Baile da Graça

Lux Frágil, Lisbon

16.02.2025

This soirée masquée celebrates (two years later) the centenary of the infamously famous and scandalous Baile da Graça of 1923.

The Graça Ball took place on a Sunday, 11 February 1923, in the hall of a school in the Graça neighbourhood, which had been rented for the purpose. According to reports from the time, the janitor guarding the door was surprised that only men were entering. He went to take a look and discovered that the gentlemen arrived, took off their overcoats and, as he later said in court, ‘they were all women. Even with earrings, Mr Judge! Tied to their ears with a guita...’ and she reiterates, “arms out in the open, legs out in the open, breasts out in the open”. After a complaint at the police station, the police arrested all the transvestites, and Lisbon was able to see them in court the next day, already half unmasked. One was wearing a nurse's gown, bald and with a shaved face, another had high heeled shoes and a ruffled skirt, a third was wearing a lady's cape with branches, the fourth had a fan like a Spanish woman, a gold bracelet and a cambric collar. Next to him, a small 15-year-old boy was hiding behind a brassiere with a short skirt and bare chest. They were all fined 160 escudos each. One of them had to pay 180 escudos for changing his name.

This event, along with the publication by Fernando Pessoa's Olisipo publishing house of Raúl Leal's provocative book Divinised Sodom, would serve as a pretext for the public intervention of the Student Action League, founded by Pedro Teotónio Pereira, with the express aim of ‘putting in order’ the transvestites arrested at the carnival ball in Graça and ‘those equivocal gentlemen who walk around in the streets and cafés with feminine manners and ridiculously exaggerated elegance’, along with ‘the decadent artists, the poets of Sodom, the publishers, authors and sellers of immoral books’. The book earned Raul Leal the accusation of debauchery and heresy from the League and the newspaper A Época, which tried to link the work to the ‘scandalous’ ball, both of which were described as symptoms of the ‘shameful demoralisation’ that, in the face of police inaction, was spreading in Lisbon society.

*this is a private event