Networks of desire: the specter of AIDS and the use of digital media in the quest for secret same-sex relations in São Paulo

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze the emergence of an on-line market for love and sex partners in São Paulo, as of 1997, when the internet became commercially available in Brazil. Focusing on the first generation of digital media users, my field research looks at men who entered adolescence or adulthood during the AIDS epidemic. I analyze how the use of digital media has been molded by people's desire to dissociate themselves from the image that homosexu-ality acquired during the sex panic. In Brazil's largest metropolis, this use of digital media is linked to historical and cultural transformations within the realm of homosexualities, as they move under the aegis of an erotic regime based on the desire for social adjustment.