What the Global Swing to the Right Means For the LGBT+ Community

On Sunday, Brazil elected the far-right self-proclaimed “proud homophobe” Jair Bolsonaro as their President. In a few short months Bolsonaro will be sworn in and will irrevocably shift the course of Brazil’s political history. The atmosphere, for the country’s LGBT+ community, is tense.

Bolsonaro famously told Playboy magazine in 2011, “I would be incapable of loving a gay son. I prefer that he die in an accident.”

He further reiterated these views in a 2013 interview with Stephen Fry for the documentary series Out There.

“No father would ever take pride in having a gay son… Pride? Happiness? Celebrate if his son turns out gay? No way…

“You have to have some sort of moral compass bearing in your life.

“[Gay activists] want to reach our children in order to turn the children into gay adults to satisfy their sexuality in the future.

“I went into battle with the gays because the government proposed anti-homophobia classes for the junior grades, but that would actively stimulate homosexuality in children from 6 years old.

“There is no homophobic behaviour in Brazil. Those who die, 90 percent of homosexual deaths, they die in drug-related situations, prostitution, or even killed by their own partners.”

“I would be incapable of loving a gay son. I prefer that he die in an accident.”

Stephen Fry later described this interview as “one of the most chilling confrontations I’ve ever had with a human being.”

In 2015, Bolsonaro said patients in hospital had a right to reject blood from gay people. He also told TIME last month that he would punch two men in the street if he saw them kissing.

“I do not kiss my wife on the street. Why face society? Why take that into the school? Little children of 6 or 7, watching two men kiss as the government wanted them to do. Is this democracy?”

He also equated homosexuality to paedophilia, “So let’s respect the paedophile’s right to have sex with a two-year-old? Would that unite [Brazil]?”

“Yes, I’m homophobic,” he once said, “and very proud of it.”

Over the course of this year’s election anti-LGBT+ hate crimes have reached an all-time high in the country – increasing a massive 30 percent since 2016 and more than tripling since 2007.

“These things don’t happen by accident. There’s been a validation,” Aretha Sadick, a transgender artist told the Guardian, who found herself running for her life from man with an iron bar, trying to kill her just two weeks after the first round of elections.

“It was a hate crime. No doubt about it. Hate is the only word.

“It was on a street I always walk down. An area where I always go. And I’ve never experienced such an overt act of hostility.”

“It’s as if the gates of hell have been opened – as if hunting season had been declared,” said Beto de Jesus, founder of São Paulo’s annual gay pride parade– the largest in the world.

“It’s barbarism.”

Hate crimes have reached an all-time high in the country – increasing a massive 30 percent since 2016.

Amnesty’s Americas director Erika Guevara-Rosas said this increase in hate crime shouldn’t be a surprise when Bolsonaro’s “toxic speech” is given a megaphone and a national stage.

“The president-elect has campaigned with an openly anti-human-rights agenda and frequently made discriminatory statements about different groups of society,” Guevara-Rosas said.

Campaign rhetoric is only the beginning, she warns. Bolsonaro is about to have real power.

“His election as Brazil´s president could pose a huge risk to Indigenous Peoples and quilombolas, traditional rural communities, LGBTI people, black youth, women, activists and civil society organizations, if his rhetoric is transformed in public policy.”

We are witnessing this anti-LGBT+ rhetoric become law in other countries across the world right now. We see this in the Trump White House’s recent proposal to cement gender as strictly defined by what you’re assigned at birth – in the process erasing the identity of millions of transgender and intersex people.

“The memo has caused outrage because its goal is to define gender transition out of existence. Its aim is to discriminate against trans people, declaring them to be deluded or deceptive, their lived genders irrelevant,” wrote Dr. Cary Gabriel Costello for the Trans Advocate.

This proposal was written by the Director of the HHS Office of Civil Rights, Roger Severino. He has no special knowledge of the medical issues he’s writing about and he was hired to please Trump’s conservative base. He’s been on record as an advocate for conversion therapy and has said being LGBT+ is “against biology.”

Then there’s Putin, the ultimate example of a strongman politician making good on his violently anti-LGBT+ rhetoric. Russia’s 2013 anti-gay propaganda laws effectively ban any form of gay expression or assembly. Putin maintains that being gay is not outlawed in the country outright and that these anti propaganda laws “do not harm anybody” – but they do have the effect of containing and silencing the LGBT+ community.

To say nothing of the 106 gay men who fled Chechnya in 2017 and the hundreds more left behind to die in the “gay purges” – something the Kremlin seems unwilling to investigate.

Too often in history minorities are used as a generic scapegoat: a way to unify people against a mysterious and evil “other”. LGBT+ people are positioned as threatening the moral integrity of society, corrupting children, and perverting familial structures. We become a symbol of all that’s wrong in the world, something to rally against. Nothing unifies people more than hatred.

We’ve seen this in Russia, we’re starting to see this in the United States, and now it’s happening in Brazil. This “proud homophobe” has swept the Brazilian elections promising something his opponents couldn’t: easy answers to hard questions. He’s cut through the moral ambiguities of political correctness and defiantly told us what is right and what is wrong, and if you fall on the other side of that, well, so be it.

Russia’s 2013 anti-gay propaganda laws effectively ban any form of gay expression or assembly.

LGBT+ Brazilians are determined to stand their ground in the fight to come.

“Nobody is going back into the closet. We will resist,” said Renan Quinalha, a São Paulo-based lawyer and LGBT activist.

“To the extent possible, we will try to have a dialogue with this government,” said Toni Reis, president of Brazil’s National LGBTQ Alliance.

“(We will) use all available strategies to keep from taking any steps backwards.”

It’s hard not to feel like we’re in the middle of some great tipping point in history. The LGBT+ community has made so much progress across the world, so many fights have been won, but we can’t take any of these rights for granted. The hardest fight might be yet to come.

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