The first LGBT Pride Parade in Brazil took place in 1997, in São Paulo, with the aim of bringing more visibility and demanding rights and public policies for the community. Inspired by the New York Parade, which commemorates the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, an event that became a symbol in discrimination’s fight, the Brazilian Parade became the largest in the world and welcomed, in 2024, around 3 million people. This year’s event will take place on Paulista Avenue on Sunday, June 22nd, with the theme: “LGBT+ Aging is memory, resistance and future”,
“The parade began in 1997, as in other places around the world, as a resistance movement, and it became this mid-year cultural event, which is almost as anticipated as Carnival, because it is a gathering of people, stories, celebration, excitement, struggle, and the convergence of this encounter.
As Brazilians, we love to find ourselves in people. It is this space to meet others, your acronym colleagues, thousands, and millions of others who are just like you. Who share the same feelings as you, or who are different from you, and to celebrate the differences as well,” says journalist and screenwriter Alberto Pereira Júnior.
Alberto is a black, gay man who has been living with HIV for over 15 years. He is an active voice in the fight for the rights and visibility of the LGBTQIAPN+ community. He’s also the co-founder of one of the largest and most traditional Carnival blocks in the city of São Paulo, Domingo Ela Não Vai.
The journalist highlights the cultural importance of the Parade in bringing together diversity, just as the city of São Paulo itself does. Brazil’s largest city is the one that brings together the most different forms of thought and expression due to such a large migratory flow over the years. And the Parade is one of the events that receives the most people from all over the world.
The capital of São Paulo is the cultural center with the greatest support for the LGBTQIAPN+ community and one of the pioneering cities in the birth and development of resistance, integration and diversity movements.
“São Paulo is a city of movement, a city in transit, which ended up developing with this huge, poignant migratory flow from all over Brazil, and later from all over the world. And for the community, it is a large, urban city, which pulses with Brazilian diversity, which also finds in this diversity, acceptance, and resistance”, Alberto says.
The Parade’s economic importance
“The Parade’s impact on tourism is huge, equivalent to Carnival. This flow of people coming from other places, from the interior of São Paulo, from the ABC region, but also from places much further away in the South, Southeast, Northeast, Central-West and North of the country. Even Brazilians who come from outside the country and come to visit participate in this great party, foreigners too.
The entire city benefits from this: the hotels, the app system, taxis, subways, buses, services in general, food, beauty, fashion industry. It is a very rich period economically. And it has the support of society and also of public bodies, the city hall, the state government and the federal government, which generates jobs, business, culture and income”, the journalist continues.
In addition to its cultural influence, the LGBT+ Pride Parade generates an economic impact that varies between R$ 500 million and R$ 764 million per edition. With the support of the Municipal Secretariat for Human Rights and Citizenship, the city of São Paulo invested R$ 4.1 million in the 2024 event. The 28th LGBT+ Pride Parade generated more than half a billion in the local economy.
Besides São Paulo, the Parade becomes popular in other capitals
Aside from São Paulo, the events that that support the LGBTQIAPN+ community exist in several other big Brazilian cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Salvador, but have also expanded outside the metropolises.
Bauru has the largest parade in the interior of São Paulo and receives around 60 thousand people per year. Other cities such as Itu and Bebedouro also hold their own parades, such as the VII LGBT+ Pride Parade and the 10th Diversity Week, respectively.
“The Festa da Chiquita is an LGBT+ event on the Saturday before the Círio de Nazaré, in Belém, Pará, that I always wanted to visit. The Círio is a religious event, but the LGBT+ community is part of it, and the event has its own income,” Alberto points out.
The Festa da Chiquita was created in the late 1970s as a Carnival event and, over the years, it has become a meeting point and a point of resistance for the community. The festival has been listed by the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage and by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). The event is also an intangible heritage of the state of Pará.
“Brazil is a cultural and ethical country that coexists, not always without conflict, but we as a society are more tolerant than the opposite, and we will increasingly find these points that unite communities and be able to celebrate diversity, family, and various families,” concludes the journalist.
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The article above was edited by Isadora Mangueira.
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