Brazilian presidential candidate’s stance on LGBT people ‘genuinely terrifying,’ says Stephen Fry
This combined picture shows Brazilian politician Jair Bolsonaro (L) and British writer and actor Stephen Fry (R) (Evaristo SA/AFP/Getty Images; Lennart Preiss/Getty)
British writer and actor Stephen Fry has issued a heartfelt appeal to Brazilian voters to reject far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro and his vision for the country in the October general election.
Fry recorded a video posted by BuzzFeed Brasil in which he offered his view on the politician, whom Fry met in 2013 as part of his BBC programme Out There focusing on homophobia in the world.
Fry begins by acknowledging that it isn’t the place of a British man to tell Brazilians how to vote, but that he was prompted to make his statement due to his “alarm” at Bolsonaro’s steady rise.
Bolsonaro is now leading the polls and survived a stabbing attack earlier this month. When the two met, he was the far-right Rio de Janeiro congressman who opposed the introduction of anti-homophobia programmes in schools.
The encounter with Bolsonaro left a lasting impression on Fry. In his programme, he dubbed the meeting “one of the most chilling confrontations I’ve ever had with a human being.”
In the video, Fry repeated that assessment, adding: “I really felt I was looking into some very dead and frightening eyes indeed.” He described that, outside of the camera view, Bolsonaro was accompanied by a group of guards that were “frightening enough.”
“He lives in a fantasy world of militarism which I find deeply upsetting and frightening,” he said.
Bolsonaro is a presidential frontrunner (Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty)
Referring to Bolsonaro’s divisive rhetoric, Fry added: “The speech he uses against people of colour, women and the LGBTQ community in particular is genuinely terrifying and will result in more broken heads on pavement, more blood spilled, more torture, more killing, more unhappiness, less acceptance, more crying parents. That can’t be right.”
“Surely Brazil is better than this. Brazil is better than Bolsonaro,” Fry concluded.
A YouTube clip of the interview in which Bolsonaro made a series of extraordinary statements, such as denying that homophobia exists because “the majority of homosexual deaths—they die in drug-related situations, prostitution or even killed by their own partners” and claiming that “no father would ever take pride in having a gay son,” has resurfaced in the run to the election.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3ZBeX9uC8s
Bolsonaro, a former military officer, was condemned in November to pay the equivalent of £28,000 for “collective moral damage” after he said on a TV show in 2011 he didn’t have a gay son because his children received “a good education.” On another occasion, Bolsonaro said he’d rather his son be dead than gay.
Anti-LGBT violence in Brazil has been on the rise in recent years. Gay rights campaigners estimated that at least 260 LGBT+ people had been murdered in Brazil in 2010.
In 2017, that estimate rose to at least 445 LGBT+ cases of fatal homophobic or transphobic violence—an all-time-high, according to research conducted by Group Gay de Bahia.
