Jefferson, the dancer from “Axe-bahia”

The first time you liked a man was when you were 10 years old, and it happened out of nowhere after dreaming about “Jefferson”, one of the dancers of “Axé-Bahía”, a Brazilian group very popular among children in Chile in the early 2000s. Most of the girls liked Bruno, the blond with the hegemonic beauty, but you dreamed about Jefferson, with his headscarf and his naked body. The next day, you woke up thinking about him and from that moment on you couldn’t stop. You liked Jefferson, you felt it in your heart like an explosion (probably of dopamine) that Jefferson became at that moment your first “crush”. You didn’t get to fantasize about him much, because your logical side recognized that the chances of a romance were nil, a thirty-year-old TV man and a girl in the back of a rusty town had no future. For your mind to start working, it needed at least a small chance of that romance becoming a reality. It’s easier to fantasize when there’s context, information and ideally interaction with the person you’re devoting so much time and space in your head. A crush is a tenant in your mind, living there rent-free. You didn’t get to have erotic fantasies about him. However, the choice of Jefferson as your object of desire marked a before and after in your identity. Now you had a sexual preference, you were just like all the other girls. But with a twist, you didn’t like the same type of man as the others, you liked the alternative. Why would your mind have created that dream for you? This is my theory: That dream gave you a chance to fit in and allowed you to survive in a neuro-typical world and for that we are very grateful. However, it seems super weird to me how quickly you interpreted the dream as a sign of heterosexuality, I meant, you just have to dream once about a man, and there you were already acting super straight? I wonder what would it happen if instead of dreaming with Jefferson you were dreaming with Francini, the sexy brunette of the group?. It’s infuriating that the object of your romantic desire has never been a woman. The truth is that you haven’t even tried, maybe because of your internalized homophobia. Women occupy space only in your erotic fantasies, since their bodies awaken in you a greater sexual desire than men. But you are unable to fantasize romantically about them. There is something about the hierarchical symmetry with women that doesn’t stimulate your imagination in the same way. Your imagination is more sordid, it needs imbalance, a sway of power, a hunt for affection that clouds your vision and allows you to immerse yourself completely in the “illusion”.

To Jefferson Barbosa, who died at the age of 40 on April 22, 2016, when he fell from a height of 47 meters,

I dedicate this poem:

I could fall into anybody’s arms.

It can be dangerous to feel so damn lonely.