In the midst of wild olive trees, a muscular man sporting pink hair and a woman’s swimming costume stares into a mirror. There, at the meeting point of pastoral and queer, is António Variações: Portugal’s first gay icon, who shook the country from its post-revolution torpor after fascism’s 41-year reign.
These radical photographs provided the artwork for Variações’s final album, Dar & Receber (To Give & to Receive), released in May 1984. He would die the next month, on the feast day of Lisbon’s most beloved saint, António, marking what was widely believed to be the country’s first public Aids-related death. A gay man who had defined the zeitgeist, Variações was now the poster child for a taboo that threatened to consume his legacy. At his funeral the coffin was sealed because of safety concerns, and his remaining clothes were burnt.
Yet Variações’s spirit has survived, and become synonymous with Pride month celebrations each June in Portugal. Last year’s culminated with an António Variações sing-along; then in August, a long-awaited biopic, Variações, became the country’s highest-grossing film of the year. Thirty-five years after his death, he has regained his place in Portuguese culture. Variações had always sworn he would go down in history – “even if only the history of a bathroom wall”.
The quote dates back to 1983, when Variações was on the brink of his watershed moment. That moment was was 27 years in the making, starting when he left the province of Minho, aged 11, for Lisbon. Variações never lost connection with his rural home but even as a child, he knew it couldn’t nurture his ambition: to hone the melodies that flowed through his head into life-affirming music.
Born in 1944, he lived through the repressive Estado Novo regime for three decades. He worked in menial jobs, served in the Portuguese military and at one point moved to London. But it was his time in Amsterdam, in the mid-70s, that created Variações the icon, as the historian Manuela Gonzaga writes in her biography António Variações: Entre Braga e Nova Iorque. Life in the Dutch city afforded Variações a political and sexual freedom that was still embryonic in Portugal after the peaceful coup of 1974. The gay clubs and darkrooms in which he revelled were anathema in a nation where would take until 1982 for homosexual activity to be legalised.
When Variações returned to Portugal in 1976, he became a face of the progressive Príncipe Real neighbourhood, and later of Bairro Alto, where a dormant culture began to erupt. A new generation of musicians, journalists, architects and others met up in drag venues and alternative bars. “The arts were emerging after a ruthless censorship that had kept creatives clandestine,” his ex-manager and close friend Teresa Couto Pinto explains. “It sparked inside us a need to confront established values.”
Although Variações set up camp as a barber, music remained his ambition: “I adore the sound of scissors but nothing comes close to a guitar or a violin,” he said. At home, he eschewed strings for handclaps and a portable drum machine, recording demo tapes that earned him a record deal with Portugal’s top rock label, Valentim de Carvalho.
He introduced a fashion sense that was alien to Lisbon. Gonzaga describes it as a “gratuitous, fascinating display”: below his two-toned beard, he could wed tight trousers to bedroom slippers as easily as he mixed leather straps with knitted sweaters. Couto Pinto says she helped him wrap poultry netting around his torso, and sewed door locks and hinges to his arms and legs. “I have never dressed to provoke anyone”, he said, describing his camp style as “an act of freedom towards myself, out of pleasure”.
Variações was “at the dawn of a [gay] collective consciousness in Portugal,” says the queer studies academic António Fernando Cascais, “because he pioneered a counter-image of his own”. Any homophobic remarks – even though Variações never came out publicly – were forgotten as soon as he took the stage.
He made his TV debut in 1981, during the Sunday variety show on Portugal’s sole broadcaster. He sang a punk metaphor about pills while a dancer dressed as a giant aspirin threw Smarties at the dumbfounded audience. Nothing so transgressive had ever graced Portugal’s airwaves. Opposing the country’s deep-seated conservatism, “the audience adhered immediately, with no reservations”, to the surprise of the illustrious host Júlio Isidro, as he told a journalist. His “meteoric stardom”, Gonzaga says, pushed his label to take him off the backburner.
Variações overcame his lack of musicianship amid members of the rock elite, who helped him translate his inner world of sounds, fusing the pop vanguard and the traditional melodies of his childhood. His 1983 bestselling debut LP, Anjo da Guarda (Guardian Angel), set his fado inflections – a homage to the singer Amália Rodrigues, his idol and later his friend – to a new-wave backdrop, while the follow-up album Dar & Receber balanced disco-rock with melancholy synthpop.
His pen reconciled popular wisdom and queer identity. His songs O Corpo É Que Paga (The Body Pays the Price) and É P’ra Amanhã (Leave It ’Til Tomorrow), both pages in the great Portuguese songbook, reinvented proverbs to tell life lessons. Variações also made queer alienation feel universal: today you might hear supermarket shoppers humming along to the proto-Robyn desperation of Canção de Engate (Hookup Song), despite its bleak depiction of gay cruising (“You are alone and I am even more so”).
In 1984, national grief at Variações’s gruelling death was overpowered by scrutiny of Aids, which was still relatively mysterious. According to Couto Pinto: “It was hard to keep him alive when listeners buried him in stigma and only talked about him regarding the disease, as though the reason for his death was more important than the artist and the work he left behind.”
His reappraisal began in 2004, when the supergroup Humanos was assembled to record his remaining demo tapes. The result was a multi-platinum album. Rarefied support followed through homages on TV talent shows and tributes from other artists, and in 2019, Variações dominated the public consciousness once again. His biopic, an art house Rocketman, garnered mixed reviews but became one of the highest-grossing Portuguese films of all time. Its lead actor went on a national tour with a Variações cover band.
According to Cascais, this “appropriation as a cultural icon” comes at a cost of downplaying Variações’s sexuality and smoothing over the polarised response to him in his heyday and after his death. “In life, he was loved by some and disregarded by others”, says Couto Pinto. “Most important of all is he never generated indifference.”
A hedonist loved by the people, a humble man behind a commanding posture, Variações injected colour into 1980s Portugal. “I feel like I was born before my time”, he said in 1983; one year later, he lamented “having to die”, dreading “the depressive ending”.
It’s a good thing, then, that his verses continue to echo throughout his native country. From bathrooms in Lisbon to the greenery of Minho, the existential nomadism of Estou Além prevails as an anthem: “Because I only want whom I have never seen … Because I only want to go where I do not go.” António Variações is still going, still finding people he has never seen.
• This article was updated to correct an error: António is not the official patron saint of Lisbon.
