Pride month 2025 is finishing up, and I want to remind you that the U.S.’s journey isn’t the only one. The fight for LGBTQIA+ rights takes place all across the world. And you can see what it is like in Brazil, in a country of the global south far from the world’s spotlight and resources, by watching Homem com H. Just released on Netflix, the film is a biopic about Ney Matogrosso, one of the biggest Brazilian singers/performers of all time. It parallels the singer’s path with the country’s, showing how both dealt with the dictatorship and deep-rooted prejudices.

We begin with a child moving through a luscious forest. The natural environment’s textures, colors, sounds, and sensations are a beautiful spectacle, capturing this little boy’s attention. Only the sounds of violence pull us away from this safe haven and into an unfortunately very common situation for queer children.

It is 1949, and the little boy we saw in the forest is Ney Matogrosso. Next, we see his father beating him as his terrified brothers watch from afar. His father demands his son apologize and recant from being “queer,” but young Ney refuses to cry.

It is within this bigotry that Ney begins to discover who he is and that he’s different.

It is 1959, Ney has grown up, and despite his mother’s best efforts to keep him safe at home, his father’s constant bullying drives him away and straight into enlisting. This is his first attempt at using a costume (uniform) and a performance (being in military service) to defy authority: his father.

After all, how could an effeminate person like him be good at the service? And he was the best.

In the military, Ney finally allows his feelings of sexual attraction for other men to grow. Their fit bodies exposed, sweaty under the blazing sun, the contact activities more erotic than any pornographic magazine of the time.

But it is still too dangerous for him to act on his desires, so he moves to the country’s capital, Brasilia, and starts a new life.

It is 1961, and Ney finds himself working in a hospital and singing in a choir. He meets an older gay man, so full of culture and experience, and finds himself pulled in his direction. But this early love interest turns out to be controlling, and things go horribly wrong.

The film smartly parallels the storyline Ney’s dangerous relationship and the state of the country.

In the early 1960s, a lot of tension is brewing in Brazil. The U.S. is worried LATAM countries will follow Cuba in becoming communist and so they interfere in Brazilian politics. First more indirectly, with the exportation of film, music, literature, culture (aka propaganda) and later by directly funding the military dictatorship. “To prevent a disaster here, one that could turn Brazil into the China of the 1960s,” says Lincoln Gordon, the ambassador to Brazil, in a letter to the US government in 1964, four days before the coup.

Fortunately for Ney, he sees through the façade of his relationship and puts an end to it before things get worse. Brazil is not so lucky. For the next 21 years, it must contend with an oppressive environment, where any idea or person who does not align with “traditional morals” is censured and, sometimes, disappears.

During the sixties and early 1970s, LGBTQIA+ folk attempt to organize, but the grip of the dictatorship just tightens.

Meanwhile, Ney meets João Ricardo and Gérson Conrad, who convince him to be the lead singer of their new project, Secos & Molhados.

The band decides to perform consecrated poems backed by music to avoid the claws of censorship. Loud and animalistic, Ney faces the audience head-on and refuses to feel ashamed even when hecklers begin to yell homophobic slurs.

From this point onward, both Ney and the LGBTQIA+ community face censorship and violence. But they are no longer content staying quiet, and those who see their very existence as a threat are not happy about it.

Slowly, more and more LGBTQIA+ groups organize in coalitions such as Somos and begin to promote their cause through events. By the early 1980s, independent publications, like Lampião da Esquina and ChanacomChana, are making waves. They strengthen the base, become important vehicles to de-pathologize homosexuality and recognise homophobia as a hate crime.

Then, in 1983, Brazil has its own Stonewall moment. At Ferro’s Bar in São Paulo, the Lesbian Feminist Action Group (Grupo de Ação Lésbica Feminista in Portuguese) was meeting and selling ChanacomChana. When the homophobic bar owners begin to attack the women, they organize protests.

Along with this strengthening of the queer movement, Ney Matogrosso decides to part ways with Secos & Molhados. He’s tired of other band members’ attempts to censor and bully him. Ney goes solo and louder, making a point to defy whoever tries to put him back in the closet.

As the mid-eighties come around, Ney is at his peak and it seems so is the LGBTQIA+ movement. By 1985, the military dictatorship ends and the Federal Council of Medicine of Brazil declares homosexuality is no longer a pathology, beating the World Health Organization by five years! By 1986, any type of discrimination based on social, political, religious, racial, gender, and sexual orientation is a crime.

Then the HIV/AIDS pandemic reaches our shores and set us back.

In the film, Ney’s friends, ex-lovers (both men and women), and his current partner succumb to the infection. We finally see him cry, no longer holding in his tears for his father’s death. His survivor’s guilt is crushing, and something shifts within him as he begins to step into an advocacy role for people like him who never feel like they belonged.

The LGBTQIA+ movement in Brazil continues to organize, and by late 1990s, we became one of the first countries to offer HIV/AIDS treatment through our public health system. We host our first official Pride Parade in 1997 in São Paulo.

In a potent symbol, we see Ney exploring a piece of land where the former owner attempted to construct a highway. But after just the first rainfall, the jungle takes it back to itself.

Then, we cut to 2024, where fiction and reality blur as the real-life 83-year-old Ney prepares and performs “Eu Quero é Botar Meu Bloco Na Rua” for a packed stadium. Still big, sensual, and fully himself.

So Homem com H parallels Ney Matogrosso’s journey and that of the LGBTQIA+ community in Brazil. It was never about one single moment, but the ongoing fight. That’s how we become who we were born to be – in all its queer, imperfect glory.