We’ve been bombarded in recent months with stories of suicide of gay youth
(another one today, in fact.) But there is a place in the New World where homophobes don’t even bother berating and bullying LGBT people until their lives have no meaning; they take the life outright.
Welcome to Brazil.
Did you hear me? Every day and a half.
The number is to be included in the GGB’s official annual report due out in March, but unless that number is pared down by about, well, 100 percent, it’s pretty astonishing. Not only is the number of lives lost simply appalling, but it is on the rise. In 2009, the number of murders of gay individuals was 198 and in the previous 10 years there was one homophobic murder every three days. Now it is one every day and a half.
I don’t think I can say that too much. One every day and a half.
To put that number in perspective, coming in second in murders of gay men is Mexico with 35 per year, and the United States with 25, according to Luiz Mott, a Brazilian anthropologist and gay-rights activist. Still too high, to be sure. But 250, it ain’t.
