I was invited by the National Youth Secretariat to participate in the "Free Conference on Youth and Communication" which aimed to raise the demands of young people to be included in the proposals that will be discussed in December, in Brasília, at the National Communication Conference, which will probably will be attended by Lula and Hélio Costa.
In conjunction with my participation in this conference, I read an email from Toni Reis, president of ABGLT – Brazilian Association of Gays, Lesbians and Transgenders – where he debates precisely the relationship between gays and the conference that aims to create new rules for the communications sector in Brazil, i.e. print, television, radio and internet, and the importance of involvement.
At the event there were representatives of the black movement, feminists, evangelicals, hip-hop, disabled people and also gays. The person who included this population in the conference was Deco Ribeiro, founder of Grupo E-Jovem, which has a seat on the National Youth Council.
During the defense of the proposals of each segment there was even a certain discomfort between evangelicals and homosexuals, historically discordant populations, due to the condemnation of homosexuality that they preach, but within the context of the conference they tried to demonstrate that they accept all diversities. Mistake.
The boy who was representing the evangelicals asked that, in one of the proposals, the text "sexual orientation and gender identity" not be next to "evangelicals", as according to him there is no such thing as "religious orientation". He is a communicator, so he knows exactly the function of the comma in a text, which is to separate, but he acted as if he wasn't understanding so that the text was as he wanted, far away.
After defending homosexuality in communications, participants from other segments also began to address the topic in their defenses, always referring to representatives of this community at the event.
I returned from Brasília, where the event was held, reflecting a lot on the importance of occupying all possible spaces, as it was evident that if there was no representative of the gay movement at the event, no text of the Conference would contain the acronym "LGBT", so vulnerable when talk about the press.
The gay movement needs to expand the discussion, which currently takes place basically in health, human rights and education, and occupy seats in everything where possible. In the area of technology, sports, work.
Only in this way will it be possible to have representation everywhere, because if the president called an LGBT Conference it is because we are already seen in public spheres, it is time to take control of the space.
