Guilherme de Melo (born
20 January 1931, in Lourenço Marques, Portuguese Mozambique; died in Lisbon, 29 June 2013) was a Portuguese journalist, novelist, and activist.[1][2] Melo lived through the protracted war of independence in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique in the 1960s and 1970s. Openly gay himself,[3] Melo's novel The Shadow of the Days (A Sombra dos Dias) is an account of growing up gay in the privileged environment of a white family in colonial Mozambique before the outbreak of war and of being openly gay against the background of an increasingly bitter anti-colonial war. After the Carnation Revolution and the independence of Mozambique in 1975, Melo went to Portugal.[2]
The son of a civil servant who made a career in railway administration and a housewife, very attached to his children and him in particular, he finished the 7th year of high school with very good grades, denoting a great talent for writing and cultural activities. However, contrary to what was expected, he did not travel to the Metropolis to pursue university studies in Classical Philology, but decided to stay with his parents and make a career in public administration to help support the family. Despite his notorious competence, he soon realized, however, his repugnance to collaborate with the brutal colonialism of his superiors and accepted a timely invitation to go through journalism, which he did with great success. In 1952 he joined the newspaper Notícias de Moçambique. From 1956 to 1959 he collaborated with Reinaldo Ferreira, Jr. in the radio theater of Rádio Clube de Moçambique. His short story book The Strange Adventure was published in 1961. In 1965 he published The Roots Of Hatred which was seized by pide. He wrote the lyrics of two songs from Natércia Barreto's first album. [4] In 1974 he released the book Menino Candulo, Lord Commander.
He married a teacher friend who had fallen in love with him, although he told her that he was homosexual. The marriage, never consummated, lasted four years, eventually being annulled, at the request of the woman who wanted to remake life with another man, a situation that caused scandal in the conservative Mozambican society, all the more so since Melo was a prominent figure in it. However, Guilherme de Melo did not flee or behave, assuming his homosexual condition from the outright, living openly with successive lovers.
In October 1974, following political events that would lead to the independence of the then Portuguese overseas province of Mozambique, he moved to Lisbon, going to work for Diário de Notícias,[3] until he retired in 1998. In 2002 the book Gayvota is released and in 2004
Chronicles of good customs are published.
Among many interviews in the press, radio and television, it is worth mentioning
his participation in an RTP program in 1982 (the year homosexuality was decriminalized in Portugal) dedicated to homosexuality, which also had the presence of Natalia Correia, a priest, a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a family mother. [6] He was interviewed again in 1992 on the RTP2 program Falar Claro[7][8], in 1996, in the sic entre iguais report[9] and in 1998 on the Carlos Cruz program, Wednesday. [10]
In 1985 he began his relationship with his last partner, 28 years his youngest, who died in 2009. [11] In 2008, Guilherme de Melo suffered a stroke,[12] and died of cancer in 2013.
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