Adolfo Caminha's "Bom-Crioulo": a founding text of brazilian gay literature

It is customary to recognize the early literature of the Republic in Brazil for the brilliant fiction of Machado de Assis, truly the first great nineteenth-century Latin American writer. As befitted Machado's identification with the end of the Second Empire and the emerging national bourgeoisie of the Republic, his novels dealt virtually exclusively with genteel society and the various ideologies within which its members defined themselves. In this and other senses, Machado's novels are founding texts of the literature of the Republic, texts that provide a necessary point of reference for understanding the society of the period and the ways in which culture interpreted it. Among other founding literary texts of the period, Bom-Crioulo (1895) by Adolfo Caminha (1867-1897) is almost a startling discovery. Although Brazilian literary history takes note of this and the two other novels Caminha published before his untimely death