The new normal in Vale das Ninfas: COVID-19 and the gay sociability circuits in the metropolitan region of Recife, State of Pernambuco, Brazil

Abstract

The text addresses the sociability circuits of ‘men who have sex with men’ in the Metropolitan Region of Recife during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, with the arrival of the epidemic in Brazil, a first movement was characterized by the shift of interactions to the online dimension. From June onwards, after stricter social distancing, offline sexual inte-ractions, social interactions at friends’ houses, the return to bars and sociability on the street were resumed in that order, in the wake of what was happening in the broader society. In the mismatch between the negationist speech of the President of the Republic and the role of the state government in implementing measures of social distancing; in the contradictions generated by the leniency re-garding crowding in public transport on the way to and from work and the attempts to contain the crowds seeking leisure activities, a ‘new normal’ emerged and was marked by negativism, omnipo-tence and fatalism. Between September 2020 and February 2021, what were most evident were par-ties, ostensive circulation of people and the lack of mask use, boosting the numbers of the infected and the dead, in the normalization of an unprece-dented health crisis in Brazil.