Controversy! 1993 soap opera that addresses the veiled death of a character due to AIDS gets a new chance on Globo

The soap opera ‘Despedida de Solteiro’ finally arrives in the Globoplay catalogue. Scheduled to premiere from April 22nd on Projeto Resgate, the plot covertly addressed a very delicate subject: the character’s death from AIDS.

The story of six o’clock revolves around four friends: João Marcos (Felipe Camargo), Pedro (Paulo Gorgulho), Pasqual (Eduardo Galvão) and Xampu (João Vitti). In the plot, Felipe Camargo’s character is about to marry Lenita (Tássia Camargo), but during his bachelor party, a girl named Salete (Gabriela Alves) appears dead and he is arrested alongside his friends.

In the soap opera that preceded ‘Mulheres de Areia’ in 1993, which has just been rerun on ‘Faixa Especial da Globo’, João Vitti, Rafael Vitti’s father, gave life to the character Xampu, who would contract HIV in prison, but the character’s outcome was changed so as not to harm the population.

Death from AIDS was abolished from the soap opera

“Xampu died of AIDS, but that was never made clear in the plot. I don’t know if it was an internal issue or if it was because it was a six o’clock soap opera, but he died because at the time the author’s proposal was to address the issue of AIDS in a discreet”, recalled the actor in an interview with Gshow, in 2019.

“There was no attention to this, so I believe that Walther Negrão’s proposal was to shed light on this prison issue that was happening”, he commented. “The soap opera was in 1992, AIDS started to appear in 1985, and in 1990 people were dying, I lost some friends”, continued the artist.

At the time, author Walther Negrão wanted to highlight the high incidence of the AIDS virus among the prison population, whose laboratory visited Brazilian prisons. However, Shampoo’s end was causing him to contract hepatitis B in a knife fight. “It was a remarkable experience. I thought the soap opera could act as an alert to the precarious situation of AIDS prisoners. TV can and should do this social merchandising. But, at the time, Globo censored my idea, with the argument that the theme would be a ‘voduzão’ for a 6 pm soap opera”, said Walther Negrão to the book Autores – Histórias da Teledramaturgia.