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There is a specter haunting the human contact between gay Brazilians and international visitors to their city. Two people may encounter each other, yet in their most intimate moments, when they find themselves on their own, there is an unpleasant, invisible intruder. It is the social world that humans have created and that forces itself onto every situation of our existence. The question introducing this text: “Not just exploitation?” Encapsulates this intrusion. It comes from part of a statement by an informant in Richard Parker’s book Benath the Equator: Cultures of Desire, Male Homosexuality, and Emerging Gay Communities in Brazil (1999). The respondent is trying to explain that, contrary to what some might think, there is more than just an abusive economic exchange taking place in the sexual/affective contacts between Western tourists and Brazilans in Rio de Janeiro. He believes that the exchanges are not just about the money or material convenience. In this thesis, I argue the evidence of that observation. To give it substance, I suggest that indeed there is exploitation in these contacts because of the mere fact, for instance, that having a certain passport gives one partner an amount of rights and freedoms that the other does not have, and that these inequalities and privileges are embodied in a large array of manners. That is to say, they become part of the physical body, posture and consciousness of people. Therefore there is no way to escape that inequality as a point of departure. Under such conditions that embed love and sexuality in a larger economic and political context, gay Brazilians and white westerners who interact with each other might live these structural inequalities without awareness or problematization of them; they might try to compensate for them internally, within their own social relations, while remaining oppressed by the unchanged social structures that surround them, or they might take steps towards the dismantling of the system that allowed for such inequalities to be created in the first place. Most research participants or people observed try, as an individual reaction, either to become white westerners, to varying degrees of failure, or to give in to the forces that predispose objectification and exotization in order to use them to their advantage. This is an erroneous response, I argue. Not only because they are postures that are very difficult to perform and not available to all, but also because pursuing them results in the submission to a system that violates humanity by imposing differentiating categories of people which are subsequently hierarchized in a self-reinforcing network of flows and accumulation that alienates everybody involved. Incipient forms of resistance towards this process can be found in the discourse of some darker-skinned gay Brazilians who have been exposed to social science notions of deconstruction as outlined by Derrida and applied by Bourdieu to address the issue of taste, resolving to redirect the flows in the economy of attention and love towards those who are structurally hindered from obtaining them. This entails a critical posture towards feelings of attraction to people who incarnate privilege in a sytem of class, gender, and racial domination.