I met Luiza a few weeks ago when she was in New York for the weekend. A long time reader of mine, she quickly made me a fan of hers, since she is extremely smart and mature for her age and is clearly destined for great things. Plus, her English puts my Portuguese to shame, since she has never lived in an English-speaking country but sounds like a born and bred American (she in fact has spent her whole life in Brazil). She's passionate about human rights, and someday she will likely make a name for herself helping make Brazil and even the Americas a more just place.
She offered to write about her experience at Sao Paulo's Pride Parade, and I was happy to post it here.
It can be said that São Paulo is a ghost city during the holidays or long weekends For the stressful, hectic life the city provides its inhabitants, people can't help but skip town at every chance they get, looking for the sunny beaches of the coast, or the peaceful settings of the countryside. Like every rule, however, one fairly loud exception must be added: Pride.
São Paulo's Pride Parade takes place during the Corpus Christi holiday (celebrated every year on a Thursday) and the days that follow it. Since most people don't work on that particular Friday, there is a lot of traveling going around. This time, however, Brazilians are not after peace and quiet, but quite the opposite. The numbers speak for themselves: this year, over 400,000 tourists came to São Paulo on Corpus Christi to go to Pride, and over 3 million people attended the Parade.
Now, I've never been to Pride in the United States, so I can't really compare, say, New York's and São Paulo's Gay Parades. However, I have noticed that in the US the Pride Parades tend to be exactly what they're called: parades (with floats, people on the sidewalks watching and cheering, choreography, motorcycles, and the like). In Brazil, however, the Parade would be more accurately named if we called it a march (only with lots of music, people in drag, and half-naked men).
What we have here is about twenty "trios elétricos" (which are trucks equipped with huge sound systems, and with a space on top for people to stand and dance, sort of like on a float) blasting electro, house, techno and pop music as they are driven through the circuit of the Parade. The people, instead of mostly standing on the sidewalks to watch, gather around these "floats" as they half-walk, half-dance their way throughout the event, making the Parade look something like this.
In order to avoid ending the post on an unhappy note, I should probably mention the downsides of São Paulo's Parade before giving it all the compliments it deserves. First off, it's important to say that São Paulo is a very gay-friendly city (much, much friendlier than Rio), but, unfortunately, it's also a city that has few but very radical homophobes. I have friends who had to run on occasion from neo-Nazis and gay-haters. This year, to the horror and sadness of the gay community, a home-made bomb was thrown on a place some people were standing, celebrating the end of the Parade (more about it here), and a boy died in the hospital after being beat up by gay-bashers.
The main security problem regarding Pride remains the same: while the government deploys thousands of policemen to aid and protect people during Pride (and they actually do a pretty decent job), they seem to be sent home after the Parade is over, when there are drunken people all around, it's dark, and violent events tend to take place. Smart, huh?
Events like these sometimes make me think we haven't gotten anywhere since the Stonewall riots happened almost forty years ago. And then Pride comes along and shows me just how wrong I am.
The best thing about the Parade is the realisation that everyone around you —maybe for the first time— is free to be who they are. This is especially true when it comes to the more persecuted fraction of our little community: the transgender folk (and all the other people that don't consider themselves in the gender binary). They add such joy, colour and awesomeness to the Parade I'm pretty sure it couldn't be done without them. It kills me to look up to the floats, see those beautiful human beings and think they are also the ones that are more often killed by homophobes. However, I can't help but feel hopeful that the day will come when the Parade won't be the only day they'll be able to feel safe, free, and accepted by our society.
During the last six years, I have also noted that the Gay Parade is often the first event many closeted young LGBT people attend; the first opportunity they have to be out of the closet and to feel what it's like to be among others who face similar difficulties, and who take them for who they are. In other words, to feel authentically free for the very first time.
It is a lie universally repeated that there is no prejudice in Brazil. That here we don't care what you look like, because we have such an amazing mixture of different ethnic groups in our society.
Brazil is the country of the closeted racists and homophobes. Often I have heard from people that didn't consider themselves prejudiced that they didn't think there should be a Pride Parade. That they didn't understand why we were proud to be gay, if they weren't proud to be straight. After all, "there really isn't a Straight Pride Parade, is there?"
When faced with questions like these, I try to be polite and patiently explain that they don't have the need to say to the world they're proud to be straight because, well, the world doesn't persecute them because of it. LGBT people use the Parade as a political movement that shows the world just how many gay people there are out there, and how many people support us. To tell everyone it's not OK to beat us up or kill us just because we're different from them. To ask for the same basic rights everyone else takes for granted, like the rights to an identity and to family.
We have come a long way since the days the police used to beat us up on Christopher Street, New York. However, there is still a long road ahead. And taking this trip magnificently clad on top of a float with three million people all around us at Avenida Paulista, São Paulo, seems like a much better option than doing it alone.
For great pictures and a video of 2009's Parade, click here and here.
-Luiza
