◂ Brazil

Community

Social events, entertainment, bars, festivals, cafes, bookstores, etc.

• Universidade Federal do Pampa (UNIPAMPA)

  • Campus is a safe space. It is very LGBTQ+ friendly and you will see many visibly queer students and professors. However, it is a bubble. It is very removed from the center of the city, which is where most people live.

• Queer Friendly Spaces:

  • Restaurants: Mr. Broa Burger, a relatively cheap lancheria with a queer/subversive aesthetic and incredibly queer friendly servers; Casa Rosa/Tacos Comida Mexicana, only Mexican restaurant in town, puts on cool queer-friendly cultural events and parties; LEB, Tarragona Café, Neissa Confiteria, and Company Café are hot study spots for students and all are queer friendly.

  • Clubs: Blackout, the only current LGBTQ+ party in the city, owned by two Lesbian women. Although Blackout was once seen as very alternative, it has recently been invaded by majority heteros, and the queer community has felt marginalized from the party. However, there are alternative parties that pop up, like Casa Verde and Galpão; you might also get lucky and live to see an alternative to Blackout if parties like Paradise and Be Happy come back.

  • Bars: Mão Preta is a very alternative bar, with trans employees and great chopps; Bar Tupynámba, where all the gays congregate after night class, you will see dozens of gay couples/tinder dates on any given night, great quentão in the winter; Galeria Pub and Los Angeles Pub are not targetted towards queer people, but both are considered alternative and queer-friendly.

  • Cultural: Casa Pitanga is a culture center that has yoga and music classes, among other things, and puts on cool cultural events, often with the thematic of gender diversity; Festival Internacional de Cinema da Fronteira is a cool cultural event that happens yearly at Santa Tereza and brings a lot of queers in from around the state; Arquivo Municipal is a great place for research and the staff is super supportive of LGBTQ+ research.

  • Parks: Praça Estação is the favorite gay hang spot to drink chimarrão, have queer picnics, make out with the boyzinhos, smoke, and generally exist. Praça Esporte was once the more queer friendly praça, but it has become increasingly dangerous. Praça Escura (or dos Putos) was historically the queer praça, but it is now primarily seen as a prostitution point, very dangerous at night.

  • Other: Medianeira is a great barber shop (for men) that is gay-owned and run by a primarily gay staff.

• This one-hour TV special is all about the LGBT community in Bagé and showcases the project I worked on as a Fulbrighter. (Reportagem Especial sobre a comunidade LGBTQ+. Conheça mais sobre a história e as conquistas do movimento em Bagé.)

Political/Social Environment

Resources assessing queer- and trans-friendliness in your country

• Bagé is full of contradictions when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community. 

  • Bagé is a city known nationally for its “Machismo, tradicionalista, gaucho.” It is a conservative city that voted for Bolsonaro, and is home to much of the wealthy, land owning aristocracy of Brazil.

  • However, in the Pampa region, it is the primary queer magnet, some say only third to Porto Alegre and Pelotas in the state. There are a lot of visibly queer people in Bagé, but there is little sense of unity or community among them. Because the city is small, there is a lot of drama that has stifled many efforts at community building. However, it is common to see a lesbian or gay couple holding hands.

  • Historically, Bagé has been on the vanguard of queer rights. In 1939, the second sex redesignation surgery in all of Brazil happened in Bagé; the first court case in Brazil to approve same sex civil unions occurred in Bagé in 1999; in 2005, the first court case approving same sex couples adopting happened in Bagé, and those women took the case all the way to the STF, guaranteeing all Brazilian same sex couples the right to adopt; and in 2017, the first law allowing Trans people to change their sex and social name on their legal documents was approved in Bagé. 

  • Bagé is generally perceived as a lot safer for queer people than Porto Alegre, since the crime rates are much lower.

  • However, local queer people don’t always feel safe in Bagé. In 2019 there was an incident where a gay couple were kicked out of a straight club for dancing too flamboyantly; in 2013 a Trans person, Lacraia, was the victim of a hate crime by bigots; in 2015, in nearby Santana do Livramento, which you will undoubtedly visit, a CTG (Gaucho Tradition Center) where a gay wedding was going to happen, was burnt to the ground by bigots. Bagé’s municipality took a lot of measures to raise LGBTQ+ awareness and secure LGBTQ+ rights, especially after the murder of Lacraia, but those events are haunting to the people of the Pampa.

• I conducted a research project called “Projeto Memoria LGBT - Bagé” in 2019, raising money to pay student research assistants to help build a Queer History of the city through archival research and oral history methods. I hope to have the website up by the time the next ETAs come. The project has also posted articles in Pesquisa e Sociedade - Annais IV EHM - Centro Latino Americano de Estudos em Cultura.

  • The first article is "HISTÓRIA ORAL E MEMÓRIA LGBT NA CIDADE DE BAGÉ/RS" on page 445-454.

  • The second is "A HISTÓRIA DA SEXUALIDADE NO ACERVO BAGEENSE" from page 957-967.

Legal

Laws that are accepting or discriminatory and legal resources specifically for LGBTQ persons

Grupo Diversidade Sexual e Genero Bagé-RS is a group dedicated to organizing and advocating for LGBTQ+ and Gender rights. Here is their Instagram. They also organize the Pride Parade. There are also several prominent lawyers who have been on the vanguard of national LGBTQ+ rights in Bagé.

Like all our resources, our Brazil resources were recommended by Fulbrighters in the host country. Because of the vast and thorough resource collection the Brazil cohort of 2018-19 provided, we have copied their recommendations nearly verbatim. Please contact us if you have updated information.

Unless indicated otherwise, the above page was written by Christian Flores (he/him/his) and Mary Scott (they/them/their).