The silence of the country queers needs to be broken

There is a violence in the countryside that is far removed from the popularity of Chico Bento, the culture of Mazzaropi and the irreverence of Rosa and Rosinha. There is nothing funny, cute or positively significant in the physical and psychological aggression suffered incessantly from a very young age by LGBT+ people in rural areas, in the countryside, on farms, on smallholdings, in convoys, at auctions, in agriculture, in livestock farming, in family farming, in agribusiness, in all this immense terrain.

I mention so many near-synonyms to show that there are many facets of agriculture, and many sizes. But in all spheres – in some more than in others – there is prejudice against LGBTQIA+ people. Because, as common sense has it, the man of the countryside is first and foremost a “man” of the countryside – even though most family farming is done by women. The man of the countryside is strong, aggressive, tames the ox with his hoof, and plows the land with a hoe.

Soon, a weed seed sprouts a tangle of branches that ties up our discernment in knots. Those who are effeminate do not have these qualities. How can a crazy faggot stretch a barbed wire fence? A trans woman leading a cattle drive? Unthinkable in a rural world that drowns in swamps of ignorance and does not allow intellectual progress to make its way down the road.

Effeminate boys who live in rural areas are pressured every day to be the macho men in boots, pants covered in mud or cow shit, the successor to their father. But in the thick of prejudice, the possibility of a father not germinating is that his son, even if gay, even if effeminate, can run the family business, the land; he is not part of it. Tractors are not for sissies; you have to become a man before you can learn to harness a horse.

How can a crazy faggot stretch a barbed wire fence? A trans woman leading a cattle drive? Unthinkable in a rural world that drowns in swamps of ignorance and does not allow intellectual progress to make its way down the road.

Maybe you’ll find a good place to spend time with your mother in the garden, doing less strenuous tasks. It’s very likely that you’ll be responsible for the smaller animals and play at throwing corn to the chickens and ducks every day – while trying to figure out why they didn’t teach you how to lasso an ox. Making cheese and preserves can also be a way to somehow add a little more flavor to a bitter everyday life like gairoba.

I hope you have the strength to show that a man in the field can be gay, can be a woman, cis, trans. Show that all it takes is competence and a willingness to work.

Because every time I think about this repression – which I experienced firsthand during my childhood in the Pantanal, inspiring this text – I remember my friend Tiago. Gay, queer, and very close to our group of friends. Until one day, at the buatchy, he announced his engagement to a girl, and he was still gay. He needed to marry a woman to ensure that he would succeed his father on the farm. He got married. He has children. Sigh. Are you happy?

I also remember a 15-year-old boy I met in a settlement in the municipality of Serra Azul, in the state of São Paulo. I realized he was gay, approached him and started talking. My heart sank as his opened up because I was one of the few reliable listeners on his path. He couldn’t tell his family that he had just met a really cool boy, that he liked this boy, that he was discovering love.

“My brother will kill me if I’m gay,” he told me. The fear is because “if I am” doesn’t exist, he is. But the brother believed that by repressing him, by threatening him with death, he would no longer be gay. And the threat seemed very real, unfortunately. Because in the countryside there is indeed a kind of justice system that is almost self-contained, very similar to times long gone by. It is no exaggeration to say that many people would defend a brother having killed the other because he was gay.

What did this boy want most? To move away from his family, to be who he knew he was, to be happy. Homophobia in the countryside is violent and drives people away from a place that faces the challenge of succession in the countryside every day. Is it better to end it than to have a gay farmer?

Tractors are not for sissies, you have to become a man before you learn how to harness a horse.

Perhaps those who live in cities and have never had a rural life experience do not understand the extent of this problem. There are many Tiagos. There are many lives suffocated by a layer of heavy soil that was built a long time ago, mixing machismo, religion and lack of vision. A shovel of intolerance compacts all of this. Tiagos are seeds that were not able to put themselves out of this land, grow, get sunlight, compose all this diversity that we are.

But not everything is devastated land and some flowerbeds are beginning to sprout. Some companies in the agricultural sector, mainly those linked to technology and innovation, are already testing diversity policies. The National Confederation of Family Farmers and Rural Entrepreneurs (Conager) has just created its National LGBT+ Secretariat Casa Tibiras (learn more here).

Agriculture can be everything, but first and foremost it needs to belong to everyone.

By Ezatamentchy