Thirty years ago, a march in Rio was Brazil’s first pride parade
The 30th anniversary of Brazil’s first pride parade, held in Rio de Janeiro, will be celebrated this Sunday (Nov. 23). The event is returning to Copacabana beach, its setting since 1995, both to celebrate its journey and look to the future, with the theme “30 Years Making History: From the First Struggles for the Right to Exist to Building Sustainable Futures.”
The three decades are counted from the Marcha da Cidadania (“Citizens’ Rights March”), staged on June 25, 1995, at the end of the 17th World Conference of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA).
The international event’s passage through Rio, requested and made possible by the Brazilian LGBTQ movement, brought great visibility to the community, helped engage groups, and boosted pride parades countrywide. In a number of locations across Brazil, activists had been mobilizing for decades – but with a focus on the urgent need to contain the HIV/AIDS epidemic, said Renan Quinalha, professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp) and head of the LGBT Memory and Truth working group.
“It wasn’t the first time the LGBTQ movement took to the streets, but it was at this point that a demonstration of this kind took place in dialogue with society and with a comprehensive agenda of demands,” he noted.
Quinalha pointed out that Rio’s 1995 march was iconic for initiating a process of awareness-raising that spread throughout Brazil in the following years, reaching millions of participants in the 2000s with the São Paulo parade becoming the largest in the world.
“It can be said that the parades are the largest democratic demonstrations in Brazil. No other movement brings so many people to the streets in various cities every year,” he stated.
First attempt
The first steps towards bringing the ILGA conference to Brazil started four years earlier, in 1991, when activist Adauto Belarmino succeeded in making Rio de Janeiro an official candidate to host the event – a choice that was confirmed in 1993.
That year, the Homosexual Emancipation Movement Atobá Group, the newly created Rainbow Group (“Grupo Arco-Íris” in the original Portuguese), and other movements had attempted to stage a parade on Copacabana beach – but the outcome was a fiasco. Participants added up to fewer than 30 people – most of them the organizers themselves.
Now head of the Rainbow Group for LGBTI+ Citizens’ Rights (“Grupo Arco-Íris de Cidadania LGBTI+”), which has organized the parade since its first installment, Cláudio Nascimento was 23 years old and was one of the people who sat down after the failed march at a bar in Galeria Alaska – a former meeting place for the community in Copacabana – to discuss what had gone wrong.
“The older folks were pissed, saying people were traitors, that they had no sense of community or collective spirit. And we, from Rainbow, a brand-new group, had the nerve to tell them that, instead of blaming the community, we had to consider everything that was keeping the turnout low. We had a lot of work to do on our self-esteem first of all,” he recounts.
The conclusion came after a turning point in the Brazilian movement back in the 90s. More than a decade of fighting the AIDS epidemic as well as the end of Brazil’s military regime and return to democracy took the movement “off the defensive,” said Nascimento, which enabled the creation of an agenda focused on citizens’ rights, pride, and public policies.
When Rio de Janeiro was confirmed as the host city for the ILGA conference, the Rainbow Group realized that this was an opportunity to further strengthen mobilization.
Self-esteem
Despite the breakthroughs, a determining factor still kept LGBTQ people away from the parade – the fear of being recognized in public and facing verbal and physical aggression, of losing their jobs, being thrown out of their homes, and even losing partners who were not willing to come out publicly.
“In 1994, we decided to stop holding the parade, but we did social and cultural events – weekly gatherings that brought together some 60, 70 people,” he added, saying the group hoped to build confidence among participants.
One of these events was the public wedding of Cláudio Nascimento and Adauto Belarmino in 1994, celebrated by former Catholic seminarians at the headquarters of the Rio State Health and Welfare Employees Union. Also that year, an outdoor gathering in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro – called “an afternoon of conviviality” – brought together 600 people.
As mobilization grew, preparations for the conference and the eagerly hoped-for parade in the city remained on the horizon, he recalled.
“We got a fax from New York with more than 50 pages and a series of demands. Then, we decided to lie, saying we had it all covered. If we had told the truth, that we were still seeking support and partnerships, [the conference] could have been canceled,” he admitted.
He noted that he did not feel at ease until the afternoon event was held, with 600 participants. “At that point, we were sure it was possible, because we went from fewer than 30 to as many as 600,” he said.
Starting point: 1995
The Rainbow Group was chaired at the time by Augusto Andrade, who had founded it with friends in the living room of the house where he lived with Luiz Carlos Barros, back in May 1993.
After the conference was confirmed, Andrade says the group faced all kinds of obstacles to its realization, including financial ones, as members incurred debts in their own names to make sure the event could take place.
Registrations from international participants and donations from organizations overseas, activists, and artists – such as singer Renato Russo, who was named the conference’s patron – proved essential. Sound trucks and other resources from the Rio State Health and Welfare Employees Union, as well as the bank workers’ union and the telephone company workers’ union were also vital for the march.
“At that time, ILGA had the status of a UN advisory body. So we used that to open doors, because, for a lot of people, it was shocking, something inadmissible, unacceptable,” he says.
“But we achieved immense visibility. We took homosexuality out of the crime pages and into the economy, politics, culture, and fashion pages.”
The conference was held from June 18 to 25, 1995, at a hotel in the Posto 6 stretch of Copacabana beach. At the center of the discussions – which brought together 2 thousand to 3 thousand people a day – were issues that would only be achieved some 20 years later through court decisions – same-sex marriage, made legal by the Supreme Court in 2011, and the recognition of discrimination against the LGBTI+ people, defined by the court in 2019.
With the parade at the end of this event, the Rainbow Group’s ambition was to create a symbol of mobilization that could be repeated in the following years.
“The parade was the solution we found to make sure the discussion would continue and our agenda would remain alive in the years to come,” Andrade said.
Cláudio Nascimento praises the main symbol of the Rio parade, the rainbow flag measuring 124 meters long by 10 meters wide, which was already present in 1995. The size was strategic. “We wanted everyone to have the luxury of holding it, touching it. If the press had to choose just one photo, we wanted them to choose a picture of this flag. Even today, 30 years later, that’s what happens,” he recalls.
A sense of belonging
Lesbian activist Rosângela Castro was a member of the Rainbow Group at the time. She recalls that, in addition to those attending the international conference and activists from other states, support for the parade came also as a result of promotional efforts in bars, nightclubs, and other haunts of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities.
“We had a lot of people helping with this parade, so there was a really strong feeling of belonging. We felt that, from then on, things would start to change. We’d get a lot of disapproving looks, but there were also many who saw it as something new. They asked themselves, ‘Wow, are there really that many people?’” she said.
After the march in Rio, Rosângela and the Rainbow Group traveled to other Brazilian states, helping organize a series of first parades – including the one in São Paulo, in 1997. The activist remained with Rainbow until the early 2000s, when she founded the Felipa de Sousa Women’s Group in 2001, first dedicated to lesbian and bisexual women, and subsequently focused on lesbian and bisexual black women.
“It wasn’t until recently that I began to see how important I was in all of this, because people kept telling me as much. For me, it was something I had to do, it was like being alive. To this day, activism is what drives me. I’ll be turning 70 next year, and this is my way of life. If I had to do it all over again, I would,” she said.
