João Silvério Trevisan's "In the Name of Desire" isn't your typical coming-of-age story. It's a poignant return, a man revisiting the seminary of his youth after a thirty-year absence. Memories flood back, a bittersweet mix of first love, forbidden desires, and the harsh realities of a life devoted to God.

Trevisan's prose is both lyrical and unflinching. He captures the beauty and repression inherent in Catholicism, where whispers of same-sex attraction clash with the stern pronouncements of faith. The fragmented narrative, using a question and answer format, reflects the protagonist's fractured past. We piece together his story alongside him, the pain and confusion palpable.

"In the Name of Desire" is a landmark Brazilian LGBT novel. It's a brave exploration of sexuality and faith, a story that resonates even today. While some might find the fragmented style challenging, the emotional core is undeniable. This is a haunting look back, a testament to the enduring power of desire.

Questions and responses, never answers. A lust-soaked catechism of discovering gay desire in adolescence. A bitter, angry disappointed-romantic's coming to terms with coming, and with coming out even when you could never be in. Plotless, though not storyless, this is a read with something to appall everyone in its frankness, its sometimes-you-wish-it-was-squeamish physicality. It might not even be all that meaty and of the flesh were it not for the powerful, passionate spiritual longing and desire that runs alongside and shoots through the bodily awareness of Tiquinho.

Being gay in a world where you're surrounded by the thing you lust after, yet are Forbidden to Touch...and at the peril of your soul, no less, if you fail!...pretty much perfectly explains why priestly celibacy is a risible concept. No normal male will pass the test forever. In failing, he is doomed. Expressing his natural desires dooms him eternally.

No wonder a femme like Tiquinho is drawn to mysticism. Its rejection of the body is very appealing to someone who Believes the absurd nonsense that sexual desires will cause the omniscient, omnipotent Sky-daddy to reject him eternally (the mirror of what Earthly parents all too often do). His embrace of his by-definition unrequited lust for Jesus has, as it so often does, the seeds of his eventual sexual awakening. A man is born!

What I think will be a major stumbling block for many people who would otherwise ring like struck bells to this story is its presentation: It's an interview, though between whom exactly I was never entirely settled in my mind about...older and younger versions of himself? himself and Authority as he's internalized it? An unseen interlocutor?...all or none, it's a very reflective way to tell a story. It also mirrors the Catechism, that combination of indoctrination and reflection that is the source of its power. What made me smile broadest was this mirror of catechism and its probing (!) internal questioning, only about gay desire, lust, love, and awareness. What a delicious subversion of the church's intentions for the form of catechism! Instead of indoctrination, catechism as a form of self-discovery, a path to honesty and knowledge not cant and dogma.

A very physical self-discovery. Be aware that you're going to be in the trenches of an adolescent male's bodily awakening. That might not be to all tastes. I resonated with it because I grew up among women who didn't like maleness. I'd say that isn't too terribly uncommon an experience, at least among the men I've known over the decades. What Tiquinho fetishizes and uses as desire focuses are common to many males whatever their sex lives. But they're dealt with in very physical terms. That won't be to all tastes.

A way to interrogate the power of faith to deform while shaping, the power of love to mangle and destroy while forming a spirit, and the brutal truth of male desire's perversion into control and abuse. It is a difficult book to read and a necessary story to hear.

Translation of a book that is a LGBTQIA classic in Brazil, and focuses around a man returning to the Catholic school where he was raised, and the homosexual desire and romance he found with one of the boys at the school, juxtaposed against the brutality of the rituals and the Catholic adults. The whole thing is written in the form of question and answer, which is always a neat thing to see formatting wise. Definitely worth picking up.

The literary scene in Brazil is, largely, obscure to me, and so I'm always happy whenever books such as this appear in translation. It does feel like peering into another world, one filled richly with stories unique in character but otherwise intimately relatable.

I found this to be a singular book, it is surprising that it took so long to come out in English. The voice, the interrogative style, the use of question and answer made it really interesting to read, and the combination of carnal and religious imagery was very poetic. It reminded me of 'Les Enfants terrible' and also 'The Carnivorous Lamb' and somewhat of Genet's writing also. The setting-a Catholic boy's seminary in the past felt very dreamlike and ritualistic, inevitably the relations remind one of 'Lord of the Flies' with the capacity for violence ever lurking, and it also had overtones of a fairytale. The intense love affair between the two main characters and the inevitable denouement was compelling-it's definitely a book that one will remember.

Very odd book this. I wouldn’t say I am exclusively a plot person but I am primarily. For me the point of a novel is to tell a story, and that is very difficult to do when you have no plot. This book was very ambiguous which obviously is by design but it is too vague. There is so little plot that it is hard to discern even the most basic of plots that the author is trying to talk about. Also the way it is written as basically a long Q and A makes it very hard to get into not just the story but the characters. And if I can’t get into either than there is nothing particularly of interest to keep me engaged. Ultimately wasn’t a fan of this one at all.

How does one begin? With a trigger warning...? With recommending this novel? With advising against reading this novel?

Perhaps João Silvério Trevisan had a similar moment of pause before setting pen to paper: how to begin? What to say? Calling things by their proper names might seem vulgar, but being coy about them can mask their nature. How can the conundrum be solved?

"In the Name of Desire" is a story about-... no. That's a lie. If I call it a story, people will expect a plot, but there is none. A teenage boy studying in a Catholic seminar falls in love with another boy, and then they have an ugly breakup. That's all the plot there is, and it's mostly a pretext.

The book is about the world of the Catholic seminar, where poor boys are offered food, lodging and learning in the hopes that some of them will become priests one day. The rules are draconic: boys are barely allowed to speak to each other outside of allotted times. Their schedules are very strict. They aren't allowed to have "private friendships", which might mean anything from close friendships to romantic relationships. They engage in brutal play, with the approval of authority figures. And, of course, they're supposed to attend numerous services and learn about saints and Christian dogma.

Tiquinho, our hero, is a young boy who spends a few years at the seminar. His body isn't very masculine and he's often the target of bullying; he has strong sexual urges, which many of the student body share; and he's mystically inclined. He takes the teachings of the priests to heart, and interprets his whole life through them. He loves Jesus in a deeply sensual fashion. He falls deeper and deeper into Christianity with a passion that seems lustful, and a desire to be martyred for love. Worldly lost and feelings of Christian charity intertwine in his mind, until they're one and the same. When he falls in love with another boy, the mystical tendency becomes so pronounced it turns almost into delirium and madness.

The story is told mostly as an interview - the interviewer seems to be one with the narrator, sometimes mentioning events that no outsider is privy to. It's stream-of-consciousness with two personas, one asking leading questions, the other giving short answers. What's surprising is that it works so well: it's engaging, despite the aforementioned lack of a proper plot.

The style allows the narrator to jump through disjointed memories, going back and forth in time, presenting a world that's temporary and eternal, closed off and yet enormous, a place with its own rules and expectations. Once the stage is set, the interviewee can report on memories with clinical detachment, calling himself by his nickname, rather than referring to himself in first person, allowing both a cold, analytical listing of practices and events, and a certain dubious unreliability of a narrator who's merely pretending to be objective.

"In the Name of Desire" quickly becomes a very uncomfortable read. Between its cool reporting of emergent sexuality in a highly repressed, all-male environment, in minute detail oscillating between lascivious and repulsive, its very lustful view on the abuses of priests as seen through the eyes of besotted teens, its violence and its religious delirium, there's something here to appall anyone. But it's obvious that the discomfort and horror are intentional. The narrator insists on seeing his time at the seminar through the mystical lens of young Tiquinho, viewing even the most lurid situations in a sacred light - but do we? Or do we see it as brainwashing, as an escape out of a strict, impossibly restricting cage through madness? Is it not a spit in the face of a church, a way to turn its own tools against it, to corrupt its discourse to show its rotten core?

Written in the format of a traditional question-and-answer catechism, João Silvério Trevisan's novel relays the poignant story of a young gay boy, Tiquinho, living in an austere, Brazilian seminary at the turn of the Second Vatican Council. It is a brutal institution that drives many of the boys to madness. They are rarely permitted to speak; when they walk between classes and chapel, they are told to pray the rosary; they are forbidden from having any personal friendships. In this rigid school of military-grade discipline, the boys have few precious moments of frivolity. Soccer is popular, an opportunity to demonstrate athletic machismo. Once a week, for one hour, they are also allowed to beat up a select victim among themselves in an act of violent humiliation known as the "Bottle Game". Although it is a fervently Catholic seminary, the boys most prize their burgeoning masculinity—some even refuse to shower in order to accumulate smegma under their foreskins, an ostentatious stench and sign of their virility. Pious devotion is mandatory but thuggish brawn still reigns supreme.

Nonetheless, there are, inside this depressingly rigid school, a few boys who prefer mysticism over masculinity. They are maligned as "sissies". Instead of playing soccer, they visit the spiritual director to listen to recordings of Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky; they read St Teresa d'Avila and St John of the Cross, poring over their erotic mystical canticles. Tiquinho, first among them, is a witty, sensitive boy who gradually becomes infatuated with one of the new boys, Abel Rebebel, and in his naive, horny, earnestly theological mania, comes to believe that the love of Christ must necessarily entail the love of men—a love that has no physical and moral limits. He transposes the "mystery of the Tabernacle" to the "mystery of the bedsheets". "What is the mystery of the Eucharist?" asks the primer; the answer: it is the mystery of semen, the sacrament of communion turned into the liturgy of coitus.

There is a long history of reading St John of the Cross as an early gay writer—John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Carmelite mystic whose poems achingly long not just for God, but his face and body and breath. In this novel, the Songs of Solomon, the canticles of St John of the Cross, even the scholastic dogmatism of the catechism, provide a language for the seminarians to understand and celebrate their furtive sexual experiences. Although the boys are punished for masturbation, expelled if they are found with another boy, the prayers and readings ironically provide Tiquinho with a vocabulary to express and justify his love for Abel. "My Beloved is for me and I for my Beloved", he thinks, quoting Teresa of Avila, quoting Solomon. Paradoxically, it is the Carmelite mystics who express for him his yearning for communion with a man.

A beautiful, unique novel. It reminded me in a way, with less flashy prose, of Robert Gluck's Margery Kempe.

As always thank you to publishes and Netgalley for a free arc in exchange for an honest review.


I wanted to like this a lot, and while I can appreciate this novel as a piece of LGBTQ+ history, ultimately this translation fell flat. Firstly, this book spends so long establishing atmosphere that there is no plot up until 60% of the book. This book is structured in a question and answer format which while making this book read like an honest tell all, made things incredibly awkward at times to understand. Some of the things I genuinely enjoyed about this book was its surprising wit and humor, as well as its flowery prose and raw look into young queer people. Please check TW's before reading.

𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘣𝘰𝘺𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘨𝘪𝘳𝘭𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘢𝘥𝘰𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘴 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘴. 𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘥, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘥𝘰 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦. 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘢𝘶𝘥𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘺.


Thank you to Netgalley and Sundial House for my ARC of this book.


In the Name of Desire is a novel largely written in an interview format. It chronicles the memories of a man returning to the seminary wherein he studied for several years during an incredibly formative period of his life. He describes the strict rules and rigid hierarchies, the harsh punishments for infractions, and the intensely violent ways the boys even policed themselves. It goes on to discuss the sexual dimension of the seminary, the ways shame and repression were drilled into the boys all while the men in charge took advantage of their positions in different ways. The novel also explores the position of the ‘sissy’ boys. The weaker ones, the cleverer ones, the ones who did not like soccer but liked the boys who played it. The protagonist is one of those boys, and the novel explores his struggles to consolidate these feelings with his religious education and also how he fell in love for the first time.


𝘚𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘛𝘪𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘯𝘩𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘭 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘣𝘪𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘢𝘺 “𝘐 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶” 𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘮𝘢𝘯. 𝘐𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘑𝘦𝘴𝘶𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘴, 𝘸𝘩𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘣𝘪𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘯? 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘰𝘥.


This novel is very sexually explicit in many ways, dealing with emerging male sexuality and puberty very frankly and sometimes romantically, which at times definitely crossed into uncomfortable territory. This, I believe, was intentional, though, especially in order to convey the abuse that was rife in the seminary. While there were boys who were private friends, there were also descriptions of boys being sexually assaulted and taken advantage of by other boys and priests. It creates a real sense of tension, establishing that desire in this environment could quickly become a violent and dangerous thing, while also being something the boys craved, especially considering the rules against touching each other at all. The result is a group of boys unable to express affection and not knowing how to healthy deal with the feelings they have inside. I thought the book also did a really interesting thing by emphasising how dangerousness manifested differently based on ‘type’. The more effeminate boys; the ‘sissies’; are always at more risk in the novel, even if they are not actually gay. Manliness is something the boys are desperate for, but they have limited roadmaps for what that looks like, so they punish anyone that falls short. They are to be manly and virile but also sexually pure and controlled, the contradictions in expectations between ideas of manliness and ideas of holiness are at the heart of this novel, emphasised by the questions the ‘interviewer’ asks.


I really liked the interview format, and at times, the back and forth was like poetry, serving to send home the intended message or theme of a particular section. It is a format I have not read many novels in, but I thought it suited this one really well.


𝘋𝘪𝘥 𝘛𝘪𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘯𝘩𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯? 𝘛𝘪𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘯𝘩𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘦.

Dnf at 54%

I loved the idea of this book so so much. However, I just could not connect with this piece at all. Maybe it was the translation. Maybe it was the writing.

To quote R.F. Kuang: “Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does it leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”.

So I cannot fully “rate” this book because I genuinely do not think it was the original text that was awkward and wrong, but the translation itself. This book would have been pure perfection if read in its original language and read during the blistering heat of July. I hope this book finds its audience, but sadly that was not me.

I should have liked this more than I did—“queer kids at boarding school” is extremely my jam, and lately I’ve been on a kick of reading about adult characters looking back at their grade school years (Idlewild, Speech Team, Pet by Catherine Chidgey). But this book has approximately zero plot until 60%. I’m not a very plot-driven reader, but I wanted more plot than this.

The other problem is that when there *is* plot it’s often unclear, at least to me. At the two most important points in the book, plot-wise—the climax and the ending—I was left uncertain what had happened. Some of the ambiguity is clearly intentional, but I got the feeling that I was supposed to understand more than I did. An ambiguous ending can be enjoyable—the fun is in debating what happens (does the top ever fall in Inception?)—but you have to understand the stakes in order to enjoy the ambiguity (if you don’t know the significance of the top, you don’t care whether it falls or not). And with several of the events of this book, I didn’t understand the setup enough to appreciate the resolution (or lack thereof).

This book reminds me of Rebecca Makkai’s Substack piece about No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, where she observes that the book has a much larger exposition-to-scene ratio than she was expecting. This book is mostly exposition and summary rather than scenes; there’s very little dialogue. Which makes sense, I suppose, since it’s the novel equivalent of a memory play.

The book is structured as a long Q&A: “Who were the characters?” “What is the intrigue of this drama?” “Why is it said that he Rector did not approve the means?” Occasionally this feels awkward, but for the most part it works better than you’d expect, and can be quite charming.

Other things I liked:

-The prose, which is often lush and poetic
-It’s sometimes quite funny, definitely more than I’d expected
-The Little Prince allusions made me tear up
-It’s very different from the current crop of, like, pastel romances where everyone talks in Tumblr cliches. It’s a book that’s frank about queer teen desire, and not in a safe sanitized way. The characters are unambiguously horny; there’s panty-sniffing and bodily fluids and underage gay sex at Catholic school.

I would comp this to Lie With Me by Philippe Besson (but with less plot and less clarity on what happens) and Spring in Siberia by Artem Mozgovoy (but less strongly grounded in time and place).