Buraco da Lacraia closes: Actor Lobianco reflects on Rio's lost queer sanctuary

Rio de Janeiro is losing another piece of itself. The Buraco da Lacraia, a nightclub tucked into the basement of a building in the Lapa district, is closing its doors for good. The space is being handed over to a church, and with it goes something that cannot easily be replaced: a refuge where people who had nowhere else to go could be themselves.

The story begins in the late 1980s, when a man named Conceição opened a self-service restaurant in Cinelândia. He was not trying to build a nightclub. He simply put speakers outside his shop, playing the music he loved—the voices of great female singers—and waited. A different kind of customer began to arrive. Gay men from central Rio, people who were not welcome in most establishments, found something unexpected: kindness. Conceição and his partner Adão treated them well. Customers started bringing their own cassette tapes. Beer appeared on the menu alongside the daily specials. The place earned a nickname—Buraco da Lacraia, the Centipede's Hole—because it occupied a basement level, and the winding path down the broken escalators resembled the creature's journey. When the crowd outgrew the space, they found a mansion in Lapa large enough to hold everyone.

Adão stayed through everything. He watched the Collor Plan devastate the economy. He watched his customers die of AIDS. He watched Conceição pass away. What held the place together was not profit or trend but something older: the refusal to abandon people. The Buraco da Lacraia became more than a nightclub. It was a club of friends, a place where the old, the fat, the poor, the disabled, the marginalized could be loved and desired. Within the LGBTQ+ community itself, there are cruel hierarchies, but here they did not apply.

Actor Lobianco first walked through those doors in 2002, twenty years old, paying fifteen reais for entry and unlimited drinks. He danced. He kissed. He went to the dark room, where the only requirement was a drop of nail polish on your fingernail. He left with his soul scrambled like the framed puzzles on the walls, boarded the first morning bus with new best friends, his clothes smelling of beer and karaoke. He would strip everything off at his front door and surrender to the hangover.

It was in that basement that Lobianco found his people. In 2012, he and others from the alternative scene created their first show, using the karaoke stage as a democratic platform where any gay man from the suburbs or downtown could be the star he wanted to be. They studied the repertoire of gas stations, red-light houses, and music machines across Lapa. Nothing was planned. They followed the laughter and worked hard. When the show touched something in the audience's memory, they understood they were telling a story the city needed to hear. The company has existed for eight years now, with six shows in its repertoire.

Lobianco once wrote a script imagining the Buraco's end—a dream sequence where, as the last chicken dishes fried in oil and glitter was poured onto the artists' skin, Liza Minnelli appeared to pay the debts and stop the sale. But that was fiction. The real ending is far less magical. The building will become a church. The air conditioners have already been removed. The last nights will be hot and loud and final.

Rio is experiencing more endings than beginnings. Lobianco's generation shared their brightest dreams in places like the Hipódromo, Democráticos, 1140, Dama de Ferro—all gone now. The Buraco da Lacraia enters the memory of a happy city they tried to build. The company continues as Cia Buraco Show, moving from place to place, carrying love for their companions and faith in art. But something irreplaceable has closed. A space where the unwanted could belong does not simply reopen somewhere else.