Rodrigo Almeida | Como Era Gostoso Meu Cafuçu (How Tasty Was My Little Cafuçu) / 2015

how they lost it at the movies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rodrigo Almeida (screenwriter and director) Como Era Gostoso Meu Cafuçu (How Tasty Was My Little Cafuçu) / 2015 [14 minutes]

 

Two Brazilian queers are on their way to a party hosted by “some rich fag,” reports the one first (Jean Santos) to his friend (Thiago Merces). There’s food, drinks, and maybe some hookups with the other partygoers, but the friend is a bit skeptical since he’s afraid he won’t know anyone there. “Chill out,” says the guide, “Chill, Miss Honey. You’re already there, all dressed up, mug beat up.” Besides, he reports, evidently from a vast experience, “Those rich queens aren’t scary. Barking bitches never bite.” This entire conversation occurs while screen in black, the opening scene resulting in an explosion of bright color.

    This piece is hard to describe since it’s all about the Portuguese slang and street language of these two street boys as they wait by a bus stop, talking about their sexual conquests along with outrageous statements about their own queer culture and the heterosexual culture at large. A few select quotes will have to provide the sense of their discussion. All you need to know is that a “cafuçu” is a Portuguese gay slang term meaning a strong man, often ugly or poor, but still with a good body ready for sex. A “pedreiro cafuçu,” for example means a handsome, sexy bricklayer.

   

        “There was this time I would go to this gas station nearby with a friend. We would stay there just staring at the cafuçus playing hot or not.”

        “Whenever the bus collector came asking for the fare, I would picture his cock. My uncle would show up, I’d picture his cock. If it was large, small, medium, big head, bushy.”

         “They’re all homophobes, you know? Italians are all homophobes.”

         “This reminds me of this married cafuçu I used to hook up with.”

         “All that repression, all that fear, the lies…”

         “Shit will get real when they come up with a bomb that only kills certain types of people. Like, a bomb for the gays, a bomb for the straight, a bomb for women. One that only killed rich people would be sickening. Can you imagine? One that only kills politicians and evangelical Christians would be wonderful. The born again, all cray cray running away from the bomb.”

     Their bus arrives and they’re off to the “Sausage party,” the sign on a small billboard reading as they enter: “hoje festinha de arromba.”

     Once at the party the two continue to talk pretty much in the same matter, sharing stories, filled with outrageous camp terms, about how they were approached by various cafuçus or how in the midst of everything they were attacked on the run. The quieter and far more beautiful of the two of them spots a tough boy he once had sex with, but when the camera pans over there is simply a slim boy in glasses dancing all by himself.

   They drink heavily in the richly colored neon-lit room, suddenly looking out of the city, even commenting on the beautiful view, the other responding, “Yeah, but this music sucks.” He gets up and changes the record to a “brega” song—in this case about a female lover who attends the wedding of her previous boyfriend to fight for him—as they continue to relate their various past sexual encounters, their dreamboys, their fantastic past adventures.

 

    But soon it’s morning and time to leave, and they stroll down the avenue back home continuing in the same manner, recalling the good booze, the bubbly champagne and in their campy conversation recounting experiences with doormen, a secret boy across the room, and others they had supposedly at the party they just attended.

     Once again their pass the little building where a man is now changing the title on the signboard to the words “glans gang,” and for a moment the screen goes black, coming up again with a man with a rope around his neck and a leather mouth-and-face gag. On the side stand our friends, now naked except for high heels, the tall, more handsome of them with a whip in hand.

     As if by this time we hadn’t guessed, the little place they entered for the party, now an S&M den is a gay movie theater where they live out their imaginary sexual lives, which spills over to their daily encounters as they walk the streets, stand for busses, and wait out their lives in a world that has no room for them.

    Even though the shorter one insists he won’t go back to any parties there again, we know that these two effeminate gay men have no where else to go in the favela world in which they live. The world of these truly cheesy gay films are their only way into a fantasy world that they create for themselves.

   But there were moments at the “party,” when the camera caught the profiles of these two men that I will always remember, when these coarse-speaking queers became, just for a moment, absolutely beautiful.

       

*A brega song is a popular musical style in Brazil wherein the subject is about a dramatic encounter about love. The genre is also described as a “struggle song,” in which the romanticism approaches tacky or disgustingly outrageous behavior.

 

Los Angeles, November 21, 2025

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).