Three rock stars. One songbook. A country that knew every lyric but didn't always recognize the lives behind them.

In Brazil's explosive rock scene, Cazuza, Renato Russo, and Cássia Eller shaped a generation through music, sexuality, and unconventional love. One spoke openly about bisexuality and AIDS. Another embedded pansexual desire into anthems sung by thousands. The third built a queer family whose fight for recognition would challenge Brazilian law. They were the original Brazilian Bisexual Trifecta.

Their stories intersect through songwriting credits, friendship, HIV/AIDS, and the complicated politics of visibility.

In this episode of Binary Bashers: Latinidad, Ross follows the musical evidence connecting three Brazilian icons, excavating a bi+ and queer lineage hiding in plain sight. What happens when a country celebrates your art but struggles to recognize your whole identity?

If you notice any factual errors, please contact us at stories@embracingallofme.org. We are committed to accuracy and respect of the figures legacy and family and will issue corrections as needed. Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, the complex, and the in-between, uplifting bi+, queer, and BIPOC voices. For more, visit embracingallofme.org.

Frida Kahlo is everywhere: on candles, sneakers, and a Barbie with softened brows. But how much of the woman can we still see? In this Binary Bashers: Latinidad episode, Ross looks beyond the icon to the rooms Frida entered and the stories told about her. From Diego Rivera’s double standard on his wife to Mary Reynolds’s care in Paris and letters to painter Jacqueline Lamba, the episode follows desire, evidence, and erasure. What gets lost when a bisexual Latina becomes a brand? Visibility is not the same as being understood.

If you notice any factual errors, please contact us at stories@embracingallofme.org. We are committed to accuracy and respect of the figures legacy and family and will issue corrections as needed. Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, the complex, and the in-between, uplifting bi+, queer, and BIPOC voices. For more, visit embracingallofme.org.

In “Alejandra Pizarnik: All of Me in Closed Boxes,” Binary Bashers: Latinidad explores the Argentine poet’s Jewish immigrant roots, love for men and women, and struggle with language that could never hold her whole. Through letters, diaries, and unpublished manuscripts, Ross Victory follows a bi-coded archive beyond the myth of the doomed poet, asking how literary acclaim and selective publications narrowed her legacy, and what becomes possible when we read her own words left in the boxes.

HOW TO VOTE FOR EMBRACING ALL OF ME ⁠Signal Awards⁠ → Individual Episode → Activism, Public Service, & Social Impact → Embracing All of Me → Vote

If you notice any factual errors, please contact us at ⁠stories@embracingallofme.org⁠. We are committed to accuracy and respect of the figures legacy and family and will issue corrections as needed. Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, the complex, and the in-between, uplifting bi+, queer, and BIPOC voices. For more, visit ⁠embracingallofme.org⁠.

Embracing All of Me is a finalist in the 5th Annual Signal Awards Activism, Public Service, and Social Impact category. We have a chance to win a Listerner's Choice Award. Vote now before October 15!

Puerto Rican playwright and poet Miguel Piñero carried the Lower East Side onto Broadway with Short Eyes and helped build the Nuyorican Poets Café. His writing exposed masculinity’s armor; his relationships crossed its boundaries.

In Binary Bashers: Latinidad, Ross Victory traces Piñero’s incarceration, creative brilliance, bisexual history, and allegations surrounding his legacy. Through Martin Wong’s paintings and Miguel Algarín’s fiercely protective love, “Ashes in Their Hands” asks what we owe the people whose stories we inherit.

If you notice any factual errors, please contact us at stories@embracingallofme.org. We are committed to accuracy and respect of the figures legacy and family and will issue corrections as needed. Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, the complex, and the in-between, uplifting bi+, queer, and BIPOC voices. For more, visit embracingallofme.org.

Mário de Andrade spent his life resisting the demand to become one thing. Poet, novelist, musician, folklorist, photographer, and architect of Brazilian modernism, he made contradiction part of his form.

In 1928, responding to rumors about his “so-called homosexuality,” Mário wrote: “I don’t deny it.” Years later, he created a word for himself and described in himself a kind of “pan-sensuality,” while private writings and correspondence left evidence pointing in more than one direction. This episode follows those fragments alongside Macunaíma, his complicated modernist masterpiece, and the archive he sealed for fifty years.

Binary Bashers: Latinidad asks what happens when a life, and its archive, refuses to resolve itself for us.

Also, Embracing All of Me, the podcast and producer of Binary Bashers has been nominated for a Signal Award. The episode A Black Bisexual Blueprint for Belonging & Survival with Zoomy Taylor & Chizu is a finalist in the Activism, Public Service, and Social Impact category. Would you mind taking 3 seconds to support us with a vote?

How to Vote for the Signal Awards

1. Go to the Signal Awards voting website

2. Create an account or sign in

3. Select Individual Episode

4. Go to Activism, Public Service, & Social Impact

5. Find “Beyond Binaries: A Black Bisexual Blueprint for Belonging & Survival” from Embracing All of Me

6. Tap Vote

If you notice any factual errors in this episode, please contact us at ⁠stories@embracingallofme.org⁠. We are committed to accuracy and respect of the figures legacy and family and will issue corrections as needed. Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, the complex, and the in-between, uplifting bi+, queer, and BIPOC voices. For more, visit embracingallofme.org.

Gloria Anzaldúa spent her life writing from the borderlands—between languages, cultures, genders, bodies, and ways of belonging. From the fields of South Texas to Borderlands/La Frontera, she transformed experiences of linguistic policing, chronic pain, queerness, and cultural displacement into a radical language for multiplicity.

In this episode of Binary Bashers: Latinidad, Ross Victory traces Anzaldúa’s life, her concept of the border as an open wound, her reclamation of mita y mita, and her insistence that identity cannot always be contained by inherited categories. Her work asks what becomes possible when we stop treating the in-between as confusion—and begin recognizing it as its own place of knowledge.

If you notice any factual errors, please contact us at stories@embracingallofme.org. We are committed to accuracy and respect of the figures legacy and family and will issue corrections as needed. Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, the complex, and the in-between, uplifting bi+, queer, and BIPOC voices. For more, visit embracingallofme.org.

Binary Bashers Vol. 2: Latinidad opens Latinx Heritage Month 2026 with Juan Gabriel, the Mexican music icon who made a career out of refusing easy categories.

Born Alberto Aguilera Valadez, Juan Gabriel traveled from Ciudad Juárez clubs and “No Tengo Dinero” to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, crossing ranchera, bolero, pop, gender expectations, and the line between popular culture and artistic prestige. Through songs like “Amor Eterno,” he created a musical language for grief, love, defiance, and belonging that generations across Mexico and Latin America made their own.

This episode explores what Juan Gabriel’s life and legacy reveal about Latinidad, cultural gatekeeping, bi or queer possibility, and the freedom of being larger than any label.

Tune in all Latinx Heritage Month for new episodes.

If you notice any factual errors, please contact us at stories@embracingallofme.org. We are committed to accuracy and respect of the figures legacy and family and will issue corrections as needed. Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, the complex, and the in-between, uplifting bi+, queer, and BIPOC voices. For more, visit embracingallofme.org.

BINARY BASHERS: LATINIDAD

The Hidden Bi+ and Queer History of Black and Brown Latin America

For Latinx Heritage Month 2026, Binary Bashers returns with its second volume: Latinidad, tracing bi-coded and queer-coded lives across the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas, from Mexico to Brazil, and confronting the seven countries where the archive went silent by design.

This volume follows the same rigorous, evidence-based bi-coded framework introduced in Volume 1, our Black History Month 2026 volume: no speculation, no retroactive labels, just documented lives followed as far as the record allows. Episodes trace Juan Gabriel's refusal to be labeled, Mário de Andrade's one surviving letter, Frida Kahlo in her own words, Reinaldo Arenas writing his memoir from a hospital bed, and Marielle Franco, the Afro-Brazilian councilwoman whose murder didn't silence her.

The opening episode also names what's missing. Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Uruguay, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador: seven countries where almost no bi+ or queer Afro-Latino history survives on record. We treat that silence as evidence, not absence.

Hosted, researched, and written by Ross Victory. [New episodes drop all Latinx Heritage Month.

Haven't caught Volume 1? https://pod.link/1887569381?view=apps&sort=popularity.

Binary Bashers is produced by Embracing All of Me, a storytelling and advocacy platform for the multi, the complex, and the in-between, uplifting bi+, queer, and BIPOC voices. For more, visit embracingallofme.org.

Topics: Latinidad, Bi+ Visibility, Queer History, Afro-Latino, LGBTQ+ Podcast, Latinx History, Latine, Hispanic Heritage Month, Latino