Brazil enjoys very high status in the gay travel industry, but gay sex tourism has been overlooked until now in studies of prostitution. The closest thing to such a study is Don Kulick's classic Travesti, which took as its subject transvestite sex workers; Gregory Mitchell's subjects are hypermasculine "garotos" working the beaches, saunas, and streets of Rio de Janeiro. (The fieldwork also includes a beach town, Salvador, and an Amazonian outpost.) Rio is always in the top ten list for gay travel magazines and periodicals, and as recently as 2010, the government estimated that the city received 880,000 gay tourists. Right from the start, Mitchell ushers us, his readers, into a gay sauna. clad only in a towel as the hustlers crowd hallways and stairways, shouting playful epithets in Portuguese at the young American graduate student. This gay brothel turns out to abound with mostly straight young rentboys alongside some gay ones, having campy fun among the aging Brailian gay customers, gringo tourists, and the drag queen performers. We get to know several individuals by name and absorb the ambience of the "performative labor" these men pursue. Mitchell was able to build long-term relationships with the garotos, as they began and ended relationships, got married, had children, went to prison, or died. In short, we get to know these sex workers as people. We also see how central the issue of race and racialized masculinity can be for sex tourism (for many gringo customers, the darker the skin, the more attractive a rentboy will be). Mitchell's work with and revelations about foreign sex tourists are also important. They come to be seen as "uncles" and "godfathers" to the indigenous garotos they take on as lovers during the time they spend, usually once or twice a year, in Brazil. New forms and concepts of "family" come in to play. This opens up issues of transnational race and sexuality, and the sexualization of cross-national contacts of diverse types is an important aspect of contemporary globalization processes.
Industry Reviews
"Tourist Attractions not only holds its own, but in fact stands out as a new and innovative study within a field that is noteworthy for its strength. Mitchell brings the legacy of this scholarly tradition into meaningful dialogue with a range of other literatures that have emerged on issues like sex work, tourism, and race relations. He offers rare insight into the context of commercial sex and gives readers the lived experience of a social system in all its richness and complexity. This book is a tour de force."-- "Richard Parker, director, Center for the Study of Culture, Politics and Health, Columbia University"
"Tourist Attractions tackles a difficult subject: the intimate sexual economies between men inserted in very different places and positions, juggling contradictory layers of stigmatized and privileged identities. It takes a highly reflective and perceptive anthropologist to get respondents to open up about these most personal aspects of their lives. Mitchell has accomplished this, providing the reader a precious insight into a site of transnational commercial sex that will greatly advance our conversations about racialized sexualities and sexualized races within the Americas. This exceptional ethnography belongs on the reading list not only of scholars and students of anthropology, gender and queer studies, but also to those interested in American Studies and the intra-continental sexual economies within the Americas."-- "American Studies"
"A valuable and insightful book about how sex works to both frame encounters between foreign tourists and Brazilian sex workers, and also to complicate and extend the impressions and the relationships that result from those encounters. The focus on male sex workers is welcome and overdue, and the attention to eco-tourism, African-American 'roots tourism, ' and the way that some client-sex worker relationships develop into transnational queer families is eye-opening, fresh, and fascinating."-- "Don Kulick, author of Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes"
"This is an intimate and innovative ethnography on male sex work in Brazil. Building on research in three Brazilian cities (Rio de Janeiro, Manaus, and Salvador) from 2006 to 2015, Mitchell adeptly fuses theories of affective labor, eroticized authenticity, and queer kinship to develop a nuanced analysis of how shifting performances of masculinity and race shape not only sex workers but also their clients, girlfriends or wives, and families. In studying these complex sexual economies, Mitchell artfully connects rich ethnographic data, including extensive participant-observation in sex work locations and interviews with 50 sex workers and 40 foreign tourists, to broader themes of sexual subjectivities, sex tourism, gay consumerism, and contemporary neoliberal capitalism. . . . Tourist Attractions will appeal to a broad readership and would be a great ethnography for undergraduate and graduate courses."-- "American Ethnologist"
