The Chicago Tribune, 435 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611 - Friday, 4 April 1997.
Laurie Goering, Chicago Tribune

The reasons are as complex as Brazil itself, a country torn between its mild form of Latin machismo and its reputation for Carnival eroticism and sexual tolerance.

"Brazil is a very tolerant country but also a very hypocritical one," said Veriano Terto Jr., project coordinator for the Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association, or ABIA.

"Homosexuality here is something exotic, and it's tolerated if it remains that," Terto said. "It's when an average-looking guy who pays taxes falls in love with another average guy that there's a problem."

That "problem" was displayed in graphic detail when local newspapers published a photograph of a 20-year-old man who had been disemboweled, his eyes gouged out, and said the reason for his murder was the fact that he was gay. Authorities said 125 gay men were murdered last year for what might seem to be an odd transgression in a c percent of Brazilian homosexuals interviewed said they had suffered some type of violence as a result of their sexual orientation.

Many reported they had been beaten, shot at or threatened by police officers or homophobic gangs of men.

"There's a lot of prejudice," said Genildo Santana, a tall, slim gay man with a gold loop earring, white sleeveless T-shirt and denim shorts. "People walk by on the street and say things like `Fags should die.'"

Even a high-profile actor such as Andre Goncalves isn't immune. The first actor to portray a gay character on one of Brazil's enormously popular nightly soap operas, Goncalves received death threats after taking the part -- even though he isn't gay.

"He played a young man like anybody else, and that's what bothered people. He wasn't exotic," Terto said.

That difference, gay activists say, is precisely the problem facing most homosexuals in Brazil.

Violence against homosexuals is hardly a new problem in Latin America, or even Brazil. In 1591, a Brazilian woman named Felipe de Souza was tortured by the Portuguese Inquisition on charges of being a lesbian. An International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission award is now named in her honor.

French colonists on the Brazilian island of Maranhao were equally upset in 1616 to find homosexuality among the local Indians. One individual, history records, was loaded into a cannon and shot out over the Atlantic Ocean.

In Brazil today, flamboyant homosexuality is broadly accepted. Drag queens on roller skates glide down Copacabana's beachfront Atlantic Avenue. Businessmen blow kisses to transvestites. Roberta Close, Brazil's standard of feminine beauty, was once a man.

At Carnival, everyone cheers floats covered with nearly nude gay men decked out in glittering wings and feathers.

The problem, gay activists say, is that while Brazilians celebrate flamboyant homosexuality as harmless fun with little connection to their own lives, many also fear everyday homosexuality as a threat to the country's Roman Catholic and now increasingly evangelical Protestant norms, as well as its understated Latin machismo.

"It's a paradox," said Paulo Fernandes, the president of ATOBA, Rio's Gay Emancipation Movement. "The same people that clap during Carnival for the gays on the floats throw rocks the rest of the year."

The intolerance is the result of far more than religious restrictions. AIDS, which has grown to epidemic proportions in Brazil, has made the country dramatically more homophobic in recent years, activists say.

AIDS also has cast a shadow over the country's widespread tradition of bisexuality. More than half of Brazilian men, ATOBA estimates, have had sexual relations with other men at least once. But what once was viewed largely as harmless experimentation has now become a health risk, particularly as married men carry the threat of AIDS home to their wives.

Married women in their 30s are now one of the fastest-growing groups contracting AIDS in Brazil, according to ABIA. And bisexual men, driven into the closet, are sometimes participating in attacks against homosexuals in an effort to hide their own inclinations.

"Married bisexuals don't see themselves as gay. They'll harass gay guys, even guys they've had sex with, just so they aren't identified," said Raimundo Pereira, vice president of ATOBA. "A lot of the killers are people who have slept with their victims."

As homosexuals have become increasingly marginalized in Brazil, in part because of AIDS, they also have become growing targets for Brazil's police, who have traditionally enjoyed broad support for their efforts to violently clear cities of "marginal" populations including street children, beggars and thieves.

In Brazil, "anyone who can be labeled as a `marginal' in some sense is vulnerable to police violence," and homosexuals have joined that class, Terto said.

In other cases, police simply look the other way when confronted with crimes against homosexuals.

"If somebody kills a gay man, the police say it was just a defense of honor. All the killer has to say is that the homosexual tried to induce him into sex," Pereira said.

Still, for the most part, homosexuals in Brazil have had an easier time than their counterparts in other Latin American countries. During Argentina's years of military dictatorship, homosexuals were routinely targeted by death squads. In Chile, homosexuality remains illegal.

In Brazil, by comparison, 74 cities including Rio now have laws that forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The country has no federal anti-discrimination law, and enforcement of local laws is sketchy. Only one business owner, a hotel manager in the southern city of Porto Allegre, has ever received even a formal warning, much less a fine.

Brazil's Congress also is considering a domestic partners law that would extend to gay partners rights to social security payments, inheritance and the Brazilian equivalent of a "green card" for foreign partners.

All in all, "this is one of the more open places for homosexuality in South America. It's better here than in some U.S. states," Pereira said.

But violence remains a looming problem. Like many gay activists, Pereira, who also works as a classical singer, has received death threats.

Bringing the problem to light, he says, is what may save his life and others.

"Before, in the dark of the night, no one knew how many died," he said. "Now, at least, more are speaking out."

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