Jean Wyllys
Brazil’s first openly gay member of parliament to make queer rights his programme left the country in 2019 because of death threats: “I want to live.”
Jean Wyllys grew up in poverty in Bahia, one of seven children of a washerwoman and a car painter. A boarding school gave him access to education; he studied journalism in Salvador and worked as a journalist and lecturer. In 2005 he became nationally famous as the winner of the reality show “Big Brother Brasil” – as the show’s first openly gay contestant.
In 2010 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the left-wing party PSOL from Rio de Janeiro, the first member of Congress to campaign openly as a gay activist. He fought for marriage equality, the rights of trans people and against homophobia, and clashed repeatedly with the evangelical right and with the then deputy Jair Bolsonaro. Smear campaigns on social media falsely attributed quotes to him and linked him to paedophilia; he received death threats. In 2014 he was re-elected with more than 100,000 votes.
In March 2018 his close friend, the Rio city councillor Marielle Franco, was murdered. From then on Wyllys lived under police protection. Re-elected in October 2018, he announced in January 2019, shortly after Bolsonaro took office as president, that he would not take up his seat and would remain abroad. He did not want to be a martyr, he said, but to live.
Wyllys went to Berlin and later to Barcelona, where he worked on a doctorate on disinformation. In 2023 he returned to Brazil for the first time.