Queer Places:
Cemitério Santo Amaro
Santo Amaro, Município de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
Cassandra Rios (October 3, 1932 São Paulo [1] – March 8 , 2002 São Paulo) was a Brazilian writer.
Author of dozens of books which for forty years caused a stir in Brazil for their "pornographic" style, including A Tara, Tessa, a Gata, Volúpia do pecado, A paranoica, Muros Altos, Uma Mulher Diferente, Cabelos de Metal and A Borboletta Branca.
She met her partner, Pabla (or Vera), in 1974 and they lived together for 13
years. Pabla died in 2019 in a car accident in Paraná.
Born into a family of Spanish origin under the name of Odete Rios, Cassandra Rios was one of the best-selling authors of works in the sixties and seventies, and one of the most persecuted by the censorship of the military regime, which did not tolerate high erotic content of her work, considered pornographic by the most conservative sectors of culture. In her books, Cassandra Rios wrote freely and with a lot of sensuality about quite controversial issues for the time, such as female homosexuality or the relationships between sex, religion, politics and Umbandist cults, which undermined the morale defended and propagated by the military junta. A declared lesbian, she went on to sell three hundred thousand copies a year, a publishing success equaled only decades later by Paulo Coelho. She made her debut at the age of sixteen with Volúpia do Pecado, in 1948, and soon had a consistent popular following with countless works, flanked by another woman also considered pornographic, Adelaide Carraro. In 1976, still 33 of the 36 books of the writer had passed under the scrutiny of the censorship and were banned throughout Brazil. Since then, she disappeared from the public eye, self-producing her latest books.
Cassandra and Pabla
My published books:
