A paradigmatic example of “backsliding”

In recent decades, the quality of democracy in Brazil has experienced a significant decline. A good indicator is provided by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute’s Liberal Democracy Index (LDI). Brazil’s LDI dropped from a high of 0.795 in 2011, one of the highest in Latin America, to 0.511 a decade later (Spektor Reference Spektor2024, 69). The roots of this decline are not hard to locate. Since 2011, Brazil has endured a series of traumatic events that paved the way for Bolsonaro’s rise to power, including an economic crisis, a corruption scandal that embroiled virtually the entire political class, and the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female leader (Encarnación Reference Encarnación2017; Hunter and Power Reference Hunter and Power2019; Brancoli Reference Brancoli2023). These events polarized the electorate, fueled massive discontent with the political establishment, caused a collapse in trust in public institutions, and increased Brazilians’ appetite for the kind of leadership that Bolsonaro promised: bold, uncivil, and illiberal.

Once Bolsonaro took office, in January 2019, his authoritarian instincts were unleashed. Half of his first cabinet was composed of people with military backgrounds, including Bolsonaro and his vice president, Hamilton Mourão. Bolsonaro also reinstated commemorations of the March 31, 1964, military coup. This decision reversed a halt on celebrations of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985 enacted by the Rousseff administration in 2011. Bolsonaro’s intention was to undermine all the work that Brazil has done in recent years to come to terms with the legacy of the brutality of the military dictatorship (Atencio Reference Atencio2014). The final report of the National Truth Commission, a body created in 2011 by Rousseff to investigate human rights abuses committed by state agents between 1946 and 1988, with a primary focus on the period of military dictatorship, “identified over four hundred individuals murdered by the military, many of them ‘disappeared’ in an attempt by the military government to cover its actions” (Encarnación Reference Encarnación2022, 191). Many more were tortured, including Rousseff, who was arrested at the age of twenty-two and spent almost three years in prison.

Thousands of active duty and retired military officers were also placed in key government positions with the clear intention of weakening civil service bureaucracies (Bauer et al., Reference Bauer, Lotta and de Holanda Schmidt2025). In particular, Bolsonaro targeted the state’s regulatory apparatus, a priority for Bolsonaro’s supporters in the agribusiness community. Ibama, the environmental agency, was stripped of much of its powers. He also undermined the public health system at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which killed some seven hundred thousand Brazilians. In 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, Bolsonaro criticized measures undertaken by health officials to curb the pandemic, such as wearing masks and avoiding crowds. He argued that the physical strength of Brazilians would allow them to power through the pandemic. “They can jump in raw sewage, and nothing happens,” he famously remarked.Footnote ³

This was all a prelude for the dismantling of the checks and balances that liberal democracies put in place to ensure accountability of the executive branch, a type of democratic backsliding that has been termed “executive aggrandizement” (Bermeo Reference Bermeo2016, 10). In March 2021, Bolsonaro began to use a dictatorship era law—the National Security Law—to silence his critics, including protestors who called Bolsonaro’s managing of the pandemic “genocidal” and displayed a cartoon depicting him next to a Nazi swastika.Footnote ⁴ He also went after the press. The NGO Reporters Without Borders recorded 580 attacks by Bolsonaro against the media in 2020 alone, a figure that was typical for every year of his administration.Footnote ⁵ These attacks generally entailed bullying, threats of prosecution, and name-calling, and were often aimed at female journalists.

In an effort to undermine checks and balances, Bolsonaro attacked the judiciary. The attacks grew so serious and widespread that in 2022 a group of eighty prominent jurists filed a petition with the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers to investigate the situation in Brazil. It noted: “The Brazilian judiciary is under siege. Judicial independence in Brazil is facing challenges that are unprecedented since democratization in the 1980s.”Footnote ⁶ Bolsonaro’s main target was the Supreme Federal Court (or STF in its Portuguese acronym), Brazil’s highest court. He attacked several of its individual members, especially justices Alexandre de Moraes and Luís Roberto Barroso, whom he accused of acting as dictators out to get him. He also urged the public to disobey the orders coming from the STF and ran against the judiciary during the 2022 presidential campaign.

Bolsonaro also targeted the electoral system, with an eye toward undermining its integrity. He introduced a constitutional amendment mandating the exclusive use of paper ballots in federal elections, claiming, without any evidence, that the current electronic voting system, which got him elected in 2018, was vulnerable to fraud. The amendment fell short of the three-fifths majority required for approval. He also invited diplomats to his office to talk about the presumed vulnerabilities of the voting system, posted on social media a classified report about the hacking of an electoral court in 2018 to suggest fraud, and set up an audit scheme of the country’s electronic voting machinery to be conducted by the military. And just four days before the elections, he released a document that claimed, without any proof, that government employees were ready to manipulate the election results.

A final assault on democracy arrived on January 8, 2023, when Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed the capital city of Brasília hoping to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The attack was inspired by the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol, in which supporters of President Trump successfully stopped the certification of president-elect Joseph Biden. Spurred by Bolsonaro’s unfounded claims of electoral fraud and hoping to instigate a military intervention, a mob flying Brazilian flags invaded government buildings, including the presidential palace. The buildings sustained significant damage (some US＄3 million) and more than a thousand people were arrested.

Gay rights during the Bolsonaro era

LGBTQ Brazilians greeted Bolsonaro’s election on October 28, 2018, with trepidation, if not outright panic. Jean Wyllys, an openly gay congressman and Brazil’s best-known gay rights advocate, resigned from his job and left for Spain in January 2019, claiming that death threats and a smear campaign were driving him into a self-imposed exile. He returned in 2023. There was also a rush to the altar by same-sex couples. According to Brazil’s statistics agency IBGE, “same-sex marriage in Brazil rose 62 percent in 2018, and a fifth of the 9,520 gay weddings took place in December.”Footnote ⁷ Those rushing to the altar were acting on the advice of the Brazilian Bar Association and gay rights organizations. Both warned that Bolsonaro would seek to overturn gay rights, including gay marriage, shut down LGBTQ crisis centers, cancel public health care for transgender individuals, and ban gays and lesbians from serving in public offices.

Such an intense reaction was justified. Bolsonaro’s reputation from decades of service as a federal congressman from Rio de Janeiro (1991–2018) was that of an incorrigible homophobe. “Yes, I am homophobic and very proud of it,” he once proclaimed.Footnote ⁸ He also said “that he would rather his son die in an accident than be gay” and that parents “should beat being gay out of their children.”Footnote ⁹ He described gay marriage as “a blow to family unity and family values” that “would result in children of gay parents being indoctrinated into being gay.”Footnote ¹⁰ He even threatened violence against the gay community. Commenting on a widely-publicized 2002 picture of then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso at a gay marriage rally, Bolsonaro noted: “I won’t fight against it nor discriminate, but if I see two men kissing each other on the street, I’ll beat them up.”Footnote ¹¹

Predictably, Bolsonaro’s 2018 presidential campaign against former São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad was a veritable extravaganza of political homophobia, or the deliberate use of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric for political gain (Weiss and Bosia Reference Weiss and Bosia2013). A meme that went viral falsely accused Haddad of supporting policies that would forcibly turn children gay and transgender. It showed a picture of Haddad with a quote attributed to him that read: “When they turn five, children will become the property of the state. It’s up to us to decide if a boy will become a girl and vice versa! It’s the parents’ job to respectfully comply with our decision! We know what’s best for children.”Footnote ¹² The attack mirrored a trend among Brazilian conservatives of claiming to be protecting children from ideological indoctrination on issues of gender identity.

Adding to concerns about Bolsonaro among LGBTQ Brazilians was that his most ardent supporters were religious conservatives, especially Evangelical leaders. It is due to their success in blocking gay activists from accessing the Brazilian Congress that all major gay rights advances in Brazil have come through the courts rather than the legislature (Encarnación Reference Encarnación2016; Friedman Reference Friedman2018; Corrales Reference Corrales2021). During the drafting of the 1988 constitution, religious leaders defeated a proposal that would have made Brazil the first country in the world with a constitutional ban on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. They argued that the ban would restrict their ability to criticize homosexuality. According to Luiz Mott, the founder of Grupo Gay da Bahia (GGB), the oldest gay rights organization still in existence in Latin America, “Evangelical leaders succeeded in painting the constitutional initiative as special or privileged rights for gays and a potential barrier to religious freedom.”Footnote ¹³

The first major gay rights breakthrough arrived on May 5, 2011, when the STF recognized same-sex couples as “stable unions,” a category of relationships that entitles unmarried couples to all the rights and benefits of marriage and that honors Brazil’s long history of “domestic cohabitation” (Moreira Reference Moreira2012, 1001). That decision was followed by a ruling of May 16, 2013, by the National Council of Justice, a body that oversees Brazil’s justice system, that compelled notaries public to issue a marriage license to any same-sex couple that asked for one. It made Brazil only the third Latin American country to legalize gay marriage, after Argentina and Uruguay, and, at the time, the largest country in the world to do so. In 2018, the STF ruled in favor of gender self-determination. It allows people to change genders without surgery, a psychiatric evaluation, or permission from a judge or a medical doctor.

But little of what was feared about gay rights under a Bolsonaro administration actually came to pass. Between 2019 and 2022, fundamental rights protecting LGBTQ people, especially those granted by the courts, remained intact, even as Bolsonaro used the powers of his office to promote heteronormativity and traditional family values. Bolsonaro’s most notable attacks on gay rights consisted of executive actions removing LGBTQ issues from the Ministry of Human Rights and disbanding the National Council to Combat LGBTQ Discrimination. He also appointed officials contemptuous of LGBTQ people and hostile to gay rights, including Damares Alves, the minister of women, family, and human rights. During her swearing-in ceremony she noted that in Bolsonaro’s Brazil “girls will be princesses and boys will be princes.”Footnote ¹⁴

Contrary to expectations, under Bolsonaro gay rights continued to expand as they had under previous administrations. On June 14, 2019, the STF ruled that homophobia and transphobia are crimes akin to racism, and punishable by imprisonment for a term of up to five years.Footnote ¹⁵ It is hard to overestimate the importance of this ruling. Criminalizing homophobia had been the main objective of the Brazilian gay rights movement since its emergence in the late 1970s. The movement was acting on the view that homophobia is the main factor behind Brazil’s gay violence epidemic. According to reports from the GGB, which has been collecting data on antigay violence in Brazil for some forty years, the country has averaged one violent death or killing of an LGBTQ person every twenty to thirty hours.Footnote ¹⁶

A string of other court victories followed the 2019 homophobia decision. In 2020, the STF permitted the broadcast of homosexual materials that religious people might find offensive. At the heart of that case was The First Temptation of Christ, a satirical comedy film that depicted Jesus as a closeted homosexual. That same year the STF also lifted a ban on blood donations by gay males and ruled against municipalities wanting to ban sex educational materials that conservatives argued promoted “gender ideology.” Gay rights activists were also able to successfully push back against several antigay initiatives undertaken by Bolsonaro. The most notable was the attempt by the Ministry of Education to revise school textbooks by stripping them of any reference or discussion of feminism, homosexuality, transgenderism, and violence against women. Bolsonaro education officials argued that gender and sexuality materials are a form of “indoctrination” that leads to “early sexualization.”Footnote ¹⁷

Democratic resilience and gay rights

The most apparent factor in accounting for the survival and expansion of gay rights in Bolsonaro’s Brazil is a democratic resilience that few could have anticipated. After all, stable democratic governance in Brazil dates only to 1988, when the country introduced a brand-new constitution. A robust civic response to Bolsonaro’s democratic threats marked an early and important manifestation of democratic resilience. It very likely curbed Bolsonaro’s authoritarian impulses, and it most certainly contributed to his defeat in 2022.

Bolsonaro’s election gave rise to a very prominent debate around protecting democracy that was informed by international trends about the threat to democracy posed by rightwing populist movements.Footnote ¹⁸ The debate found local resonance since it tapped into the memory of the military coup that ended democracy in Brazil in 1964, especially as the country was gearing up for the fifty-fifth anniversary of that traumatic event.Footnote ¹⁹ Efforts to protect democracy reached a crescendo during the 2022 electoral campaign, which generated high-profile public letters in defense of democracy from the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo, Brazil’s most important business association, the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops, and ordinary Brazilians. On August 11, 2022, tens of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets to launch the “Letter to Brazilians in Defense of the Democratic State of Law.” Written by former students of the Law Faculty of the University of São Paulo, the letter referred to the forty-fifth anniversary of the 1977 “Letter to Brazilians,” a movement led by law professor Goffredo da Silva Telles Jr. that famously denounced the illegitimacy of the military government.Footnote ²⁰

The media also played an important role in boosting civil society’s opposition to Bolsonaro. It exposed not only Bolsonaro’s political malfeasance but also the impact of his administration on LGBTQ people. The increasing amount of misinformation being spread on Bolsonaro’s social media platforms propelled the rise of a “news media ecosystem” devoted to fact-checking, including Lupa, Aos Fatos, and Comprova, an organization of thirty-three media outlets (Barsotti Vieira and Azevedo de Aguiar Reference Barsotti Vieira and de Aguiar2024, 330). During the entirety of Bolsonaro’s time in office, leading newspapers and media organizations reported widely on the impact of Bolsonaro’s homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, including a spike in hate crimes against LGBTQ people. Using police reports obtained from freedom-of-information requests, Folha de S. Paulo was able to prove that homophobic hate crimes in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, rose 75 percent during the months leading to the October 2018 elections.Footnote ²¹

A strong civil society mobilization was also part of the opposition to Bolsonaro. Pride parades, in particular, became political arenas for millions of Brazilians (gay and straight) to express their opposition to Bolsonaro’s far-right administration. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the first São Paulo pride parade of the Bolsonaro era, held on June 23, 2019. Widely recognized as the world’s largest pride parade (since 1997, the event has drawn as many as three million revelers annually), the São Paulo pride parade in 2019 had a clear air of defiance. According to the US historian James Green, who was in attendance, “The parade is really a moment of affirmation and celebration for most people, but it is de facto, in my mind, a confrontation with the policies of Bolsonaro.”Footnote ²²

Ultimately, however, it was the institutional response by the judiciary that stood out as the most compelling and consistent sign of democratic resilience in Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Judicial institutions—especially the aforementioned STF and the Superior Electoral Court (or TSE in its Portuguese acronym)—became the first line of defense against Bolsonaro’s authoritarian proclivities. These institutions were well equipped by the 1988 constitution to defend democracy and gay rights when they came under attack by Bolsonaro. At least in this respect, being a new democracy was an asset rather than a liability for Brazil.

The 1988 constitution endowed the STF with extraordinary powers to prosecute public officials, including the president and his cabinet members, to oversee the electoral system, and to intervene unilaterally on behalf of vulnerable communities, such as Afro-Brazilians, Indigenous groups, and LGBTQ people. Before the coming of the Bolsonaro presidency, judicial reforms were also introduced to strengthen the independence of the courts. In 2004, the constitution was amended to create the National Justice Council, the body that, as noted previously, legalized gay marriage in 2013. Composed of fifteen members who serve two-year terms (including public prosecutors, lawyers, and citizens) and chaired by the STF Chief Justice, the Council’s mission is to enhance the autonomy, transparency, and efficiency of Brazil’s justice system.

Under Bolsonaro, the STF used its powers to uphold and expand legal protections for LGBTQ people, usually in response to what was taking place in the political realm. In 2019, when the STF criminalized homophobia and transphobia, it did so because of the failure of the Brazilian Congress to act first. The justices voting in favor of criminalization noted that “the acts of homophobia and transphobia should be treated under current anti-discrimination laws until the country’s parliament passed legislation dealing with LGBT+ protection.”Footnote ²³ According to Judge Luiz Fux, who cast the sixth and deciding vote on the homophobia ruling, “The judiciary got out in front of the slow-moving legislation … Parliament doesn’t act … There is no guarantee the bill will pass, and even if it does, it can be vetoed and homophobia will continue. The judiciary must act in defense of minorities against violence by the majority.”Footnote ²⁴

The 1988 constitution established the TSE as part of a wholesale revamping of an electoral system that was notorious for its inefficiency and corruption. Aside from tasking the TSE with the job of overseeing federal elections, the new constitution abolished the electoral college and introduced the direct election of the president. These reforms allowed Brazil to certify the 2022 elections without the cumbersome task of counting and approving electoral votes. In 1996, Brazil introduced an electronic voting system to replace a paper ballot system notorious for its corruption. By 2000, Brazil had become the only country in the world with an all-electronic voting system. In all the years since the system has been in place, there has been no credible report of fraud or irregularities.

In the run-up to the 2022 elections, the TSE gave itself the power to regulate and monitor digital platforms, especially any information affecting electoral integrity. This power allowed the TSE to force tech companies to remove posts claiming voter fraud. It also allowed the TSE to fact-check statements from the executive branch. Prior to the 2022 elections, the TSE issued some twenty rebuttals to Bolsonaro’s charges, calling them “unacceptable electoral denialism.”Footnote ²⁵ Most notably, just days before the elections were held, the TSE issued an extraordinary rebuttal to Bolsonaro’s charges that the government would manipulate the vote, calling them “false and dishonest” and an attempt to “hinder and disrupt” the electoral process.Footnote ²⁶

After the elections were certified, the TSE took the lead in holding Bolsonaro accountable for his misdeeds. In 2023, the TSE ruled that Bolsonaro had abused his power by spreading lies about the electoral system. He was barred from running for public office until 2030. This ruling alone likely ended Bolsonaro’s political career. Then, in 2024, following a sprawling two-year investigation by Brazil’s prosecutor general and the federal police, Bolsonaro and thirty-six of his associates were indicted for attempting a coup to keep him in office after his defeat in the 2022 elections. Part of the plot included a scheme to assassinate Lula and his vice president ahead of their inauguration. On September 11, 2025, a five-member tribunal composed of justices drawn from the STF by a 4–1 vote found Bolsonaro guilty of attempting to stage a coup, leading an armed criminal group, and attempting a violent abolition of the democratic rule of law. He was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. Having exhausted all appeals, and a failed attempt by conservative legislators to enact an amnesty law that would cover the insurrection, Bolsonaro entered federal prison on November 22, 2025. Due to failing health, Bolsonaro was subsequently granted humanitarian house arrest.

Grounding gay rights in human rights

Just as important behind the survival and expansion of gay rights in Bolsonaro’s Brazil is the firm grounding of gay rights in universal human rights principles. This grounding served to protect gay rights during the Bolsonaro era in a twofold manner. It acted as a shield against Bolsonaro’s attacks on the LGBTQ community by firmly planting gay rights within Brazil’s legal fabric, state structures, and civil society, as part of a societal aspirational goal to make Brazil a more democratic and humane society. At the same time, this grounding served to soften the conservative backlash against gay rights.

Since the rise of the Brazilian gay liberation movement in 1978, with the formation of Somos (We Are) at the University of São Paulo, gay rights activists have sought to tie gay rights to human rights principles.Footnote ²⁷ At the time, human rights were rapidly becoming a major ideological force in politics in Brazil and across Latin America, having been embraced by most social movements during the struggle against authoritarianism, and they were in the process of transforming global politics (Kelly Reference Kelly2018). By the early 1980s, the embrace of human rights in the gay rights movement, particularly the idea that the freedom of sexuality is a core human right, was so pronounced that it had pushed to the side other ideas that in earlier years had influenced Brazilian gay rights organizations, especially Marxism (Encarnación Reference Encarnación2016).

For much of the 1980s, when gay rights activism began to gain steam in Brazil with the emergence of organizations like the GGB, human rights strategies such as naming and shaming took center stage among gay rights advocates. For instance, GGB activists coined the term homocaust to refer to the wave of LGBTQ killings that has tarred Brazil’s reputation as tolerant of sexual diversity (Mott Reference Mott1996). The intention was to amplify the victimization of LGBTQ people by linking antigay violence in Brazil to the Holocaust, the ultimate human rights atrocity, and to shame the government into taking action to curb the violence.

Gay activism also incorporated human rights language and tactics into the struggle against HIV/AIDS, which ravaged Brazil while serving to institutionalize relations between gay activists and the state (Galvão Reference Galvão1995). Gay rights activists stressed that a constitutional provision declaring access to health care a basic human right compelled the state to provide medical treatment for all people living with AIDS. This struggle became the main goal of the National AIDS Program (PNDA). Established in 1986, the PNDA brought together state officials, health-care executives, and human rights and gay rights activists to provide free and universal access to antiretroviral therapy through the national health-care system. This policy stood in direct opposition to what the US government and international organizations like the World Bank were advising Brazil: to focus on preventing new infections rather than treating those already sick and dying. In time, however, the PNDA came to be viewed as the key to preventing the “Africanization” of AIDS in Brazil (Biehl Reference Biehl2004, 105).

Starting in the late 1990s, gay rights organizations began to enter the state’s human rights bureaucracies, in recognition of their prominence within Brazil’s human rights community. In 1997, the ABGLT (Brazilian Association of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Travestis, Transsexuals, and Intersex), which claims the title of Latin America’s largest gay rights organization, was incorporated into the National Human Rights Plan. Developed by the Cardoso administration to monitor human rights abuses, the plan led to the creation of a National Secretariat of Human Rights. In 2012, gay rights activists were invited to join the work of the National Truth Commission. An important milestone in Brazil’s reckoning with its dictatorial past, the Commission was also a significant marker in gay history by becoming the first body of its type to look into the human rights abuses committed against LGBTQ people. Released in 2014, the Commission’s final report concluded that while the military regime “did not have a policy to exterminate homosexuals,” the promotion of homosexuality as subversive legitimized the systemic repression of LGBTQ people (Encarnación Reference Encarnación2021,154).

Human rights also loomed large over the struggle for state recognition of same-sex relationships. As it evolved from its onset in the mid-1990s, this struggle mixed legal arguments and moral appeals that drew on human rights concepts, especially dignity, to form a compelling “political” framing that played well with the courts, civil society, and even the Catholic Church (Encarnación Reference Encarnación2025). Front and center in this struggle was the legal claim by gay rights activists that same-sex civil unions qualified as “stable unions.” But the activists also argued that state recognition of same-sex unions was in keeping with the human rights aspirations that Brazil set for itself during the democratic transition of 1985. Paulo Iotti, the director of Lawyers for Gender and Sexual Diversity, a São Paulo–based LGBTQ advocacy group, and part of the legal team that argued the stable couples case at the STF, contended that this recognition would honor the dignity of LGBTQ people as guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution.Footnote ²⁸ To bolster this moral argument, Iotti relied on the theory of “homo-affection,” which draws a moral equivalency between homosexual and heterosexual unions (Dias Reference Dias2001).

In 2011, when the STF legalized gay civil unions, it made it clear that it was making a decision based not only on legal grounds but also on moral reasoning extracted from universal human rights principles. Justice Ellen Gracie wrote: “The recognition made by the Court today responds to the rights of a group of people who have long been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose dignity has been offended, whose identity was denied, and whose freedom was overwhelmed.”Footnote ²⁹ Justice Gilmar Mendes noted that “the Court had an obligation to respond to protect the human rights of gay couples.”Footnote ³⁰

After 2011, as demands for same-sex civil unions grew into calls for gay marriage, human rights gained greater prominence among gay rights activists. This was most notably the case of Congressman Wyllys’s advocacy for gay marriage. He contended that gay marriage would deepen citizenship, comparing gay marriage to the extension of the right to vote to women in Brazil, in 1932. He drew inspiration from the gay marriage campaigns of Spain and Argentina and the slogan that anchored these pioneering campaigns: “The same name with the same rights.” This slogan, as noted by gay rights activist Bruno Bimbi, one of the architects of the Argentine gay marriage campaign and a former adviser to Wyllys, underscored the “moral equivalence that activists of egalitarian marriage were trying to make between homosexual and heterosexual unions.”Footnote ³¹

Evangelical legislators reacted to the gay marriage ruling by sabotaging the Rousseff administration’s gay rights agenda, including forcing the suspension of School Without Homophobia, a program intended to fight antigay discrimination in schools. They also mobilized on behalf of the ill-fated Estatuto da Família (Family Statute), a 2015 bill that defined family as “the entity formed from the union between a man and a woman, through marriage or stable union, and the community formed by any of the parents and their children.”Footnote ³² But the broader societal reaction to the gay marriage campaign was more positive and provided evidence of the success of the framing of gay marriage as a human rights matter. The best example is the reaction from the Brazilian Catholic Church, historically a defender of human rights. Beginning in the 1970s, the Brazilian Catholic Church began to confront the military regime over the regime’s human rights abuses. It also became an advocate for the poor, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised (Burdick Reference Burdick2021).

For the most part, the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops, historically the most influential religious organization in Brazil, sat out the culture war over gay marriage. This, in turn, undercut the conservative opposition to the gay marriage campaign. In a 2014 interview with O Globo, Leonardo Steiner, the head of the Conference, said that while the Catholic Church is opposed to gay marriage, “there needs to be a dialogue on the rights attached to shared life between people of the same sex who decided to live together. They need legal support from society.”Footnote ³³ Shortly thereafter, in anticipation of São Paulo’s 2014 gay pride march, the first since the legalization of gay marriage in Brazil, the Archdiocese of São Paulo made a plea for acceptance of LGBTQ people: “We cannot remain silent in the face of the reality experienced by this population that is the target of prejudice and victim of systemic violation of their fundamental rights, such as health, education, work, housing, culture, among others … We are engaged in upholding human rights and do not agree with violence, regardless of the color and the sexual orientation of people.”Footnote ³⁴

In light of all the above it seems fitting that the biggest gay rights struggle in Brazil—the campaign to criminalize homophobia—was fought and won with a human rights argument: that homophobia was an affront to the human rights principle of dignity. This contention was fully vindicated by the 2019 ruling on homophobia and transphobia by the STF. According to STF Chief Justice José Celso de Mello: “The issue of homosexuality, which arose at a time when the topic of ‘gender ideology’ was not yet being debated, has assumed, in our country, over centuries of repression, intolerance and prejudice, serious proportions that affect people so much because of their sexual orientation (or even their gender identity), marginalizing them, stigmatizing them and depriving them of basic rights, in a social context that is clearly hostile to them and undermines the postulate of the essential dignity of the human being.”Footnote ³⁵

Reflections on the United States

At least since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the US has experienced a marked decline in the quality of democracy, sufficient to make the country the most outstanding example of democratic backsliding among wealthy nations.Footnote ³⁶ According to the 2026 V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report, the US is no longer a liberal democracy, with its Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) dropping to its lowest level since 1965.Footnote ³⁷ The report added that “within only one year, the USA’s score on the V-Dem Liberal Democracy index has declined 24 percent, while its rank dropped from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations.” Instead, like Brazil, the US is today classified as an “electoral democracy.” This political classification reflects the toll of Trump’s attacks on democracy, including undermining the independence of the judiciary, sowing doubts about the integrity of the electoral system, and restricting civil liberties.

Unlike Brazil, however, the US is a textbook example of the devastating impact that democratic backsliding can have on LGBTQ people and their rights. Indeed, the case embodies all the prevailing expectations about gay rights in a backsliding democracy. According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest gay rights organization in the US, the years of the first Trump administration (2017–2021) were “the most virulently anti-LGBTQ” in decades.Footnote ³⁸ During this period, the Trump administration focused on rolling back federal nondiscrimination clauses (e.g., repealing health-care rules that protected patients from discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation), limiting gender-affirming health care, and barring transgender service members from serving in the military.

Trump’s second term (begun in 2025) saw a shift toward delegitimizing and potentially criminalizing gender identity, undermining gay visibility, and excluding LGBTQ people from public life. The linchpin of this assault on the gay community was an executive order declaring that the US would recognize only two sexes (“male and female”), based on the view that these sexes are “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”Footnote ³⁹ Other orders excluded transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ and women’s sports, ended an LGBTQ youth suicide hotline, restored the ban on transgender people serving in the military (they had been allowed back under the Biden administration), and canceled hundreds of millions of dollars for LGBTQ health research.

More sinister, perhaps, is the erasure of LGBTQ people from American history by rendering them invisible from museums, historical sites, national parks, and federal agencies. Within the first year of Trump’s second term, the web page of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, the site of some of the earliest gay rights protests in American history, was scrubbed of any gay content, the word transgender was deleted from the web page of the Stonewall National Monument, and thousands of images were removed from the Pentagon’s website, as part of a cull of diversity content. The vast majority of these images had the words gay, transgender, women, Hispanic and Black in them.

Taking a cue from the Trump administration, Republican-controlled states have enacted their own gay rights rollbacks. In 2023 alone, the number of antigay laws introduced in the US amounted to 491, with several dozen signed into law, including bans on drag shows, gender-affirming care for minors and adults, participation of transgender athletes in sports, and the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through the third grade, including Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” law.Footnote ⁴⁰ When defending such laws, social conservatives cite “grooming,” a homophobic slur that exploits people’s worst fears about gay people and children. It is recognized as a classic instance of “moral panic” (Osborn Reference Osborn2025).

Republican legislators have also sought to undermine Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 US Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage nationwide. In 2025, several Republican-controlled states asked the Court to overturn the ruling. They were inspired by the Court’s 2022 decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion. In its concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas noted that the Court should reconsider its past rulings protecting same-sex marriage, sodomy, and access to contraception. The US Congress moved quickly to protect gay marriage by enacting the Respect for Marriage Act, also in 2022. But this new legislation did not codify the Obergefell decision into law—it only protects federal recognition of gay marriage. It will not prevent individual states from reactivating the state-level gay marriage bans struck down by the Obergefell decision or from enacting new bans if Obergefell is invalidated.

Conservative attacks on gay rights have alarmed gay and human rights activists. In 2023, the HRC declared a “state of emergency for LGBTQ people.”Footnote ⁴¹ The organization was unsparing in its description of the threat level: “The multiplying threats facing millions in our community are not just perceived—they are real, tangible, and dangerous. In many cases, they are resulting in violence against LGBTQ+ people, forcing families to uproot their lives as they flee their homes in search of safer states, and triggering a tidal wave of increased homophobia and transphobia that puts the safety of each one of us at risk.”

It is a challenge to explain the fate of gay rights in the US through the experiences of other countries. This is the case even of Brazil, a country with a lot in common with the US, including a history of slavery, a large and racially diverse population, rampant social and economic inequality that is intertwined with racism, and the recent experience with democratic backsliding. The US and Brazil are also home to some of the world’s largest and most vibrant gay rights organizations, and they share a comparable level of gay rights development. Both countries legalized gay marriage around the time of the onset of democratic backsliding. But they differ significantly on the issue of homosexuality.

In contrast to Brazil, the US has a long history of criminalizing homosexuality and of marginalizing LGBTQ people (Mogul et al., Reference Mogul, Ritchie and Whitlock2011; Encarnación Reference Encarnación2021; Johnson Reference Johnson2023). Sodomy laws were not completely repealed in the US until the US Supreme Court struck the remaining ones, in 2003, with its ruling in Lawrence v. Texas. At the time, fourteen states had active laws that made consensual sodomy a crime: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. These laws justified antigay discriminatory policies like President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 Executive Order 10450, which banned “sexual perverts” from working in the federal government. It ushered in the so-called Lavender Scare, a Cold War–era gay witch hunt that caused as many as ten thousand people to lose their federal jobs because of a presumption of their homosexuality (Johnson Reference Johnson2023). Sodomy laws also emboldened a virulent opposition movement to gay rights (Herman Reference Herman1998; Rimmerman et al. Reference Rimmerman, Wald and Wilcox2000; Faderman Reference Faderman2015).

The template for opposing gay rights in US history was set by “Save Our Children,” a 1977 referendum organized by anti–gay rights activist Anita Bryant that repealed an ordinance banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in Dade County, Florida. The ordinance was not restored until 1998. In typical moral panic fashion, Bryant depicted gay males as predators out to indoctrinate children. “Homosexuals cannot reproduce, so the must recruit,” she famously argued (Frank Reference Frank2013, 126). Her success inspired a legion of religious organizations opposed to homosexuality and gay rights led by the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, and the Family Research Council. They became notorious for championing the “politics of disgust,” which stressed that dehumanizing homosexuals is the most effective way to justify denying them their civil rights (Nussbaum Reference Nussbaum2010).

But bigger differences can be found in the factors that this article argues allowed gay rights to survive and expand in Brazil while democracy was under attack. It is hard to find the robust democratic resilience shown by Brazil in the US. The institutional response speaks volumes. On two occasions, the US Senate failed to convict Trump following impeachment by the US House of Representatives—the first one for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and the second one for inciting an insurrection. Trump’s return to office in 2025 was enabled by a US Supreme Court ruling granting him near-complete immunity from prosecution for “official acts.” In essence, the Court put him above the law. According to Samuel Breidbart of the Brennan Center for Justice: “The ruling Trump v. United States is an affront to democracy and the rule of law, forfeiting critical checks on executive powers. It undermines criminal accountability for presidents if their law-breaking occurs in the course of ‘official’ conduct, and it endangers democratic accountability by potentially shielding presidents from prosecution for trying to overthrow elections.”Footnote ⁴²

Telling, too, is the “tepid” civic response to Trump’s democratic threats.Footnote ⁴³ During the 2024 presidential elections, leading business associations remained on the sidelines, refusing to repudiate Trump’s authoritarianism. The US Conference of Bishops remained neutral, while many Evangelical leaders enthusiastically endorsed Trump. Breaking precedent, major newspapers, like Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, declined to take a side in the elections. In 2025, just before Trump’s return to office, the social media giant Meta ended its long-standing practice of using third-party checkers on Facebook, Threads, and Instagram.Footnote ⁴⁴

As for the grounding of gay rights, this process seems less successful in the US than in Brazil. As seen already, gay rights in Brazil have been justified as human rights—a very effective strategy for institutionalizing gay rights across the state and civil society. But the US does not have much of a tradition of grounding gay rights in universal human rights principles. Almost from the moment it was drafted, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was deemed “foreign and un-American” by US conservatives (Encarnación Reference Encarnación2026, 253). And when human rights are defined in the US, what gets emphasized is individual freedom rather than social justice (Moyn Reference Moyn2018). This understanding deprives human rights of their capacity to affect social change. Instead, gay rights have been justified in the US as “minority rights,” a strategy copied from the civil rights movement. According to the historian George Chauncey, from this movement gay rights activists borrowed the “political concept of minority rights” and this “made it easier for gays to begin to depict themselves as a minority who deserved the same civil rights that other Americans and other minorities did.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The idea of gay rights as minority rights has struggled to gain acceptance in American society. But more important, perhaps, is that this idea led to the framing of gay rights as a legal matter rather than as a moral imperative. A fitting illustration of this is the campaign for marriage equality. That campaign was anchored on the argument that gay marriage is a civil right protected by the US Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment of equal protection under the law. It inspired the campaign’s core slogan: “rights and benefits,” which highlighted more than one thousand rights and benefits denied to gay couples—from tax benefits to hospital visitation rights to inheritance rights—with the intention of underscoring the discrimination prevalent in existing marriage laws (Encarnación Reference Encarnación2025, 14). This legalistic framing left very little room for making a moral case for gay marriage and gay rights more broadly. Although not averse to moral appeals, US gay marriage activists mostly avoided them, believing that moral arguments were a distraction from the legal argument that disapproval of homosexuality is not a reason to deny gay couples the right to marry.

Not surprisingly, the heavy focus on legal arguments became one of the main criticisms of the US marriage campaign, especially, oddly enough, by legal scholars. These scholars argued that the campaign was neglecting making the case for the moral goodness inherent in same-sex relationships, including gay parenting (Ball Reference Ball1997; Feldblum Reference Feldblum2005). Ultimately, the legal framing succeeded in securing gay marriage. But success came at the cost of creating a more transformational campaign for LGBTQ equality.Footnote ⁴⁶ For starters, while the legal framing made a convincing case for ending antigay discrimination, it did little to make the case for extending full citizenship to LGBTQ people. Actually, the rights and benefits message backfired by giving the impression that gay and lesbian couples desired gay marriage for material and political reasons. For this and other reasons, late in the gay marriage campaign, in 2012, gay marriage activists were compelled to introduce the new messaging strategy of “love and commitment.” It suggested that gay and lesbian couples desired marriage for the same reasons as heterosexual couples.

The legal framing also did little to blunt a gay marriage moral panic that is “exceptional at the world scene” (Adam Reference Adam2003, 259–260). Unintentionally, this moral panic served as both a prelude and a bridge to the massive gay rights backlash witnessed during the Trump era (Encarnación Reference Encarnación2025). Between 1996 and 2015, the US gay community had to contend with the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, a law that barred federal recognition of gay marriage at a time when no locality anywhere in the world allowed two people of the same sex to marry. It also confronted some thirty gay marriage bans across the US that made a mockery of democracy by putting the rights of a vulnerable minority to the whims of the majority, including California, where gay marriage was already legal, and an unsuccessful attempt to amend the US Constitution to define marriage as the exclusive union of one man and one woman. Dozens of “religious restoration acts,” or RFRAS, were also enacted. These laws allow private businesses to openly discriminate against LGBTQ people as long as that discrimination is based on sincerely held religious beliefs.

In short, when under attack by a duly elected leader in pursuit of an illiberal political agenda, the US did not show the same democratic resilience as Brazil. For the most part, the response to democratic threats by the political system (including the judiciary) and by civil society in the US did not match that of their Brazilian peers. It is also clear that by relying so heavily on legalistic arguments, US gay activists have not been as effective as their Brazilian counterparts in grounding gay rights in society.