THE WORKING CLASS AND THE LGBT MOVEMENT IN BRAZIL
By: Alexandre Frederico Oliveira Almeida
The majority of LGBT people from Brazil struggle to understand the way they experience love is legitimate even though it is different than the heteronormative cisgender style that rules our society. The journey of acceptance that we’ve been through has been hard and painful, therefore, we live in a world that restrings and patronizes the love, family’s structure, ethnicity, race, gender and social class. After all of the suffering and fighting against the internal homophobia, finally acceptance is achieved, but the struggle isn’t over, because now we must fight for the rights of expressing our gender identity and sexuality to society at large.
When one finally comes out of the closet, especially in peripheral countries such as Brazil, the structural prejudice starts to show its face and is reproduced into the LGBT person’s family, work, school and community. To suffer the oppressions and harassments coming from everywhere, one may think that those individuals are the real enemies, because they’re full of ignorance and prejudice and this will never change. However, the LGBT people, their family, coworkers and friends also need some time to ponder, acknowledged and overcome their internalized LGBTphobia. Understanding where the prejudice comes from is one of the ways to destroy it.
Whenever oppression manifests itself in society, someone benefits from it, this is historically notable for Brazil as it is a country that always survived based on a logistics of oppression of the “Other”. If one is not part of the oppressors, he’s invariably part of the oppressed (of course it must be take into account the many intersectionalities such as gender, race, sexual orientation and others).
The right to private property and heritage are in the base of capitalism. Thus there appears a need for an heir (that’s white, cisgender, straight and male) and to guarantee that there’ll be one, the Catholic Church, as an institution, was responsible to create and maintain a idealized ideal patriarchal Cristian white family. Everything that is considered is treated to the system and will be retaliated with violence, in all of her levels. Even though Brazil was born from a catholic tradition (and for tradition I mean “everyone was obligate to be catholic and the others religions were persecuted”), the evangelical church is now massive power and experiencing tremendous growth. This is problematic as the catholic church and the evangelicals work for the continuation and strengthening of the patriarchal family. Presently, the evangelical churches are making a stronger countermovement opposing the LGBT rights movement. These religions remain very powerful and influential, they have lots of money, and great representation in the State (Even though Brazil “is a secular state”) with representatives in the legislative and executive branch. The Evangelical Parliament Front articulates against many topics of the civil rights movements (such as race and gender equality, the right to abortion, euthanasia, equal marriage for same sex couples and others). But it’s notable that the conservative speech is used to draw away the attention of the political projects they support, they voted in favor of absurd laws such as reducing the criminal liability from 18 to 16 years old, which will increase the already massive prison population (The black movement was extremely against it), the Welfare Reform and the Labor Reform, the majority of their electors are workers and this is not the agenda they voted for.
The similarities between us and the people around us is much bigger than the differences. We are exploited every day, we have to wake up early to work more than 8 hours a day, take crowded busses, sell our work without receiving, most of the time, a salary that can supply our needs, pay high prices for food, suffer violence on the streets, suffer with the violence of the police, take long queues in crowded hospitals without even knowing if we will get attendance, never having access to the on city, to culture, to sports and many others oppressions that we have to deal daily and I could continue to type forever because they seem endless. So I have to ask why is so hard to realize, both for us LGBTs and for ours working class fellows, why are we so divided? We may experience the same prejudices, but the people in power, with their policies continue to oppress us both. Let us find some similarities and bridge our divide, to make both of our lives better.
As Audre Lorde said in her unforgettable speech “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions”:
“I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, .wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.” — LORDE, 1983.
The revolution will be colorful, or it won’t be! We can’t have the luxury of fighting against one form of oppression, because they come from the same source, Capitalism. Racism, homophobia, machismo(sexism) and class struggle are all part of a logistics that privileges one to the detriment of other. We must destroy this idea and not try to overhaul it. So then I ask to all LGBTs and fellow works to combine our strengths and battles to create a society that is in fact made for us, by us.
