Julio & Myself at the Christmas party at Fisk Schools in December 1978.
Julio, dona Maria Turchinski & Luiz Amorim.
Nezel, Julio, dona Maria & Luiz at Fisk's Xmas Party 1977.
Michael Mingucci, Julio Galvão & Luiz Amorim in December 1977.
Fabia Fekete & Julio Galvão on a Saturday morning at Fisk's Rebouças-Unit front-yard.
Fabia who was a student and Julio, a teacher at Fisk's Rebouças-Unit in 1978.
I met Julio Galvão in 1974, when I taught English at Escolas Fisk in Vila Mariana in São Paulo. He was a bright young man from Maranhão - the most northern Brazilian state - who had been educated in a Catholic seminary run by Dutch priests where he had the chance to learn both Dutch and English. Even though he had never lived in an English-speaking country he was pretty fluent in English and knew its grammar quite well.
He was a likeable character and very popular with students and the secretaries Elena and Nezel. Julio was a natural. I was not! I actually didn't feel comfortable teaching English. Maybe because I wasn't sure about my grammar and too self-obsessed to be a good teacher.
Me and Julio hit it off straight away even though he was an Aries and I am a Taurean. I guess he liked the way I spoke English. Having lived in the USA and having come back recently I knew recent slangs and had the right intonations even though my grammar was not that good.
Julio shared a flat with a Paulista boy-friend of his somewhere in Cambuci, a middle class suburb not far from Vila Mariana.
Julio shared a flat with a Paulista boy-friend of his somewhere in Cambuci, a middle class suburb not far from Vila Mariana.
When I went back to the USA in July 1975, I sort of lost touch with Julio who continued teaching at Fisk's Vila Mariana school.
When I came back to Brazil in 1977, me & Julio picked up where we had left off in 1975. Actually, Julio had moved to Rio de Janeiro where he had a brother (Raymundo) and sister (Poly) who shared a flat in Rocha, a suburb not too far from the city centre.
When Julio and I met in Rio, I noticed he was not as happy and gay as he had been in São Paulo. In Rio he worked as a clerk in an office on Avenida Princesa Isabel, in Copacabana. He could not get a night-time English-teaching job - as he used to do in São Paulo - because the English-as-a-foreign language market in Rio was much more competitive due to the greater presence of native-speakers who worked as teachers.
When Julio and I met in Rio, I noticed he was not as happy and gay as he had been in São Paulo. In Rio he worked as a clerk in an office on Avenida Princesa Isabel, in Copacabana. He could not get a night-time English-teaching job - as he used to do in São Paulo - because the English-as-a-foreign language market in Rio was much more competitive due to the greater presence of native-speakers who worked as teachers.
When Elvis Presley died - 16 August 1977 - I was trying to make a living in Rio de Janeiro and Julio was my only friend in town. I rented a room with a family who lived on the top floor of a Botafogo high-rise and I felt terribly lonely. I remember going out with Julio to a night-club called 266 West in Copacabana where he danced like crazy to the sounds of Thelma Houston's 'Don't leave me this way' and Donna Summer's 'I feel love'.
Even though I had found a teaching job at Brasas in Rio I was not happy at all and after a few weeks I decided I didn't want to live there anymore and came back to São Paulo.
Not long after that, Julio also came back to São Paulo and got his old job back at Fisk Schools. During day-time he worked full-time as a clerical work at an office on Rua Estados Unidos and at night Julio would teach English at Fisk's Vila Mariana branch. As I had been teaching at Rebouças, in Pinheiros since I came back from the USA in early 1977, I introduced Julio to Dona Maria, the director-secretary who liked him and provided him with work.
Around this time, as Julio was very resourceful, he teamed up with Dora and Eloina, two of his co-workers at the office at Rua Estados Unidos, and rented a flat on rua da Consolação on the corner with Avenida Paulista. That was probably the time Julio was the happiest and the busiest. He led a free life having one-night-stands at the drop of a hat. At the same time he got involved with Dora who was a very attractive young woman. Dora became pregnant and they decided to start a new life. They got married and moved out to a flat on Avenida 9 de Julho.
By this time we had grown apart even though we never broke up. I heard from common friends (probably Elena) that Dora had had Julio's baby but I never had the chance to see the child because I was teaching at a different school and soon I would be making a radical change and move to Australia.
Around 1983, when I had been living in Sydney for 2 years I found a free pay-phone in Annandale and rang Julio who then lived with Dora and a baby. Due to the different time-zone I think I rang him at an ungodly hour and Julio thought it was a hoax and hung up on me. I was so frustrated I didn't ring back for he wouldn't be patient to listen to an explanation why one was ringing at such an hour.
That was the last time I heard Julio's voice. Much later I heard he had come down with the HIV and died some time in the mid to late 1980s.
Julio was a free spirit! We had a kind of bond which united us somehow. He was dismissive of my conservative social behaviour but we got along... maybe we got along so well exactly for being so different from each other.
