There they were, a group of 12 foreigners, friends from the international students group from the university in Brazil. A Brazilian friend had invited the entire group of 12 to her family’s beach house in Angra dos Reis. They all took an early morning bus from Rio de Janeiro to the beach town, happily chattering all the way to the waterfront house. Once there, the kind hosts showed all the rooms on different levels, and everyone chose a place as their bedroom. The house was actually a complex, a couple of buildings with a huge open patio between them. The piers reached out into a bay before the Atlantic Ocean. The visitors were all very excited about their weekend there.
The host selected three to go to the grocery store to buy food and goods for the weekend. Amy went as one of the representatives on the mission for food. The host and his brother and wife all went and they got to know each other. Pretty soon she realized that the host was looking for a good time, as he made a few passes at her. They returned to the house, unloaded all the food, and many hands began to prepare the churrasco and caipirinhas. Music started and everyone began to dance. The model-shaped wife of the host began to teach the students how to dance samba and forró.
Amy was dancing with her friend, a Polish gay man. He was super fun and always up for anything. They danced for hours trying to learn the steps, until the sun fell and everyone began to gather around to eat and drink. The two sat together at the big outdoor table, and listened to the conversations. They had both been in Brazil for only a month, but her Portuguese was significantly better than his. As she began to hear some jokes from the host and his friends becoming more grotesque, she began to worry when she realized they pertained to her friend. Even though she denied to him that there was any threat, he soon noticed that the comments were aimed at him. “Te picou o bicho?” “O foi foi rapaz?” They began to harass him more clearly, using the mosquito sting as a sexual reference and began to come near to him. They began to grab him and push on him. Amy could no longer tell him that the jokes were nothing. Soon she was afraid of the drunk men, and stretched herself over his lap, with her arms over his shoulders and legs to protect him. It was extremely humiliating. Finally, someone intervened and took the most aggressive man away.
They fled to the pier in the dark, away from the group. Alone on the pier, she hugged and comforted him. They were skinny dipping in the water when the others arrived. The students were joyful and jumped in too, oblivious to the severity of the recent attacks. But then the men arrived again with their taunting jokes. Somehow Amy and her friend got away and found a vacant couch on the bottom floor. Their theory was that since the hosts had assigned rooms, they could go looking for him there in the night. She awkwardly held him through the night. He told her that he had never been so humiliated and that in Poland this had never happened to him. He was not expecting such behavior in Brazil.
The next day, in the early morning, the two fled, leaving notes for their friends; not saying goodbye to anyone as they wanted to leave before anyone awoke. He took the bus back to the city to spend the weekend with some friends there, but Amy could not return to normalcy. She bought a boat ticket to Isla Grande, a large island off the coast that has very few small boarding houses and mostly campgrounds with some very well-preserved beaches. Why was she so upset? The offense was not even to her. As she reflected back to the moment the night before at the table when the taunting began, she remembered having a flashback to a moment in the back seat of her dad’s truck, he and her mom in the front, they were driving down a windy country road in the dark of the night. Her parents began to discuss friends from high school. At the mention of one guy’s name, her mom informed her dad that that guy was gay. Furious at the thought, he said, “We used the locker room with him, he was on the basketball team. We should have castrated him right then.” Amy was appalled and disgusted, not to mention scared, sitting there as his lesbian daughter, frightened by what he had said. That moment is one that she was never able to forget or confront him about, as the possible response was too ominous.
The next few days on the island in Brazil were her release of anger and fear around this topic. She explained it to me like this. Why is there lashing out of violent words and in many cases physical abuse toward queer people? The night with her Polish friend made her think of Matthew Shepard and the many queer people like him who have been killed due to prejudice and uneducated populations. She battled these feelings surrounding her father while she was hiking, camping and swimming at the gorgeous beaches. She shied away from people who wanted to chat and meet a foreigner, and she analyzed those fears. She had never experienced such a threat as the previous night, and at the hand of people who had invited them in, who seemed kind. The fact that being gay can trigger aggression against the queer person is quite frightening. She despised those men that night and still today. The most troubling thought was, “What if my father had been in that situation, would he have been among them taunting my friend?” The feeling went from anger at the situation to fear of people so close to her being part of such an act.
“The island healed and protected me. I hiked alone on the hilly trails that dissect the island through a wealth of trees. Each trail leads to a different hidden beach with crystal clear blue water and calm seas. I tried to escape what I was feeling, but really even though this happened five years ago in Brazil, still today I carry with me that experience of being a young girl hearing those words from a father whom I loved. Although it is actions that cause bleeding, words cause pain too; and sometimes those words remain longer, followed by the uncertainty of what they meant; and even more, of how they could be used.” – Amy, 2016
