The iconic yellow and green of Brazil’s flag mixed with a sea of rainbow-colored tutus, hand fans and drag queen hairdos at Sunday’s LGBTQ+ Pride parade in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The annual event along Sao Paulo’s main thoroughfare is among the biggest gay Pride celebrations in the world, attracting thousands of people to celebrate the sexual diversity in a nation synonymous with street partying, but where violence and discrimination against members of the LGBTQ+ community has surged.
While apparel is mostly optional, this year organizers made a special appeal for participants to wear green and yellow in a pointed rebuke to far-right followers of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who have appropriated Brazil’s national symbols for themselves.
Photo: Bloomberg
“We will march this afternoon to take back our flag and to show that Brazil will be better, it will be queer, butch, transvestite,” Erika Hilton, who in 2022 became one of two openly transgender people elected to the Brazilian Congress, told a cheering crowd of revelers.
Although Brazil has pioneered LGBTQ+ rights in Latin America — transphobia was made a crime in 2019 — the nation still has the largest number of transgender and queer people murdered in the world.
Brazil was responsible for 31 percent of the 321 murders of transgender and gender diverse people reported murdered worldwide last year, according to Transgender Europe, which collects data globally.
It was the 16th consecutive year that Brazil led the list.
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