Photographer Unknown, At the Edge of the Open Sea
“Then you come and come to me and invade me and take me and ask me and lose me and spill over me with your eyes always on the run and open your mouth to release new stories and again I complete like this, without urgency, and concentrate whole in the things you tell me, and so silent, and so submissive, I chew you inside me while you stab me with slow delicacy making it clear in each promise that it will never be fulfilled, that I must expect nothing but this colorful mask, that you want me because that’s how you are—
At the edge of the open sea ”
— Caio Fernando Abreu, Dragons Don’t Know Paradise
Born in September of 1948 in Santiago, Brazil, Caio Fernando Loureiro de Abreu, as a young man, moved to Porto Alegre where he published his first short stories. In 1967, he joined the Letters and Performing Arts studies at the Federal University of Rio Grande de Sul, and later its dramatic arts program. Abandoning both lines of study, Caio Fernando Abreu decided to do journalistic work in the central and southern areas of Brazil.
In 1968, Calo Fernando Abreu moved to São Paulo and joined the newsroom of Veja Magazine, a country-wide weekly news magazine. A frequent visitor of trendy bars, he became friends with singer and songwriter Agenor de Miranda Araújo Neto, better known as Cazuza, an openly bisexual man who helped change public attitudes about AIDS in Brazil. Abreu became a prolific journalist and literary writer, producing short stories, novels, chronicles and drama works.
During the middle of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1968, Calo Fernando Abreu was pursued by the Department of Political and Social Order, a repressive branch of the government, but found refuge in the São Paulo country estate of poet and novelist 
Hilda Hilst. In 1971, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, working as a researcher and editor for the magazines “Leia Livros”, “Manchete”, and “Paus e Filhos”.
Fleeing the military regime in 1973, Calo Fernando Abreu entered self-exile in Europe, living and subsisting on odd jobs in London and Stockholm, France, the Netherlands, and Spain. In 1974, he returned to Porto Alegre and resumed his literary career. Besides his own literary works, Abreu continued writing for the theater and for the press medium, with relocations to Rio de Janeiro in 1983 and São Paulo in 1985.
In 1995, while visiting in France, Calo Fernando Abreu found out that he was HIV positive. In a series of three letters called “Letters to the Beyond the Wall”, published in the newspaper “O Estado de São Paulo”, he revealed that he had contracted the AIDS virus. Caio Fernando Abreu returned home to Porto Alegre permanently to live with his parents. He enjoyed the last two years of his life gardening, before dying in Porto Alegre on February 25, 1996.
Caio Fernando Abreu’s narratives come from the subjectivity of a bisexual man in his mid-forties who has AIDS. The characters in his books live and function in the periphery of society; they are in many ways equivalent to queer characters in North American literary traditions. In his most famous, short-story book “Os Dragōes Não Conhecem o Paraíso (Dragons Don’t Known Paradise)”, the majority of characters are either gay or seem to be. A camp writer, Abreu’s works are full of examples of queer sensibility, and of multiple appropriations of mainstream heterosexual society into queer narratives.
The discourse of AIDS was already present in Abreu’s writing from the beginning of the epidemic in the 1980s. He is, along with his friend Cazuza and Brazilian singer and songwriter Renato Russo, one of the most recognize Brazilian artists to have died of AIDS.