Abstract This article ethnographically describes the practice of friendship among differentially racialized, working-class queer and trans Pentecostals in São Paulo, Brazil. It argues that friendship is an inventive practice of queer Pentecostal world-making that floods the isolation of solidão (which one might translate as “loneliness” or “isolation”) with other modes of feeling life and its relationalities. Friendship is one way in which crentes (believers) come to situate solidão and depression as socially conditioned by racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia within Brazil, Pentecostalism, and even the inclusive church movement. Rather than recuperate friendship as an escape valve from conflict, I show how queer Pentecostals practice friendship as a form of “cultural inventiveness” that engages difference to make queer Pentecostal life more possible. Through these world-making practices, queer Pentecostal friendship emerges as a micropolitical space through which the otherwise possibility of queer Pentecostal theology is lived.
Joseph A. Coyle (Sat,) studied this question.