Revolutionary Blue

Blessed with a rightist government and a conservative Roman Catholic hierarchy, Portugal before the April revolution was one of the least libidinous countries in Europe. Striptease shows, topless dancers, dirty books and X-rated movies were, legally, at least, not allowed into the country. At the most, an occasional street vendor would risk arrest by the morals squad and peddle a few bootlegged copies of Playboy or some other forbidden girlie import. The morals squad still exists, but since the April revolution, the risk has gone out of eroticism. In fact, one of the curious consequences of the coup that ousted the old regime is Europe's biggest explosion of pornography since Denmark legalized practically everything.

Not that staid Lisbon has yet turned into another Copenhagen. But sexually explicit Danish magazines are now available on newspaper kiosks along with tamer publications like Penthouse. Uncut versions of previously forbidden films such as Last Tango in Paris and A Clockwork Orange are drawing huge crowds. A dubbed-in-Portuguese version of Deep Throat has been approved for import. Bawdy, undulating, take-it-all-off strippers from France and Italy are lending new interest to traditional vaudeville. Enthusiastic audiences flocked to see Last Fado in Lisbon, featuring a French stripper named Poupee la Rose.

Though no more libidinous than the strip shows at Paris' Crazy Horse Saloon, Last Fado was an erotic milestone for Lisbon. A month ago, a still bolder step was taken by Producer Ruth Escobar, 39, who offered audiences her production of a play called Autos Sacramentais (Sacramental Rites). A dramatization of the eternal struggle between good and evil, it featured 14 Brazilians of both sexes cavorting onstage au nature! for two hours. A 69-year-old orange farmer who watched the production remarked: "It would have been better if there had been more lights."

Frontal Shots. The outburst of porn has made strange bedfellows of Roman Catholic bishops, the Communist Party, the actors union and even some impresarios, all of whom are pondering the age-old question of how to have liberty without license. "Debauchery is a pig's breakfast," one anguished citizen wrote the Lisbon weekly Expresso. There have even been charges that the CIA is sponsoring the new pornography to sap the revolution of its energies. Recently, Premier Vasco Gonc,alves on nationwide television admonished his people to fight "pseudo-leftists and anarchists instead of going to see the pornography that is around everywhere."

By sheer coincidence, Gonc,alves appeared on the air an hour after a TV broadcast of highlights from Autos Sacramentais that included shots of full frontal nudity. Since TV is government controlled, that in itself was a fairly strong indication that the wave of pornography is not about to subside in the near future. One reason is that the military junta--and the leftist unions, which heavily restrict the theoretically unfettered press by refusing to publish anything not to their liking--can use the sex explosion as evidence that censorship does not exist. Another is that the people obviously like it. Says one kiosk operator in Lisbon's Restauradores Square: "A few passers-by sometimes mutter, but we are making a lot of money from erotic magazines."

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