Beyond the closet? Male homoerotic relations created online and the new regime of visibility in contemporary Brazilian society

Since the end of 1990's people started using the internet and other digital media in the search for love or sexual partners. Men interested in other men have used it in Brazil to create secret relationships, so they can keep their public heterosexual status. This paper discusses how the use of digital media by these men is connected and also differ itself from previous ways of maintaining secret homosexual relations. In other words, it focus in the recent transformation of the homosexual "closet" into a new sexual regime of visibility. Its bibliographical resources are queer studies, recent bibliography about personal conections via digital media, and Brazilian sexuality studies. Following Foucault's perspective that sees sexuality as a power apparatus, the investigation tries to understand the social grammar in which this particular use of contemporary media develops. Based on a long ethnography in the city of São Paulo, it unifies online observation with (authorized) face to face contact with few of these men during the last 3 years. The research is sponsored by the Brazlian "National Council for Scientific and Technological Development" (CNPq).