Lamonte Aidoo aims to illuminate the whole of Brazilian slave society by concentrating on aspects that have received relatively little attention from previous scholars. He focuses on “interstitial” relationships in Brazilian slave society, such as same-sex victimization of slaves by their masters and slave ownership by free people of color, arguing that these contributed to “sustaining the social order even as they appeared to veer so flagrantly away from it” (3). Although legally, religiously, and socially proscribed, the rape of male slaves by their male masters, for example, “worked in tandem” with other approved forms of white male privilege and domination: “Under slavery, white male supremacy was dependent on the existence of a male sexual and racial inferior, and male rape served as a way of manifesting that supremacy physically” (2, 55). Similarly, the ownership of slaves by free people of African descent reinforced the values of a slave system that primarily benefited white males (Chapter 4). These exceptions, then, largely prove the rules.

In Chapter 2, Aidoo examines several Inquisition trials for sodomy between masters and male slaves, some of them familiar from previous work by historians such as Luiz Mott and Ronaldo Vainfas. Although Aidoo admits that “it is virtually impossible to quantify how frequently enslaved men were raped and sexually abused,” he posits “the pervasiveness of same-sex sexual violence in the everyday lives of slaves” (6). Aidoo argues persuasively of the colonial period that “there was no acknowledgement at the time that sex could be used as a weapon against male slaves.” Records of these abuses, consequently, rarely found their way into the archives (63). Chapter 3 covers the abuse of female slaves by their mistresses, which is yet more poorly documented, largely because of a “narrative of white women's virtue” that refused to admit such things were possible (96). Some of the material Aidoo includes here, such as incidents of same-sex relations between free women, do not advance the argument about slavery (79–83, 96–99).

In Chapter 4, Aidoo takes up what he calls the “complicity between whites and free blacks” such as overseers, slave catchers, and slave owners in the maintenance of slavery. Key to understanding such apparent (but only apparent) anomalies is “social whitening,” in which Brazilian racism “took an individualistic slant, opening spaces of privilege for individual free blacks and mulattos” while oppressing the mass of blacks as a group (139), much like Carl Degler's “mulatto escape hatch” (114). Although Aidoo concedes that there were some free blacks, including Luiz Gama, who fought against slavery (130–31), he contends that “most free blacks and mulattos in Brazil were concerned about enjoying and maintaining their privilege, not extending that privilege to other blacks and mulattos” (139). Chapter 5 discusses the rise of the myth of the black male homosexual predator in Brazilian society and literature. In this chapter, Aidoo includes lengthy analyses of the works of Gilberto Freyre (163–69) and Adolfo Caminha's Bom-Crioulo (173–80).

The book works better as a collection of loosely related essays than as a cohesive monograph. A significant amount of Aidoo's material, including the whole of Chapter 5, does not deal with slavery at all. All of the chapters hold valuable insights, but the theses that connect them are sometimes less than convincing. For example, Aidoo sees a direct link from the laconic descriptions of master violence in Inquisition documents to nineteenth-century propaganda about the benignity of Brazilian slavery to the twentieth-century myth of racial democracy (50). The lack of concern with victims’ suffering in Inquisition accounts of sodomy, and the erasure of black sexual victimization from the myth of racial democracy, however, seems to be a case of coincidence, not causation. Aidoo is at his best when stripping away the ideological conceits of Brazil's racist and sexual myths.