an army of poor and suffering women from Rio de Janeiro, not much different from the women of São Paulo’s periphery, whom I knew well.

Benedita made the biggest impression on me. She was an attractive woman, tall and slim, and she spoke very well. She knew how to take up space, and she struck me as a perfect representative of Rio, a city I was still getting to know. She also happened to be married to the man who most caught my attention. He was a large Black man, known as Bola, with a carefree and happy outlook on life. He was the only person who came over to our corner of the room to speak with us. The women at the meeting kept their distance, which, of course, we expected.

In fact, it had been surprising that Maria Alice invited us to participate in the meeting in the first place. She lived nearby, in Estácio, and she had a certain understanding of the zona that helped dispel our negative image among the women. She said that it was the whores who brought happiness to Estácio. At the very end of the conference, in the final session, Ângela Borba approached us and asked us if we wanted to speak. My two colleagues from the zona didn’t feel comfortable, but I, on a whim, without knowing that this would be only the first of thousands of speeches, got up and went to the front of the room, quaking in my boots, of course.

“My name is Gabriela,” I said, “and I am a prostitute from the Vila Mimosa. [Pause] Right next door.”

I caused a commotion. The prostitute had spoken! It seems unbelievable, but the taboo persisted even there among politicized women: Prostitutes shouldn’t speak up. But I had spoken. Following the model set by the other women, I explained what working conditions were like for prostitutes in the Vila, our hardships, the problems we routinely faced…

After the conference, Beth Lobo immediately invited me to go on her radio program, and I began answering the same questions that I have been responding to for over 20 years. Why did you go into that line of work? Were you abandoned by your family? Did you go into prostitution out of economic necessity? And the best of all, a nasty little ambush: What would you think if your daughter was a whore? That one is sure to surface, sooner or later…

There were a lot of people at that event, the conference where I first spoke, including many journalists from the country’s premier media outlets. Benedita was the sensation of the moment. A Black woman, and from the favela, no less. A harbinger of the Lula era to come…

The Forbidden Word

The opening of the ministry²Gabriela is referring to the Ministry of Marginalized Women, the Brazilian Catholic Church’s outreach project with prostitutes, founded in 1974 as part of a broader move to embrace Liberation Theology in Latin America. meeting in Salvador took place in a packed Teatro Castro Alves. The bishop of Juazeiro do Norte, Dom José Rodrigues, presided over a panel that included several nuns, Leonardo Boff³Leonardo Boff is a Brazilian leftist theologian and priest famous for his criticism of the Vatican., an acquaintance from Minas Gerais, two other prostitutes, and me. I was still quite rough around the edges and didn’t grasp the nuances of social movement politics. My friend from Minas, who spoke before me, introduced herself in the following way: “Good evening, my name is Suely and I am a girl from Uberaba.” Girl? I turned to Boff and said: “Why is she saying that she is a girl?” Boff replied: “The ministry thinks it is too harsh to use the term prostitute and decided to create an affectionate nickname instead. Girl is what they came up with.” To this day they still use that term. Soon enough, it was my turn to speak: “My name is Gabriela, and unlike my colleague from Uberaba, I am a prostitute, and I currently live in Rio de Janeiro.”

Later, during the open discussion period, the auditorium was packed, and everyone wanted to know why the woman from Minas had said girl while I had said prostitute. Thus began my long fight against politically correct terms, one of the most important aspects of my work to this day. I told the audience: “I think it is because people are ashamed of the word prostitute.” That caused quite a stir.

Across the board, I was treated quite poorly at that meeting. Lourdes⁴Gabriela refers here to Lourdes Barreto, an activist from Belém who cofounded the Rede Brasileira de Prostitutas and is still one of the primary figures in Brazil’s sex worker movement. was the only person there who defended me. We were housed in a large convent where she and I shared a room. At night, we would talk for hours on end about all the absurd things that had gone on during the day. It was there that we began thinking about creating an autonomous movement of prostitutes. I dreamed of one that would be free from the tutelage of the Church, that could exist without anyone watching over us. Yet Lourdes, unlike me, came from a long trajectory inside the Church. She didn’t agree with a lot of its teachings, but she couldn’t imagine any other possible path. I could imagine one, but I knew I would need to do a lot more research and preparation.

Around the time of this meeting, I started to realize that my time cooperating with the Church and with the Workers’ Party Catholics who came as part of a package deal had lasted too long. Creating an autonomous movement for our community had become an urgent matter. The objective of the ministry was to get me to take on the discourse of the victimized whore, and that would never happen. I believe that if you consider a person to be a victim, you have already established a relationship of dominance over her. On this particular point, I have to say that I’ll take conservatives over so-called progressives. At least they are clearer, less ambiguous, and less hypocritical than those on the left…

The Controversy Surrounding the Word Returns

At the end of 1988, we decided to launch a newspaper called Beijo da rua, or Kiss from the Street, in Recife, where we were hosting the First Meeting of Prostitutes of the North and Northeast. We even had support from the city’s mayor, Jarbas Vasconcelos, who allowed us to put on the event in a theater.

The first issue of Beijo da rua, which was a big hit, included a poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade called “A puta” (“The Whore”). At the launch party, I was standing around drinking beer when, all of a sudden, a prostitute appeared, furious, wielding a knife. She shouted, “I want to know who at this bullshit of a newspaper is calling me a puta!” With difficulty, the owners of the bar were finally able to remove the knife from her hands. I explained that Carlos Drummond de Andrade was a poet from Minas Gerais, that the word puta wasn’t a curse but, rather, a compliment. She still wanted to kill me. I told her, “This newspaper belongs to us!” She only responded by insisting that she wasn’t a whore! Unknowingly, I had run the risk of having my throat slit right there at the newspaper’s launch party. The woman must have suffered a lot from being called a whore, like all of us had, no doubt. But for her, it seemed to be a particularly acute trauma. Eventually, she came around and understood our intentions, and everything turned out fine.

At the Third National Meeting in 1994, a number of issues came to the fore, like sexual fantasies. The debate over terminology reappeared as well. The Third National Meeting of Prostitutes, we had originally wanted to call it. But, by that time, no one wanted to use the word prostitute anymore. Apparently, now that we were organized, we needed a more “serious” term. Fernando Gabeira, a politician from the Workers’ Party, proposed the term profissionais do sexo, or sex professionals. The Brazilian Network of Prostitutes came to be known as the Brazilian Network of Sex Professionals, and thus, everyone started calling prostitutes sex professionals. For what it’s worth, I’m against this. I believe that it is important to take ownership of the terms prostitute and puta rather than shy away from them…

Our colleagues elsewhere in Latin America consider us behind the times in relation to them because they use the term sex worker, and we still haven’t overcome the stigma by continuing to call ourselves prostitutes. But I think they’ve got it all wrong; it seems to me that changing the term is more like an apology than an affirmation.

At a Latin American conference on AIDS in Buenos Aires in the mid-2000s, the organizers distributed a pamphlet with instructions for volunteers. A section titled “Words That Under No Circumstances Can Be Used at This Conference” listed “prostitute.” My panel was one of the best attended, as we had just launched our clothing line, Daspu, and everyone wanted to know who we were. There we were, surrounded by all the do-gooders from the U.N. and other organizations and institutions. The chair of the panel, the leader of an Ecuadorian prostitutes’ organization, asked me: “How should I introduce you, Gabriela?” And I responded, “Say that I am from the national organizing committee of the Brazilian Network of Prostitutes,” knowing full well what would happen. I was the third person to speak. The chair introduced me in Spanish: “I have the great honor of introducing to you all Gabriela Leite, one of our most senior leaders, who is a member of the organizing committee of the Brazilian Network of Sex Workers.” When I took the microphone, I said: “I am very happy to be here, but I must correct my colleague from Ecuador. I would like to say that the name of our organization is the Brazilian Network of Prostitutes, and we would like it to be called that, so each time you refer to us, please call us the Brazilian Network of Prostitutes. We like to be called prostitutes.” I repeated this over and over again. I got pissed off, as only a puta can.

Copyright Duke University Press, 2024.

Meg Weeks is a writer, translator, and historian. Currently, she is an assistant professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. Her writing has been published in n+1, The Baffler, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books, and her translations of Brazilian fiction and nonfiction have appeared in piauí, Asymptote, and Two Lines.

All images courtesy of the Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio de Janeiro.

• 1
  Vila Mimosa is Rio de Janeiro’s red-light district, the successor to Mangue, the city’s storied prostitution zone, active from the nineteenth century to the late 1970s. ↩︎
• 2
  Gabriela is referring to the Ministry of Marginalized Women, the Brazilian Catholic Church’s outreach project with prostitutes, founded in 1974 as part of a broader move to embrace Liberation Theology in Latin America. ↩︎
• 3
  Leonardo Boff is a Brazilian leftist theologian and priest famous for his criticism of the Vatican. ↩︎
• 4
  Gabriela refers here to Lourdes Barreto, an activist from Belém who cofounded the Rede Brasileira de Prostitutas and is still one of the primary figures in Brazil’s sex worker movement. ↩︎