People | On Native Being and Belonging

Paulo Gustavo Helped Me Come Out As a Queer Brazilian

Nicole Froio on a gay Brazilian icon, the seminal show “Vai Que Cola,” and living under Jair Bolsonaro’s anti-queer regime

In 2014 and 2015, one of the few shows I was able to watch with my parents was a Brazilian sitcom called Vai Que Cola (loosely translated, it means “Hope It Sticks”). At the time, I was living in Rio de Janeiro and yearning for a life with a long-distance, long-term boyfriend who lived in England. Partly because I didn’t have UK citizenship, we only saw each other once a year, and I spent most of my time apart from him dreaming about being somewhere else. In my spare moments from the agony of that separation, aside from reading pop feminism memoirs, I needed something to do, but I could no longer stand to watch the crime shows my parents delighted in every night, so Vai Que Cola became our media middle ground.

Staged in front of a live audience, Vai Que Cola chronicles a comedic clash between social classes in Rio. The show kicks off when Valdomiro, played by the late Paulo Gustavo, runs away from his upper-class Leblon apartment to the working-class neighborhood of Méier. Bankrupt and fleeing vague corruption charges, Valdomiro is forced to live in a hostel with the locals, paying for his board by selling quentinhas in the neighborhood. The gag is that Valdomiro thought he was better than all his housemates because of the cachet of where he had lived before—but by the end of every episode and after a number of absurd situations, Valdomiro realizes, over and over, that he has found a new family and a sense of belonging.

Watching such a decidedly Brazilan and distinctly Carioca production in my parents’ living room in Rio was a strange experience for me: A part of me thought it was funny, and another part cynically rejected its blatant Brazilianness. At the time, I kept dreaming of going back to England where my then-boyfriend was, and I blamed most of my longing and pain on my Brazilian citizenship. I was convinced that rejecting everything related to my country would get me a visa to a better life, in a better country.

I was experiencing what Brazilians call sindrome de vira-lata, which can be loosely translated to “mongrel syndrome,” the collective inferiority complex suffered by Brazilians with regards to countries in the developed world. In the throes of this, I believed everything in the US and Europe was better, more “civilized,” than in Brazil.

Despite all that, I secretly loved Vai Que Cola. When Paulo Gustavo made me laugh, it felt like a seduction of sorts; his over-the-top jokes made the part of me that hated my Brazilianness cringe, but they were also too funny not to laugh at. I was in the process of turning back on my culture for being too retrograde and patriarchal, often raving about how I would never come back to Brazil, yet I couldn’t help but love his performances.

But Paulo Gustavo was also putting on a different kind of performance: pretending to be a straight man for the cameras. At this point in my life, I had already imagined what it might be like to date another woman, but I didn’t want to break things off with my English boyfriend. I really wanted to believe that everything would be perfect if I only found my way out of Brazil, built a heterosexual family, and became as close as possible to what I thought the developed world wanted me to be.

As I watched Paulo Gustavo play the role of a straight man in Vai Que Cola, it didn’t occur to me that I was also trying to play a role that didn’t fit me, either.

*

I left Brazil at the end of 2015 to settle down with my boyfriend and work on my Master’s degree in a tiny city in England. Rio de Janeiro became a place in my mind I thought I might just visit on occasion, not somewhere I would ever live again.

But as I shifted into living with a man after years of dating him long-distance, I started feeling like I was living someone else’s life. There were past versions of me who insisted that this reality would fix everything, from my anxiety to my depression, but instead, I felt suffocated.

More and more, I felt confused by my sexuality. I daydreamed about kissing women, wondered what it would be like to hold a woman’s softness in my arms. I even mused about this out loud when I was at his house. “I think I would have sex with a woman,” I said.

He responded quickly: “No, you wouldn’t.” I never mentioned any aspect of my queerness to him again.

A year after my move to the UK, I ended things. After longing for a companionship that would neatly tie together the loose ends of my life, I found myself alone in a new city—willingly. I didn’t know anybody. I felt free, suddenly, to potentially kiss whoever I wanted without judgement. Nobody back home needed to know that I was crushing on girls and figuring out what label described my sexuality, or that I was trying on men’s clothing and flirting with a pixie cut. I kept these experiments hidden until I came out.

The more I understood myself as queer, the more I looked for ways to be both queer and Brazilian.

At the time, I wasn’t engaging much with Brazilian TV, but I did watch Vai Que Cola the one time I allowed myself to visit Rio—from the closet, I watched Gustavo gradually become more comfortable with his queerness, playing other roles in full drag, sometimes breaking the fourth wall to talk about queerness. “I also want to talk about how good that man’s ass is,” he said in the Vai Que Cola film. “But I can’t, because the character I’m playing is straight.”

As I discovered my bisexuality away from home, Gustavo was progressively opening up about his sexuality to the public and making space for a gay man to exist in Brazilian comedy. He was carving a place for himself in a country that had all the reasons to hate him due to persistent colonial heritage of Christianity and “traditional values”—all the reasons to hate me. He did what I could not and still struggle to do: be openly queer in a country where open displays of queerness are not always embraced. And, surprisingly, he was beloved by the Brazilian public.

The more I understood myself as queer, the more I looked for ways to be both queer and Brazilian. Most Brazilian mainstream TV and film that portrays homosexuality does so by turning queer people into “the Other,”a but Gustavo used his queerness as a tool for comedy and satire, purposefuly rejecting being othered in this way.

My excuses for being uncomfortable with Brazilianness because I had felt rejected by it—be that as a woman who felt oppressed by binary gender roles or as a queer person—felt myopic when I actually found LGBTQ people making Brazilian art and trying to change the culture with their creations. Gustavo’s work wasn’t about finding relief and acceptance in the in-betweens of heterosexual Brazilian society; it was about defining queerness as Brazilian. Gustavo’s body of work became a path back to my roots, to a version of Brazil where being queer could be depicted as beautiful art and performance, not as an aberration or sin.

I’ve been thinking about this again today in the wake of Gustavo’s recent death due to complications from Covid-19 at the age of forty-two. The reality is that this kind of queer-positive art was and remains underfunded in Brazil today; it is not visible enough and is sometimes even subject to censorship by the government. But Gustavo’s death clarified the importance of any ground we gain in this fight. It clarified his impact on me and on Brazil.

*

Gustavo’s most successful role was in a movie he wrote called Minha Mãe é Uma Peça (loosely translated to My Mom Is a Character), released in 2013, around the same time Vai Que Cola started being broadcast, though I only watched the whole franchise in the last couple of years. Wearing a wig with rollers, a simple housedress and flats, Gustavo spectacularly embodied the dilemma of Brazilian motherhood and explored the dynamics of the Brazilian family through comedy. In full drag, he captured the essence of a beloved type of Brazilian woman and captivated a mainstream audience in a way that was radical for the time, given Brazil’s general reactions to queerness.

Take, for example, the opening scene. Dona Hermínia, like most mothers, is fed up with her kids. We first meet while she is chasing her daughter Marcelina around her apartment, hair rollers like a halo around her head. In the desperation of getting her kids ready on time, Dona Hermínia is trying to force her daughter to “Get into the fucking shower!” or else. In response to a quick-smart answer from her daughter, Dona Hermínia’s shoe flies off her foot in a ninja-like movement into her open palm, and she throws it at Marcelina’s bedroom door as it slams shut.

This is how Dona Hermínia, a character that would become essential to the Brazilian pop culture landscape, was introduced to the public. The opening scene of the film, which would later become the first one in a larger franchise, is a good summary of Dona Hermínia’s character generally: a blunt mother from the suburbs of Niterói who has a huge personality and militantly keeps her children in check, lest the household fall apart without the order she imposes. (Unlike the Global North, where the suburbs usually demarcate middle-class neighborhoods, in the Global South, the term suburbs demarcates lower-class neighborhoods where rent and land is more affordable; Niterói is a suburb located across the bay from its much more famous and internationally glamorized counterpart, Rio de Janeiro.)

The film tells a comedic story of domestic discontent: After overhearing her teenage kids complaining about how strict and chata she is, Dona Hermínia leaves home in protest and leaves her kids without the housework they are used to being provided with. Confiding in her auntie Zélia through retellings of her memories of raising her kids, Dona Hermínia unceremoniously expresses the dilemma of mothers everywhere: the tension between the joys of raising your children and the solid ungratefulness experienced during motherhood. In the straightforward language of the subúrbio spoken by Dona Hermínia, love, mockery, and displeasure come out all at once in sentences that are layered with the truths of Brazilian motherhood, which makes the audience laugh in their seats like never before.

Dona Hermínia was quickly understood, quite literally, as a kind of “every-mother” by the film’s mainstream audience across Brazil, swiftly transforming the movie into a huge success with mothers and their kids alike.

After Gustavo’s death, I called my own mother to commiserate. She was visiting my brother in upstate New York and had spent the days following Gustavo’s death watching the Minha Mãe É Uma Peça franchise. “I love those films,” my mother told me. “I’ve seen all of them. It’s interesting how Paulo Gustavo understood the role of women in society like that. He was ahead of everyone else. Being a mother is such an unappreciated job, and he really understood that.”

*

I came out to my mom on a video call, the day before I was flying to spend Christmas with my family. The prospect of being rejected for my sexuality in real life was too much for me to bear. I swallowed the lump in my throat, looked at the little rectangle straight up, and said: “I am bisexual,” and I cried. My mom said all the right things: that she loved me anyway, that she just wanted me to be happy.

But the fact that I had to come out and directly confront the possibility of familial rejection was traumatic in itself. In the movies, the main character comes out and then everything gets better. I had worked myself up to this queer coming-of-age moment, and it went as well as it could have gone, but all I really remember from that moment is the fear of being rejected, the mere possibility of being pulled apart from my family.

There’s also no learning curve in the movies. Families simply accept their kids as they are, they don’t struggle with what word to use to describe who your girlfriend is, nor do they admit, after the coming-out event, that yes, they are a little ashamed and that they’re working on it. It took my parents a few years to really get used to not only my queerness, but also how visibly queer I was being online. But I don’t know how else to exist: I’m just living my life as I want to live it.

It was similar for Paulo Gustavo. From an early age, he was often the center of attention, making people laugh while inventing characters. In his home city of Niterói, he became well-known for his big personality and humor. His friends describe him as agregadora—he was friends with everyone, and he wanted everyone to be friends with each other.

His primary love was the theater, and, at twenty-three, he decided that he wanted to be an actor. But soon after, he began being bullied for being gay. “You’re not going to be an actor, you’re going to be a [faggot],” someone told Paulo in 2002, at the very beginning of his attempt at a career. “That’s fine by me,” he responded, then added what seems like a premonition of his eventual public reality: “If I’m going to be a faggot, I’ll be the biggest faggot in Brazil. There’s nothing wrong with being a faggot, so I’ll be the biggest faggot in the country.”

In a cultural landscape where stand-up comedy and theater were thriving in Rio de Janeiro, he took a leap of faith: In three months, he wrote the stage version of Minha Mãe É Uma Peça and crowdfunded R$3,000 (around US$600) from his friends and family. Originally a monologue delivered by Dona Hermínia that was inspired by Paulo’s mother, Dona Déa, Minha Mãe É Uma Peça debuted in the Cândido Mendes Theater in 2006, a venue that seats around one hundred people.

It was as if Paulo was saying: We exist, we will continue to exist, and you cannot stop us.

Dona Hermínia, of course, became an instant hit. The theater was small, and within two months extra performances were added to attend to the demand for tickets. In less than a year, the play was moved to a bigger venue, Leblon Theater, and soon enough the public demanded extra sessions. Finally, the show moved to an even bigger theater, but the tickets simply kept selling out. Against all odds, a gender-nonconforming, seemingly visibly queer man—who was still not out to the masses—was connecting with the Brazilian public.

After the success of Minha Mãe É Uma Peça, Paulo became an unstoppable force in Brazilian culture and entertainment. In 2010, he created Hiperativo, a stand-up comedy stage show where he joked about his fears and relationships and shared funny stories of the everyday. In 2011, he created and starred in the TV program 220 Volts, another comedy where Paulo wrote and performed skits featuring different female characters, including Dona Hermínia.

To Paulo, the laughs he achieved were no less than what he imagined his mission on Earth might be. “I often think, I am here on earth, I must have a mission,” he said in a 2018 interview with his friend Beatriz Fernandes Coelho Gomes, who wrote a Master’s thesis about his life and work. “I keep thinking: Is this my purpose? To be comedic, to make people die laughing, to cure people in this way?”

But being queer in Brazil is a difficult line to walk, especially if you’re hypervisible, and, in 2013, Paulo was forced out of the closet by rumors in the press about his sexuality, to which he responded with an Instagram post in which he officially came out.

Two years after he came out, Paulo publicly married Thales Breta, the man he had been dating discreetly. Whether his audience liked it or not, he loved a man and, against the odds, he gained space in the mainstream media during a time where anti-gay conservatism was on the rise.

*

The force of heteronormative and cisnormative traditions in Brazil cannot be overstated: It is one of the cornerstones of society and, like in most Christian countries, it is often used to coerce and oppress queer kids. For ages, evangelical conservatives in Rio had been decrying LGBTQ-inclusive sex education in public schools, claiming absurdly that being inclusive would somehow “turn children gay.”

In Rio de Janeiro, far-right protesters forced Brazil’s biggest queer art exhibition to be shut down. A few months later, in 2018, the ultraconservative, overtly homophobic presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro was elected. Before he was elected, Bolsonaro had infamously been filmed spouting anti-gay rhetoric. “I’m a homophobe and I’m proud of it,” he says in one clip. His election was a huge blow to the LGBTQ community: I felt grief and fear for everything we would lose when the news confirmed he would be president.

On the day he was elected, in October 2018, the LGBTQ community in Brazil was inconsolable, and the very fragile mental stability we had cultivated over the years started to fall apart. I was still working on my PhD in England, and the only way I could cope was to cry for hours and make a public post about being bisexual. I heard from a friend who, in the desperation of reckoning with the hatred of a whole country, came out to his parents in one angry burst, to the dismay of his dad, who was now, apparently, depressed over his son’s sexuality. A lesbian woman I consistently watched on YouTube got married to her girlfriend in a panic, scared that same-sex marriage would be made illegal under the Bolsonaro administration. My best friend told me about his trans cousin, who ran away from home and the transmisogynistic abuse of her parents. I was certain that what was to come would be incommensurably terrible and that there would be no path back to wholeness for many of us. Unfortunately, I was right.

At the end of 2019, Paulo and his husband went on national TV to show off two new additions to their family: their sons Gael and Romeo. In retrospect, this was a response to the hatred the LGBTQ community was enduring under Bolsonaro’s reign. At this point, Paulo’s depiction of Dona Hermínia had solidified the character as the representation of Brazilian mothers; now here was her creator speaking of love and family. “A family can be two mothers, two fathers, a father and a grandma, a mother and an auntie—the important thing is love,” he said, on the most-watched Sunday show on Brazilian television, a few months before the pandemic hit.

It was as if Paulo was saying: We exist, we will continue to exist, and you cannot stop us.

*

When Paulo Gustavo died, I was still abroad. I had temporarily moved back to my parents’ place with my girlfriend because of the pandemic. We were waiting to be vaccinated and saving money for our eventual move to Rio de Janeiro. After years of internal work and deconstructing the inferiority complex that had eaten me up years before, I desperately missed home. I wanted to experience Rio like an adult who understands herself. I wanted to come home and be as openly queer as I could be. I wanted to hold my girlfriend’s hand under the blinding sun of the beach, kiss her with the taste of coconut water on my tongue. I owed this to myself.

Amidst preparations to return to Rio, I followed the news of Paulo’s hospitalization. On the day he died, one of my close queer friends messaged me the news. We were shocked, thrown by the fatality, trying to understand what it meant for us as queer people experiencing mass death because of government neglect. But my friend’s grieving had been interrupted by their evangelical family. In a voice note, my friend, who does not feel able to come out due to the overwhelming oppression of heteronormativity around them, complained: “My mother was just talking about how Paulo Gustavo died because he said all kinds of crap on TV. She basically almost said he died because he’s gay. I can’t take it.”

I told my friend that they deserve much better than a family that forces them to exist in silence. Sadly, I did not know how to do much else, and I hoped that being there for them, in this moment, might be enough, or close to it.

*

I am now back in Rio, finding an apartment to rent with my girlfriend and settling back into life in the city. Moving back to Rio and renting my own place with my girlfriend feels scarier than when I lived with her in England. I want this relationship tied to the strongest roots I have, which are in Rio. But we are still uncertain about holding hands in public and whether our landlady sees us as a couple. And I am struggling to understand the silences that crop up out of nowhere when I am speaking to people about Paulo.

“This is the building where Paulo Gustavo filmed Minha Mãe É Uma Peça!” I said to the taxi driver enthusiastically, when arriving at my friend’s place the other day. The conversation suddenly hit a wall when it had been flowing easily before. It is clearly still a problem, at times, to mention Paulo’s name to the wrong person. Or maybe I am misreading things. I am noticing how much I’ve changed and how much the city has changed in my absence. Neither of us are the same.

Seven days after his death, a mass in Paulo’s honor was broadcast from Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue to the whole country. Pessoa agregadora, he was called: a person who adds people up, brings people together, brings people in.

A public Catholic mass for a gay man, broadcast to the whole of Brazil, at one of the most significant monuments of the country. “I cannot believe you have died because of the lack of two doses of a vaccine,” one of his best friends, Susana Garcia, said during the broadcast.

Her message of genuine mourning for a queer man in the midst of a pandemic was in stark contrast to those of Brazil’s president, who had infamously said that he would rather have a dead son than a gay son, a declaration many religious communities across the country celebrated. The president’s supporters have likewise refused to bat an eye at his mishandling of the pandemic, like how he refused to buy vaccines for the population eleven times. The coronavirus is not the enemy, the president would have us believe; instead, the real enemies are people like Paulo. The evangelical imperative is to exterminate the undesirables, and the pandemic provided them with the perfect opportunity to do so. So far, 529,000 people have died of Covid-19 in Brazil.

There’s a scene in Vai Que Cola that summarizes what Paulo encourages me to feel about myself as a queer person in Brazil. In this particular episode, Paulo plays a character called Bicha Bichérrima (“Faggiest Faggot”), who comes to Méier to visit the resident gay, Ferdinando (played by Paulo’s friend and frequent collaborator Marcus Majella). One of the characters asks Bicha Bichérrima if he’s gay, and Bicha says he isn’t. So what are you? “I’m the faggiest faggot, the faggiest, there’s no way I’ll ever stop being a faggot!” he says, flamboyantly, loudly, proudly.

In the absence of a government that cares about its people, Paulo taught us to look for laughter in the cracks of tragedy, between the moments of horrifying impotence, during the respites of grief and desperation.

The power of being as queer as you are, regardless of the form that may take, without shame—this is the part of his legacy that will endure for his queer fans; these are the lines we will repeat in our heads when confronted with violence for being who we are.

On the day he died and the days that followed, Brazilians were filled with rage, love, and gratitude. Queer people on social media revealed how important Dona Hermínia had been in their own families’ journeys of acceptance of queerness. Others shared their favorite skits, where Paulo made fun of homophobic people through satire. A journalist reporting on the news of his death outed himself on live television to say that the LGBTQ community was losing a significant member. Another journalist said Minha Mãe É Uma Peça helped him come out of the closet to his family because they watched Dona Hermínia accept her gay son, Juliano.

And beyond the LGBTQ community, the whole country was grieving. What was and continues to be remarkable about Paulo’s body of work is how mainstream it became, despite the clear political edges of his jokes and the characters he created. Take, for example, his character Senhora dos Absurdos (loosely translated to Lady of Absurdities), an upper-class white woman who is openly homophobic: “The gays have an app where they can find other gays,” she complains to the camera. “Can you believe that?”

Paulo’s visibility as a gay man allowed him to create satire that subverted homophobia and made fun of those who are invested in enforcing cisgender heterosexuality as the dominant way of being. As a satirical depiction of the conservative upper classes of Rio, Lady of Absurdities embodied the blatant discrimination espoused by the Brazilian elites, exposing the hypocrisy of Brazilian “morality” and the violent vulgarity of a dominant social class that sees itself as superior to the lower classes. Paulo’s work and public life, after all, offered lightness to the experience of the constant self-abnegation queer people are forced into for their own safety. His characters allowed us to laugh at our oppressors, even if they were in the next room. He provided us with a moment of relief from the weight of national and familial hatred.

Paulo was the complete opposite of president Jair Bolsonaro. His death symbolizes who and what Bolsonaro wants to exterminate: the queers, the artists, the things that make life worth living when the world is unbearable, the kind of art that makes people reflect and change, culture that challenges the colonial heteronormativity enforced in Brazil for so long. Bolsonaro wants to exterminate the very possibility of love and laughter—what makes us human, the things that make us more likely to resist hatred, fight back, and demand more.

“Laughter is an act of resistance,” Paulo fittingly said at the end of last year, as the Covid-19 crisis worsened in Brazil and before he contracted the illness. In the absence of a government that cares about its people, Paulo taught us to look for laughter in the cracks of tragedy, between the moments of horrifying impotence, during the respites of grief and desperation. Even now, at the face of the incomprehensibility of his death, I have to admit he was right: Laughter helps us breathe when breathing is being discouraged.

There is another scene in the same episode of Vai Que Cola where Bicha Bichérrima pitches an idea to Ferdinando. “Look, I have an idea, let’s promise something to each other,” he says. “Vamo ser viado pra sempre! Let’s be gay forever!” he proclaims, as he pirouettes and jumps around enthusiastically. Ferdinando joins him, turning on the spot and hopping up and down. “Let’s be gay forever, we love being gay!” they chant in unison. I promise the same for myself, as I try to build the life I want on my own terms too: Vou ser viada pra sempre.