How Gay is Rio De Janeiro?

[TotallyOz]

Even their statues of Christ are pink. Who knew?

[Lucky]

So we are now defined by pink? I thought pink was for breast cancer.

Here's another view. I am not saying that it is mine:

Forget the Hype - Brazil Is No Gay Paradise

Brazzil, Commentary, Luke McLeod-Roberts, Posted: Jun 25, 2005 Review it on NewsTrust

Cramped in a tiny office above Rio de Janeiro's central train station, I am having trouble hearing Yone Lindgren amidst the ringing telephones, conversations between the staff, and the construction workers hammering away at the flimsy partition walls that enclose CERCONVIDH- Brazil's first ever referral center for victims of homophobic violence and discrimination.

Lindgren is coordinator of this team of 10 dedicated people who give their time, energy and financial resources to make sure that Rio's gay men, women and transgender people are able to pursue their rights as citizens as fully as possible.

"We do the work the government doesn't," she says. The program runs a helpline for victims of homophobic abuse, refers victims to psychological and medical specialists and follows through with the legal aspects of their cases. The volunteers also hold fundraising events to ensure that they can continue to provide this service.

The service could not be more urgent. National and international human rights organizations such as the Gay Group of Bahia, Global Justice, Amnesty International and the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights' Commission consistently identify Brazil as a gross offender of homosexual rights, where hatred leads to torture and over 100 murders are reported in the national press each year.

These figures may just be the tip of the iceberg of homophobic violence in Brazil. Many cases never come to light because families do not wish their dead relative's sexuality to be exposed; and the everyday violence LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people suffer is wider and more nuanced than those sensationalist accounts reported by the Brazilian press.

According to a study released this week, based on a survey at last year's Rio gay pride march by a coalition of LGBT activists from the Arco Iris NGO, and academics at the Cândido Mendes (UCAM) and Rio State University (UERJ), 64 percent of LGBT people in Rio de Janeiro have suffered some form of discrimination because of their sexual identity.

This includes acts as diverse as bullying at school or in the workplace, threats and name-calling from strangers and, as often occurs with trans (transgendered) people, denial of access to public or semi-public spaces such as shops and bars.

Similar statistics are expected when the findings of a survey carried out in São Paulo are made public. Rio, and its larger neighbor, are home to some of Latin America's most vibrant LGBT cultures.

Last month's gay pride parade in São Paulo brought together two million people, who chanted and danced for over 12 hours on the Avenida Paulista, the city's main thoroughfare, making it the largest gay pride event in the history of humanity. Today the march along the beachfront in Copacabana, Rio, expects some 600,000 participants.

These cities, and other state capitals, such as Salvador and Curitiba, are the base of extremely well-organized movements. Anti-discrimination laws and equal work-related benefits for homosexual and heterosexual partners embedded in municipal and state codes, are the result of their campaigning.

The proposal for same-sex civil union in the federal chamber in Brasília, the Brazilian capital, would not have reached that stage without the relentless activism of such groups.

"There has been an explosion of acceptance here in Brazil recently," says Silvia Ramos of UCAM, pointing to mainstream media indicators such as the landslide victory of an openly gay man in the Brazilian version of Big Brother and gay characters in prime-time soap operas, such as Globo TV's America.

"But we don't know whether the guy that beats up a gay is the same one that claims to "have gay friends," or if we are dealing with a society that is split between tolerance and intolerance."

That intolerance jars with the popular image that Brazilians hold of themselves and export to other countries – a vibrant and happy country where anything goes, the land of what Brazilian anthropologist Roberto da Matta has referred to as "o homem cordial" (the cordial man).

For Sandra Carvalho of the Rio office of Global Justice, this cordiality is a myth. "Brazil is a violent country in terms of interpersonal relations," she says. And the violence is often highly ambiguous: "The police that kill the poor and the black living in the favela (shanty-town) often come from poor, black families in the favela themselves."

Any policy that seeks to deal with the crisis of homophobic violence in Brazil then, must not only confront multiple types of verbal and physical violence that scourge the lives of LGBT people, but also, as Ramos argues, take this contradiction or ambiguity around acceptance as its point of departure.

But for some members of the LGBT communities, there may not be any ambiguity over societal tolerance in the first place.

"We're a joke for the Brazilian society," says Hanah Suzart, President of ASTRA-Rio, the association of transgendered people, which concentrates on STD prevention and building self-esteem in the trans community.

To highlight the point, she talks of the "elbow effect": the daily humiliation trans suffer in the shop, the bank or the doctor's surgery, when onlookers nudge each other and comment indiscreetly.

The image of Rio as paradise, with the travesti as its ultimate symbol of carnavalesque transgression is a "utopia," according to Suzart. Instead it is "conservative, homophobic, prejudiced and elitist," with a (state) government that "will take us back to the era of the inquisition."

Activists see the state government as representing "evangelicals" who don't prioritize LGBT concerns. They have a closer relationship with the federal and municipal governments, the latter of which is supporting the city's pride march.

The federal government, for its part, has formed an alliance with LGBT NGOs nationwide by supporting the program Brasil sem Homofobia (BsH) (Brazil without Homophobia). Launched last year, the program aims to train LGBT activists, incorporate material on homosexuals into school curricula and support referral centers in order to overcome homophobia.

But some people doubt whether the program, which may look good on paper, will ever become a reality.

"The funds were supposed to have been coming for the last five years. The problem is that the federal government made a recommendation and said "faz quem quiser" (whoever wants to do it, go ahead). But local governments don't want to."

Luke McLeod-Roberts is a journalist who is in Rio de Janeiro carrying out research for his MA dissertation on strategies to combat homophobic violence in Rio.

[TotallyOz]

So we are now defined by pink? I thought pink was for breast cancer.

Breast Cancer stole Pink from US.

Thanks for the article though. Interesting read.

[Lucky]

Yes, I guess they did. With Brazil becoming a more affluent society, I hope that education also improves. That's always been good for gays...hasn't it?

[Guest tomcal]

With over a million spectators for the Pride parade in Rio and 3 million for the pride in Sao Paulo each year, you would think they are more open than the article suggests, but it is 5 years old... Saying that, I have found the smaller cities in Brazil such as Porto Alegre and Belo Horzonte much more open to gays, with gay related activities, clubs, organizations etc. and both cities have more gay bars/clubs than Rio or Sao Paulo per capita!

[JKane]

Did the pink triangle have any good history before Hitler used it to mark us? How did that get adopted as an accepted symbol of us?

[MsGuy]

I have always been under the impression it originated as one of the color coded trianglular badges Germans used in the concentration camps. Different colored triangles indicated different classes of prisoners. If anyone has better information, please feel free to correct me.

My use of "Germans" in place of "Nazi" is for the purpose of highlighting the fact that both East and West Germany continued to use the Nazi criminal code to imprison gays for decades after the war. Many of the gays "liberated" from the camps were simply transferred to regular German prisons.