Taking Raul Pompeia's suicide as our starting point, we aim at understanding how his intellectual and political trajectory reveals unimagined relations between sexuality and the public sphere within the Brazilian context at the turn of the 19th century. Author of the novel O Ateneu (1888), the young Republican developed a critique of the Empire through a story about the moral deviance that marked the education of the nation´s elites. Pompeia saw his work and his political commitment within the Republican regime turn against himself, resulting from suspicions of a connection between political and sexual dissent that threatened him with public shame. This historical and sociological analysis reconstitutes the gender and sexual norms that made up the moral value system in which relations between individual and society in Brazil unfolded. We analyze Pompeia's drama by erasing the elusive borderlines amongst public and private lives, historical events, and subjective experience.
Sexuality; Public; Queer theory; Raul Pompeia; Homosexuality