Currents

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I was once a darling of Brazil’s LGBT movement. That ended when I defended free speech. Over more than a decade in LGBT politics, fighting for understanding and acceptance as a student, scientist, and journalist, I experienced firsthand a shift in Brazil. Sadly, the shift has not been for the better. Generations of hard work brought us significant strides in LGBT legal protections and more accepting public attitudes, both of which are now threatened by the activist class’s abandonment of nuance, evidence-based approaches, and respect for individual freedom. My story is, in microcosm, reflective of a dynamic that has played out across much of the industrialized world.

Ride of the Valkyries

In 2011, I received an anonymous question on Tumblr: “What are the origins of homosexuality?” At the time, I was a master’s degree candidate in genetics and molecular biology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil, early into the two-year program. I was an activist, too, having co-founded the Secular Humanist League of Brazil (LiHS), for a while, the largest humanist organization in South America. I was also freshly out of the closet as a 20-something gay man, but up to that point, I hadn’t really used biology as a lens through which to understand my sexuality.

My answer to this anonymous questioner, published three months after Lady Gaga released “Born This Way”, largely summarized a chapter on the behavior genetics of homosexuality written by the sexologist J. Michael Bailey and colleagues. My response also linked to a piece I had previously written about Paul Vasey’s “good uncle” hypothesis which explains that despite not usually having children, homosexual individuals help raise nephews and nieces and thus have Darwinian value.

Almost two years later, I was a Ph.D. candidate in genetics at Cambridge University, UK. Research was going well. I was studying three types of bacteria capable of changing the sex of insects, arachnids, and crustaceans, and went on to publish some widely cited papers in the years to come. But by then, a decade of romantic failures and a failed marriage (with a man) weighed on me. Like so many in my generation and younger, I was lonely, and I leaned into activism as a remedy.

In February 2013, my two worlds of activism and science collided in a good way. A famous Brazilian Pentecostal televangelist, Silas Malafaia, went on a talk show and began throwing bombs. He claimed that homosexuality has no genetic component and that 46% of gay people became gay because they had been sexually abused as children — the old recruitment hypothesis. The rest, he said, simply make an immoral choice. Progressives and non-homophobes all over Brazil were livid. I decided to reply.

I checked that oddly specific statistic Malafaia had used and found the original source. Unsurprisingly, he was mistaken about what it said. I expanded on what I wrote in 2011 by citing additional research including data on twin studies and explained that there was a difference between sexual orientation and gender identity; all with a pinch of sarcasm and a jab at Malafaia’s creationism. This resulted in a 15-minute video that went viral, giving me 15 minutes of fame. Friends reported being in bars and overhearing my name in other people’s conversations. My father, to whom I had come out of the closet a month earlier (fathers really are the last ones to know), was bursting with pride alongside my mother and three sisters. My graduate supervisor liked the video and said people were emailing him from Brazil, asking him to discipline me. I felt like I was on top of the world. I was cycling around Cambridge listening to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Malafaia was clever enough not to mention my name, but he did respond. He referred to me as a young little thing who hadn’t even cut his teeth yet in the field of genetics. I, in turn, told the press that this was a tailor-made ad hominem attack meant to avoid addressing the substance of my arguments and my scientific sources. I had become a sort of minor public figure. As a result of my higher profile, I became friendly with Jean Wyllys, at the time Brazil’s second openly gay member of Parliament in the lower chamber, and the de facto leader of the Brazilian LGBT movement.

The Rise of “Lacrar”

Things began to change around 2014. I was an early critic of Critical Social Justice (CSJ), or what the anglosphere colloquially calls “wokeness.” In Brazil, our Portuguese word for this is the verb “lacrar”, which means “to show that someone is wrong in a way that humiliates them.” From the get-go, the emerging activist class devoted to CSJ rubbed me the wrong way with their obsessive fixation on identity; disregard for fairness, proportionality, or actual tangible outcomes; fondness for jargon-heavy word salad; and their propensity for domineering moral grandstanding.

I saw myself as a feminist, but was critical of the male-bashing radical feminists who were absolutely thriving on social media and sowing discord and infighting within the humanist organization I led. The MP and leader of the Brazilian LGBT movement I mentioned, Jean Wyllys, was by that point an honorary member of my humanist group. At the time, he shared my view of this new school of thought taking over activism and reposted a cartoon I made about homophobia, praising me for having a “broad intellectual repertoire.”

My association with Wyllys led to a paid invitation to present a lecture about the biology of transsexuality for the Teachers’ Union of the State of Espírito Santo. After my talk, Toni Reis, president of ABGLT (Brazilian LGBT Association), approached me to say that he was pleased with my presentation. I was generally well-received within the LGBT movement except among the growing cohort of postmodern and blank-slate academics specializing in Critical Queer Theory (essentially the LGBT version of CSJ ideology). The Queer Theorists hated my viral video because of its “essentialism” — the label they mistakenly assign to just about anything having to do with biology, genetics, or evolutionary psychology.

My video was supported officially by the Brazilian Society of Genetics with an explicit note of endorsement, and analyzed by different humanities scholars. Two senior anthropologists were sympathetic to my position, which was, of course, never “genetic determinism” but an affirmation that genetics contributes to sexuality. While trying to poke holes at genetic explanations in the name of academic rigor, the anthropologists recognized that “many Brazilian LGBT activists leaned toward supporting the geneticist” [i.e. my conclusions]. Other scholars were less happy. A “discourse analysis” paper published in slippery postmodern rhetoric sneered, “We believe both the preacher [Malafaia] and the geneticist [i.e. me] are ‘qualified’ people.” Notice the scare quotes. When it came to explanations of homosexuality and bisexuality, ironically, these academics, for all their progressive posturing, had a lot in common with the televangelist Malafaia. Like him, they were cultural determinists hostile to scientific evidence.

The Unforgivable Sin of Defending Free Speech

Things changed quickly from that point onwards. The old-school pro-free speech liberalism that underpinned the push for LGBT rights from its very inception was abandoned by a new generation of activists. Anyone, like me, who continued to champion free expression as an indispensable human right, quickly became the enemy in the eyes of the zealots who took over the movement.

Besides my daily writings in opposition to Critical Social Justice, I did three things that got me in trouble with activists. First, I defended free speech for Malafaia himself. Toni Reis of the Brazilian LGBT Association and the activist lawyer Paulo Iotti were trying to use state power and an uncharitably loose interpretation of intent to censor the preacher for remarks he made about the São Paulo Pride Parade in 2011. The Parade displayed art inspired by Catholic saints. Malafaia said the Catholic Church should not let this slide and should “descend the rod” on the activists. This imperfectly translatable idiomatic expression means, clearly, to criticize and berate them, not to literally use clubs to pummel the activists into submission. However, the authoritarian crowd in the LGBT movement preferred to interpret the preacher’s words as incitement to violence, a limit on expression every liberal agrees with.

In this case, Malafia eventually managed to avoid getting censored, but the activists subsequently made sure he and those like him would get in legal trouble today if he repeated his words due to new court decisions that criminalized “hate speech.” (More on this later.) My defense of the free speech rights of Malafaia, a fundamentalist bigot whose homophobia I had made a name for myself by opposing, was, to me, a matter of principle. To the movement, it was a betrayal.

I got myself in trouble again with illiberal activists by defending the right to free speech of another homophobe, the late politician Levy Fidélix. A hopeless presidential candidate for many years, Fidélix took advantage of Brazil's public party financing system to run in many elections despite having no chance of winning. He once said in a televised presidential debate that “an excretory organ cannot reproduce” (a reference to anal sex). Despite the fact that he had broken no laws, CSJ activists tried to have him legally punished. They succeeded, and he was dealt a heavy fine in 2017. Fidélix died four years later.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came when I criticized Jean Wyllys for literally spitting in then-candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s face in our House of Representatives over Bolsonaro’s homophobic taunts. While an understandable impulse, that spit gave millions of votes to Bolsonaro, who went on to become President of Brazil. For my position that unpopular, stupid, and bigoted speech must be allowed, Wyllys pejoratively called me an “ultraliberal”, as though that were an insult. He also suggested that my views must be informed by internalized homophobia rather than principles. Iotti, always the lawyer, backed Wyllys up by appealing to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and other authorities who “don’t accept this ultraliberal individualist absurdity.” This is the same ECHR who, a year later, supported blasphemy laws and confirmed that Austria could punish a woman for saying that the Prophet Mohammed was a child molester because his wife Aisha was six or seven when they married. My relationship with Wyllys only broke down further. Those interested can find much of our falling out still available on Wyllys’s Facebook profile.

Fake Statistics and Judicial Activism

Iotti and the new identitarian, illiberal LGBT movement have succeeded in creating law by judicial fiat, first in 2019, and again in 2023, criminalizing homophobic “hate speech” in Brazil through undemocratic means. To do so, the ministers of the Supreme Court, prompted by activists, acted not only as lawmakers, which is unconstitutional — they also claimed that LGBT is a type of race in order to classify homophobia as a kind of racism, taking advantage of the fact that racism has been a crime in Brazil for decades. Clear interpretive creationism of the legal variety is a dish which the LGBT activist class eats up gladly.

As I showed last year, the judges based their decision on a bogus murder statistic released by the non-governmental organization The Gay Group of Bahia (GGB). Along with four collaborators, I debunked this statistic weeks before the first Supreme Court decision to criminalize homophobia without the parliamentary process through which a bill becomes a law. Just as with Wyllys, I was told by Luiz Mott, the founder of the GGB, that I had “internalized homophobia” for defending democratic principles and speech rights. There was a pattern in this accusation, but it wasn’t about me.

If Jean Wyllys was king of the Brazilian LGBT movement and Iotti his attack dog, Luiz Mott was and still is pope. As an anthropologist and historian, Mott has done good work as a pioneer for LGBT rights. He rediscovered a case of a native who was blown to bits at the mouth of a cannon by French colonizers in the 17th century in Northeastern Brazil. The victim was either gay or trans. Mott asked the Catholic Church to apologize for the execution — a fair request — but also insisted that this crime alone should make the poor soul, “the first Brazilian victim of homophobia”, a saint. What chutzpah.

In our fact-checking report, we showed Mott’s “statistic” claiming that nearly 350 Brazilian LGBT people were killed each year because of bigotry was false. The figure included uncertain reports such as people who died of drowning and a misreading of news headlines about at least one straight couple who was killed. Mott and his collaborators insist that cases like a drug-dealing lesbian being killed by her competitors for territory are examples of death by homophobia because homophobia is “structural” in Brazil. This is a Critical Social Justice dogma (anything bad that happens to “marginalized” people is the fault of The System) used to justify claims that otherwise make no sense.

Fellow fact-checkers and I were able to confirm homophobic intent in only 9% of the deaths his group claimed in their 2016 report — the same report credulously cited by the Supreme Court.

This argument, as we showed, is a perfect circle. They say these cases are a result of homophobia because it is structural, and we know it is structural because these cases prove it. I found this reasoning both in official documents, including some published by the Human Rights Ministry of Brazil. Meanwhile, serious research shows Brazil is the second least homophobic country among middle-to-low-income nations. These NGOs led by Mott’s pioneering work are slandering my country as the leading homophobic killer in the world, and it’s simply not true. Mott reacted in all too predictable fashion, telling the press, “Our critics have blood on their hands”, while tepidly recognizing his data are “incomplete.”

Jean Wyllys, meanwhile, was recently hoisted by his own petard. A few months ago, Eduardo Leite, the first openly gay state governor in Brazil, resisted President Lula’s decision to close military schools. Wyllys, who was once photographed wearing Che Guevara-style attire, claimed that Governor Leite did so because “Gays who suffer from internalized homophobia generally develop a libido and fetishes for authoritarianism and uniforms, especially if they’re white males.” His remarks lost Wyllys a job opportunity with the Lula administration, but more ironically, he has now been formally indicted for homophobic hate speech by the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Wyllys and Mott can rest assured that, because of my principled stance for free speech, they are at no risk of being indicted for what they said about me. I refuse to use unjust laws, even for my own benefit. I want them to keep thinking about their role in the Brazilian LGBT movement, and ask themselves if extremist identitarian dogma and advocating for censorship is working for them.

I have now lost almost all hope of finding truly liberal LGBT advocacy in my mother tongue. The need for it is quite simple: LGBT people have been denied our freedoms for millennia, so we should at least think twice before jumping on the Censorship Industrial Complex bandwagon and normalizing restrictions on individual liberty. In free societies, citizens should be required to put up with words offensive to them, as long as these words or expressions don’t credibly call for violence or are objectively slanderous. That means having high standards to differentiate between subjective offensiveness and literal threats.

While free to love and marry, we should ask only for tolerance from each other and aim to win acceptance by persuasion, not by force. If we are to stop the tide of public opinion from turning on us, after decades of successful progress through liberal means, we need to stop using governmental force against other people’s freedom to think and speak. We would be well-reminded that even if we are politically ascendant today, political winds can change. It is short-sighted to erode the norms and frameworks that enabled decades of progress for our community. Our instinct should be to reach for reason and evidence, not fall for the lure of abusing state power as is all too common in flawed democracies like Brazil.

Published Oct 6, 2023