LGBTQIA+ Pride Day: Fight for rights in Brazil goes back a long way

“Visibility” is a word that permeates the history of the LGBTQIA+ struggle in Brazil. Not even during the most violent and authoritarian times—such as the military dictatorship—was there silence or inertia. In the attempts to form national meetings from 1959 to 1972, in the creation of Grupo Somos and the newspapers Lampião da Esquina and Chanacomchana in 1978, in the lesbian uprising at Ferro’s Bar in 1983 and in the years-long pressure to remove homosexuality from the list of diseases—which finally came to fruition in 1985—rights activists took the lead in mobilizing and putting up a fight.

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the main date for celebrating sexual diversity in Brazil is June 28, in reference to a riot that took place in New York City in 1969. On that occasion, regulars at the Stonewall Inn, one of Manhattan’s popular gay bars, resisted a violent police raid. The protest became a milestone in the LGBTQIA+ movement for rights in the US and is now celebrated in many other countries, including Brazil, as International LGBT+ Pride Day.

“These dates can and should be celebrated. But not everything began at Stonewall and not everything was settled there. Many other episodes need to be remembered so that we have a more collective, plural, democratic, and diverse memory of the struggles of the LGBTQIA+ community,” said Renan Quinalha, law professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) and head of the LGBTQIA+ Memory and Truth Group, under the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship. “We end up being influenced by North American cultural imperialism. This makes some national milestones invisible, which we also need to celebrate as advances, achievements, and references for memory in this political construction of the community.”

Historian Rita Colaço, an LGBTQIA+ activist and director of the Bajubá Museum, argues it is necessary to direct less attention to the US as a reference point and more to elements within the Brazilian movement.

“To be true to history, you can’t say that Stonewall was the first revolt, nor that it started the fight for LGBT rights. That’s not the case, neither in the US nor around the world.”

“We need to take ownership of our past, our heritage, our records, our traces, our collections; we need to revere them, be proud of them, and fight for them to be safeguarded, restored, preserved, so that our dates, the dates of our struggles are remembered and made known. This is the work that I, along with many other researchers throughout Brazil, have been doing, in a bid to make people aware of the importance of our history,” she added.

First marches

In the 1990s onwards, “marches” or “parades” became important public demonstrations—an opportunity for LGBTQIA+ people to show pride and demand rights. The first efforts began in the 1980s, but failed to gather a significant number of people.

In Rio de Janeiro, the work of the Arco Íris Group, founded in 1993, was essential in creating appeal for the event on the streets. Organization leaders, including activist Cláudio Nascimento, persisted in their mission to strengthen the movement and mobilize more and more people.

“We understood that we needed to create other references to overcome the idea that we were just a defensive movement claiming victimization by violence. We also had to put ourselves in the position of protagonists, of historical subjects in the construction of our struggles and demands,” Nascimento went on to say.

In 1995, Nascimento coordinated the World Conference of Gays, Lesbians, and Transvestites in Rio de Janeiro, which was the World Conference of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), the most important international organization of this kind at the time. It was an opportunity to take advantage of the turnout at the meeting on the first LGBT Pride Parade on June 22, 1995. Some 3 thousand people were estimated to have participated.

Memory

“The community must recognize and value our memory, our history, because this is the progress built over time by a great many hands, and there's not just one builder. There are several people giving shape to this adventure, this struggle, this trajectory so far. Our struggle is collective. It’ll never be individual,” Nascimento declared.

“The history of LGBT+ rights in Brazil cannot be seen as a straight line. Quite the opposite, it is a story of contradictions, a struggle with gains and losses. And at this time of a huge offensive against LGBT+ rights and gender diversity, we will undoubtedly have to reinvent ourselves in new political struggles in the field of rights,” says Marco Aurélio Máximo Prado, professor and coordinator of the LGBT+ Human Rights and Citizenship Center at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG).