The LGBTQ community in Brazil still reels from the brutal attack on a gay man last week. Unidentified assailants attacked the victim in Florianópolis who beat him, raped him with sharp objects, and forced him to carve homophobic slurs into his own flesh.
The Guardian reports that police have not identified the victim by name to protect his privacy. After a brief hospitalization, he returned home to continue his recovery. Police have not made any arrests in connection with the case.
“This is a frightening crime but it’s very common in Brazil, and violence – not only against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people but also women, black people and immigrants – is worsening,” Lirous Ávila, president of the Association in Defence of Human Rights, an organization that helps victims of violence, said in a statement.
Related: Bolsonaro says Brazil must stop being a country of “fags” in its response to COVID
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“It’s absurd to justify violence that is brutal and barbaric,” Ávila added.
News of the crime–which comes at the dawn of pride month, and amid COVID-19 related chaos in Brazil–has rocked the nation and earned wide condemnation from the public. Despite recent advances in queer rights–Brazilian courts banned discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in 2019–homophobia remains an ongoing problem in the country.
“Violence against LGBT people in Brazil has grown a lot recently,” noted Margareth Hernandes, a Florianópolis-based lawyer and president of the gender law commission. “Brazil is the world champion of LGBT murders. We are a very conservative country where there is still a lot of prejudice. Hate speech ends up propagating violence.”
In 2020, the watchdog group Grupo Gay da Bahia reported 224 murders and 13 suicides of queer people in Brazil alone. These crimes often go unpunished or, thanks to systemic homophobia among police, uninvestigated. Activists have also targeted criticism at President Jair Bolsonaro for doing nothing to curb the violence toward the community, and for his long history of homophobia.
“We have a president who compounded this violence,” Lirous Ávila charged. “It seems that the population feels it has a right to commit these violent acts against the LGBT population, influenced by Bolsonaro.”
Cam
That poor man, I hope he’s doing better.
Weird that all of the troll accounts who normally come on here and scream that it’s always Muslim countries where LGBTQ people are attacked stay strangely silent when these attacks occur in Christian countries like Brazil, Latvia, Russia, etc.
ted
Religion is the root of the world’s problems
Vince
This is why you should never let a far right fascist thug into your government. People will die whether it’s indifference to covid or violence against LGBT’s. Same thing could happen here.
Den
Of course, the same thing has happened here.
Under Trump’s watch violence against LGBT people an d other minorities began an undeniable upswing. And once the haters/far right wingers feel empowered to do violence it is hard to curb them, especially when the fake news media (FOX, OAN, Newsmax and so on) and “family values” organizations continue to blow their dog whistles.
nathan
Disgusting, degrading and makes me very angry to read of incidents like this. Bolsonaro is at least partly to blame when people think this kind of violence is just fine – for years he has spewed his homophobic hatred all over his country, and this is the result. That poor man must have been terrified and in agony – makes you cry just thinking about it. We have to what we can to make sure he does not win the election. They have to be stopped from killing and maiming us.
Doug
This is really disgusting. What kind of people do things like this to other human beings? I’m glad the man survived and is recuperating… I can’t imagine how he’s going to ever get over something like this.
silverwolf
This monster said during his campaign that he’d rather see one of his four adult sons dead in a car crash into a tree than to see him holding hands with a another guy. Racists slurs were also comom-place in his rallies speech. Nevertheless, he still got 57.000.000 votes
GayEGO
This is outrageous! These bigots need to be arrested, jailed, and taught about equality and humanity!
TomG
And Brazil is supposed to be a Christian nation. That seems really far from the truth.
SFMike
Not really as Christofascist philosophy leans hard on eliminating all people and activities that they don’t approve of and as you are aware their bronze age holy book lists the death penalty for gay sex among other things. Religion ruins everything and is very dangerous for those wanting individual freedom of expression. Complete separation of church and state is the only hope for saving democracy and individual freedom.
Kangol2
Just heartbreaking to read of this horrific attack on a gay man, in a city, Florianópolis, which is one of the richest and prettiest in Brazil. It’s in the far south of the country and prides itself on being very safe. Stats and reality say something different. As the article notes, attacks against LGBTQ people, especially trans Brazilians; Black Brazilians; and the poor have escalated. Bolsonaro, like Don the Con, has created the conditions for all of these attacks, and, as everyone now knows, he’s also presided over a complete catastrophe when it comes to Covid-19. The calls for him to be impeached and removed need to increase, but however troubled the tenure of his predecessor, he has proved to be one of the worst leaders, on every level, in recent Brazilian history.