Telenovelas in Pan-Latino Context by June Carolyn Erlick

Author:June Carolyn Erlick [Erlick, June Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Latin America, General, Performing Arts, Television
ISBN: 9781134811953
Google: Ww84DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-02T01:31:33+00:00

So, unlike Los pecados de Inés de Hinojosa, which is set in a distant past, Botineras is both contemporary and newsworthy. Gay marriage became legal in Argentina in July 2010.

Three years after Argentina legalized same-sex marriage, Farsantes (The Bluffers), a 2013 Argentine telenovela, also offered viewers a passionate kiss, this time between the two main protagonists. Two lawyers, Guillermo Graziani and Pedro Beggio fall in love with each other.

In the first episode, Guillermo invites Pedro to become a member of his law firm. The two become fast friends and inseparable colleagues, always talking on the phone late at night about work-related topics. One morning, the conversation turns personal when Pedro expresses his doubts about marrying his girlfriend Camila. The two men hug strongly—a mix of erotic desire and fraternal compassion.

About 30 episodes into the series, Pedro feels quite sick and his friend takes care of him, sitting with him as he sleeps. When he wakes up, he slowly leans toward Guillermo and kisses him on the lips. The two look tenderly at each other.

However, their love eventually leads to Pedro’s death. Camila, overtaken by jealousy, stabs and kills him. Viewers were outraged, and the show’s ratings plunged. One viewer, who identified herself as Soledad, wrote:

The scriptwriters killed one of the most loved characters of Argentine fiction … without any kind of consideration or responsibility… . We do not know if Argentina will be more tolerant and less discriminatory… . What we do know is that the story between Guillermo and Pedro was a love story because it will always live in our hearts.

Another viewer, who identified herself as Sandra, wrote, “We have our place where Guille and Pedro live and are happy, away from pain and human misery.”4

Carlos Gustavo Halaburda, an Argentine graduate student at the University of British Columbia, relates how a group of fans “hung large signs with the picture of the two men kissing each other in front of the doors of Pol-ka TV studio in Buenos Aires city. The sign read ‘No todas las historias de amor terminan mal. Pedro y Guillermo hasta el final’ (Not all love stories have a tragic end; we demand a happy ending for Pedro and Guillermo).”5

And the viewers actually got their way! (Sort of; no spoilers here.)

A few months later, fans in Brazil would demand “the kiss” in Amor à Vida (Love of Life) (Figure 4.1), a 2013 Globo prime-time telenovela. The couple’s Twitter supporters—more than 600,000 of them, in fact—encouraged them with “Kiss him, Felix!” (#beijafelix) and also “gay kiss” (#beijogay). The BBC reported that more than 3,200 comments on the story were posted on its Brazil Facebook page, many of them welcoming the kiss. The supporters called the kiss “overdue” and a “taboo-breaker,” while critics charged that the telenovela would encourage children to be gay or objected on religious grounds.6

On January 31, 2014, protagonists Felix and Niko kiss deeply on the mouth, and according to the Spanish news agency EFE, the kiss made the front pages of all Brazilian morning papers and was one of the ten subjects most tweeted about in the world on Twitter.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.