In other countries, a host of adaptations had followed the switch to smaller families. Most had a direct impact on male-female relations: postponed weddings, delayed motherhood, a greater number of couples living together without marrying, and higher divorce rates. As with the drop in the number of children, this was also happening in Brazil, but it was taking place very quickly indeed.
The consequences of this upheaval were still rippling outward, further complicating Brazil’s already complex gender picture. Even during Carnaval, those days of permissiveness when men wore skirts and many of the usual rules were subverted, machismo still thrived. The groping and kissing in the streets was very often consensual, but not always. During my first Carnaval I’d almost deployed an elbow-to-the-nose move on a drunken lug who tried to force an interaction, and I’d heard from countless women who were groped or kissed against their will, or who faced a barrage of insults when they turned down a man’s advances.
Beyond the anecdotes, there was hard evidence that traditional, male-dominant gender roles and violence against women remained a real and often unacknowledged problem.
Take one extreme measure: rape statistics. The number of cases had jumped in 2009, when a new law broadened the definition to include sex acts beyond copulation, but had continued to increase nationally and locally, going up around 50 percent in the state of Rio over the three years that followed.
The increase was due in part to more reporting. Campaigns and hotlines encouraged victims to notify police; a new law protected victims of domestic violence, and specialized, women-only police stations took their complaints. But regardless of the numbers, many of the attitudes remained unchanged, and women still shouldered the blame for attacks they suffered. A 2014 survey showed 65 percent of Brazilians agreed with the statement that if a woman is abused and remains in a relationship, it’s because she “likes being beaten”; 58.5 percent concurred there would be fewer rapes if women “knew how to behave”; and 26 percent agreed that “women who wear revealing clothing deserve to be attacked.”
These beliefs were so pervasive they extended even to PUC, Rio’s elite private university, which gave its female foreign exchange students a pink pamphlet informing them that “the policy ‘no means no’ does not apply to all circumstances here (in Brazil). If a girl places herself in a situation where the guy understands that she agreed with having sex . . . he will do all he can to make her cope. And this will hardly be sexual assault, much less rape.” This is an astounding position for a major university to take; it also reveals something deeper.
The position of women in Brazil might be shifting, but this would not be a simple, linear progression so much as a period of turbulence with great gains in some areas and ugly pushback in others.
* * *
I. The 2010 census was also first to record a fertility rate that was lower than 2.1 children per woman, the number necessary for the population to replace itself. This trend was expected to continue, with the federal bureau of statistics projecting the fertility rate would drop to 1.6 by 2020 and 1.5 by 2030.
CHAPTER 13
LOVE IS ESSENTIAL
The temperature was rising within the auditorium of Rio’s Justice Tribunal. Brides and grooms in full wedding regalia took up all the seats and the rows brimmed over with veils, ballooning skirts, top hats. The aisles were dense with friends and relatives. They had come from all parts of the state; many of the men and women about to married had woken up before dawn to take full advantage of the free makeup, hair, and photo services offered by the state of Rio before the ceremony started at 3 p.m. With just a few minutes to go, emotion was running high. From my perch by the stage, I could see hands shaking as they pinned on a last-minute veil, clipped on a bow tie, or blotted out the sweat pearling on powdered brows. Bride and bride held hands; grooms checked each other’s hair one last time.
Rio was about to celebrate the world’s largest gay wedding, bringing together 130 gay and lesbian couples. Its size underscored the ceremony’s bold message: same-sex marriage was not only legal but encouraged by the state of Rio de Janeiro, which advertised, organized, and paid for the whole bash with public resources.
Every detail was deliberate, meant to bolster the political significance of the day. The building was part of the justice system’s infrastructure. The state courts’ choir would sing, along with transvestite Jane di Castro, who would perform the national anthem.
How had Brazil become such a bastion of gay rights? Watching the nervous couples settle and the ceremony’s officiants gather on the stage, I tried to reconcile this reality with one I’d known as a teenager.
Homosexuality had not been a crime in Brazil since 1830, when Emperor Dom Pedro I instituted the country’s first penal code and eliminated references to sodomy, but discrimination and violence against homosexuals was rampant in the 1980s. News reports described that terrifying new disease, AIDS, as a “gay plague,” and the archbishop of Rio, Dom Eugênio Sales, published an op-ed calling the virus “nature’s reaction to sexual perversion.”
Homophobic slurs were common currency among kids at my school, and soccer stadiums echoed with chants of viado, faggot. In the newspapers, I read reports of death squads targeting gays and of the impunity that followed. There were approximately 1,200 gays, lesbians, and transvestites murdered between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, according to the Grupo Gay da Bahia, one Brazil’s oldest and most respected LGBT organizations.I
Twenty-one years later, I returned to find a place that, at least on the surface, seemed its mirror opposite. The defense of rights was no longer dependent on nonprofit organizations with uncertain funding. The state and municipal governments had picked up the rainbow flag. The city had a sexual diversity department; the Carnaval Without Prejudice campaign that had initially drawn me to write about the issue was their initiative. On the state level, Governor Cabral established a department that fostered gay rights. Public service announcements denounced homophobia and everyone, gay, straight, and in between, partied together in the streets.
In San Francisco, one of the global epicenters of the gay rights movement, I’d covered the battles for equal marriage rights as they played out in courts, voting booths, and the streets. Same-sex couples won the right to wed, lost it, only to regain it in 2013. Even then, fewer than half of American states legally recognized same-sex relationships.
But it was back home, in the world’s largest Catholic country and one with a growing number of conservative evangelical Protestants in the legislature, that I would first see the LGBT community enjoy the full panoply of rights, marriage among them. I had not expected this.
A whole infrastructure had been established to ensure that these rights would be respected. The new state agency had set up reference centers around the state and staffed them with social workers, therapists, and lawyers equipped to handle anything from a workplace discrimination claim to an emergency request for housing for a gay teenager kicked out of her house. Working closely with state police, the department had trained 7,200 police officers in LGBT rights and pushed law enforcement to include in their reports whether homophobia was a factor in a crime—an essential step to improve data collection.
But not all was bridal veils and roses. Tension between entrenched cultural norms and new social mores often exploded in violence. In fact, the number of LGBT murders in Brazil had continued to climb year after year, reaching 338 in 2012.II The state of Rio ranked fourth on the list.
To understand this contradiction, I went to Claudio Nascimento, a militant with deep roots in Rio’s gay community. He led the state superintendence for LGBT rights; his own experiences followed the path of Rio’s, and Brazil’s, gay movement. He could help me fill in the gaps.
We met in his office. It was somber, with dark wood paneling and heavy, serviceable furniture clearly inherited from a previous occupant. Claudio himself burst into the room an hour late and in candy-cane spl
endor: a button-down shirt in red and white stripes, a red tie, and a white jacket. He had a broad, earnest face, with high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, and an open manner uncommon in a political figure. We talked for hours over the next couple of days.
His story began like that of so many of Rio’s poor: in the northeast. Claudio was born one of fourteen children of a sprawling and destitute family from Bahia. One of his first memories was the bone-jarring bus ride that took them south in search of work. Five-year-old Claudio’s immediate family took up half the bus.
They came with scant resources. His mother never learned to read; his father deciphered words using bits of newspaper in his spare time. Claudio had a drive that set him apart from his siblings. He made it to college, but left it before completing his degree. The political whirlwind that coursed through Brazil in the mid-1980s claimed him, first as a neighborhood activist, then as a student leader, then, at fifteen, as a member of the nascent Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Workers’ Party, which would eventually carry Lula and Dilma into power.
It was at a leadership conference that another young activist turned to him and teased: “You’re not as revolutionary as you say you are.” Then he leaned in, and they kissed. Claudio lost focus, walked out of the meeting, and took the bus home. With a single kiss, that boy had moved him in a way no girl ever had. As the familiar outskirts of Rio scrolled by—the brick homes with their barred windows, the tangled wires that loop like tropical vines from post to post, the kids perennially chasing a ball—he realized nothing would be the same. He had come out to himself. Coming out to his family, his friends, his community would be much harder.
“My family was conservative, poor, and very religious,” he said. “I had a deep connection to them, to my neighborhood. I was afraid of how they’d react and of being cut off from them.”
Desperate about his quandary, he threw himself in front of the commuter train two weeks later. Police officers pulled him out of the way in time. That brush with death changed his mind. He would live. Where and how, he didn’t know. There was no plan. He walked home, came out to his family, threw clothes into a backpack, and left. He was eighteen years old.
For the next eight months he slept on couches when he found homes open to him, in parks and on public benches when he didn’t. It was in one of these public squares that someone handed him a mimeographed flyer: “Come join this struggle. If you’re gay or lesbian, come participate.” He went.
This was 1989. That year, the Brazilian Health Ministry recorded 8,993 cases of AIDS, but there was no articulated government response to the disease. The still-incipient gay rights movement narrowed its focus to fighting the epidemic and supporting the sick, but the virus seemed unstoppable. The number of people infected more than doubled in the next four years. Among them was a young activist, Adauto Belarmino Alves—Claudio’s partner.
Those were grim days of watching friends die with little support and suffering from great stigma. They pushed Claudio to do something bold, outrageous even: he and Adauto starred in Brazil’s first public gay union celebration. It was April 1994. He was twenty-three and Adauto twenty-nine. The ceremony was a personal choice, not a publicity stunt, but it also came at a moment when visibility was key, Claudio said.
The celebration was heavily symbolic, held in Rio’s health and social welfare workers’ union and officiated by a former Catholic seminary student. It included many of the trappings of a traditional wedding: the two drew up a contract establishing their commitment and registered it with a notary public; they signed up for linen, silverware, blenders, and all the rest at a big department store; and they walked in wearing matching orange blossom tiaras. Afterward, in interviews, Adauto spoke openly about his HIV status. The press was aflutter. Their union heartened the LGBT movement, but it also touched many who’d had no personal connection to the struggle for equal rights.
The next year, 1995, Rio hosted its first international LGBT conference and held Brazil’s first gay pride parade. The number of AIDS cases continued to rise.
That was when Brazil took an unprecedented step that landed it on the front lines of the global fight against the epidemic. The public health system began to distribute the expensive antiretroviral drugs free of charge to all who needed them. It was a constitutional requirement: Article 196 declared, “Health is a right of all and a duty of the state.”
Because government officials had little experience in the field, they leaned on the activists and nongovernmental organizations that had been directly involved with HIV/AIDS work, bringing them and their ideas into the public health system.
In short order, this collaboration turned the country into a model in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Brazil drove a hard bargain over prices and patents of antiretroviral drugs with foreign pharmaceutical companies, created conditions for producing the medication domestically, and organized aggressive prevention campaigns.
At first, the number of new infections continued to climb, reaching 23,546 in 1997, the year Claudio lost Adauto. By 1999, Brazil registered the first slowdown in the rate of new infections. The joint efforts of government and civil society were beginning to bear fruit. Brazil had turned the corner.
The long struggle and the collaboration with the government left LGBT and AIDS organizations stronger, with infrastructure, leadership, funding, and connections. As the 1990s drew to a close, activists found they had solid platforms from which to articulate demands that went beyond public health. Broader issues of safety, justice, and equality were back on the table not only in Rio, but nationwide.
Change accrued within all three levels of government, and across the three branches. Soon a patchwork of laws, court rulings, and new interpretations of existing regulations began to come together and create a substantial set of rights.
By the time gay marriage was declared legal throughout the country in 2013, there had been so many gradual changes that little commemoration or outrage greeted the decision. It wasn’t until it was celebrated Claudio-style —with the world’s largest collective gay wedding—that it reached a wider public.
Nearly twenty years had passed since Claudio’s own commitment ceremony, but aspects of that first celebration marked the mass wedding in the Justice Tribunal’s auditorium that day. It was all very moving, the gathered families, the nervous fiancés, the historic significance of the moment, but no opportunity was lost to make a point.
About a dozen judges, government officials, and sundry legal authorities crowded the stage, each ready with a speech about the momentous occasion. As they droned on for the next two hours, the brides and grooms began to fidget. It wasn’t until Claudio stood to recite a poem by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa—“Love is essential; sex, a mere accident. Can be equal. Or different”—that the gathering shifted from stiff political rally to poignant wedding extravaganza.
When the two presiding judges finally told the couples to stand and face each other, a murmur moved through the crowd. Some, like Marcos Carvalho and Celso da Silva, a balding couple in matching black leather jackets, had waited thirty-four years for this.
Once they’d exchanged rings, all semblance of formality was swept away as women fell sobbing in each other’s arms, bouquets flew up in the air, men whooped and swirled suit jackets above their heads. Next to me, Marcos and Celso fell into a long hug: this was about love, but it was also the end of a very long fight.
“I’m from the time when homosexuals had to run from the police,” Celso told me. “I’ve waited a lifetime for this moment.”
By this point, the happy din echoing within the hall made conversation impossible. Marco and Celso invited me to continue our chat at the reception, a cocktails and hors d’oeuvres affair also sponsored by the state and held on a downtown rooftop.
I found them outdoors, taking in the view of the bay. Between one croquette and another, they told me their story. They met, they fell in love; they faced some ha
rdship, they overcame it; they built a house and raised a child. It was as unique and as ordinary a story as that of any couple. Now it had the name it had earned over thirty-four years: a marriage.
Marco and Celso also told me more about the changes of the last four decades. Rio had become more progressive, they said, but there were sectors of society that found this new visibility threatening. Not long ago gay life was largely clustered around a few nightclubs in Copacabana; transvestites had to wash off their makeup before stepping into the street. Now they were claiming space not only in clubs and bars and sidewalks, but also in Rio’s courts, beaches, schoolrooms, and restaurants—everywhere.
“This provokes some anxieties,” Celso said mildly.
When this tension explodes, the most frequent victims are those on the fringes of Brazil’s unequal society: those who are poor, who are black or mixed race, who live in suburbs far from the glitz of Ipanema’s Rua Farme de Amoedo. They are more vulnerable, he said.
Travestis were frequently a target, Celso said, using a word that applied interchangeably to drag queens, cross-dressers, and transsexuals. I should talk to the ones who worked as prostitutes in Rio’s Lapa district. He knew just the person to help: Luana Muniz. He pulled over my notebook, wrote down her number. Go find her, he said. She’s been around.
I had heard of Luana Muniz—tall, blond, and tough, a sort of transgender fairy godmother of Lapa.III A TV show had gone undercover years ago and caught Luana in a dress that was more straps than fabric, slapping around a prospective customer who, in her estimation, had wasted her time.
Dancing With the Devil in the City of God: Rio De Janeiro on the Brink Page 20