The President and the Golden Shower

Why was Brazil’s conservative leader tweeting out kink?

By Cleuci de Oliveira

 

BRASÍLIA — Carnival is one of the most anticipated events on the Brazilian calendar. There’s of course the world-famous show put on by samba schools in Rio de Janeiro, which attracts tourists from around the world, but Brazilian revelers take to the streets in cities across the nation, big and small. And every year, the parties deliver highlights — whether goofy, profound or merely bewildering — that come to define each year’s celebrations.

This year, the most talked-about moment came at the tail end of the multiday festivities, on Tuesday night, and the man who delivered it was none other than President Jair Bolsonaro. Just after 6 p.m., Mr. Bolsonaro tweeted out a 40-second clip showing a sexual act between two men, taking place in the middle of the day before a large crowd. Short on specifics, the president’s missive suggested that the incident happened at some point during the long weekend and that it represented the moral rot at the heart of a beloved national holiday.

“I don’t feel comfortable showing this, but we have to expose the truth,” he wrote. “This is what has become of many block parties during the Brazilian Carnival. Comment and draw your own conclusions.”

The tweet ricocheted around Brazilian Twitter and sent the country’s newsrooms scrambling: How to report on the presidential, er, communiqué with accuracy while still maintaining decorum? “Bolsonaro shares video of man playing with his anus and suggests this is a typical scene during carnival,” was how one newspaper, Folha de S.Paulo, framed it. The headline opted not to mention the most explosive part of the clip, which Mr. Bolsonaro addressed the following morning, again on Twitter, in seemingly faux confusion: “What’s a golden shower?” he asked coyly.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s tweet may have rendered the entire country speechless, but his motives were clear enough. First, he was seeking to demonize Brazil’s L.G.B.T. community, a marginalized population that has occupied his thoughts and rhetoric since he first emerged as a firebrand of the ultraconservative right. (In 2011, he infamously told Playboy magazine he’d rather his son die in an accident than be gay.) Now that he is president, this same community has found itself in his administration’s cross hairs.

But second, Mr. Bolsonaro was clearly smarting at the way this year’s celebrations had morphed into protests against his presidency and what it stands for. Tweeting out the video, which was eventually sourced to a block party that took place in São Paulo on Monday, was, it seems, a mystifying form of retaliation.

Carnival in Brazil isn’t just about partying, though there’s certainly plenty of that (but it should be noted that even by the raucous standards of Carnival, the explicit scene captured on video, and now immortalized by Brazil’s head of state, was aberrant). It is also a time of immense political and civic expression. This year, an unmistakable theme emerged out of all the disparate Carnival celebrations across hundreds of cities: a forceful repudiation of the far-right ideology that Mr. Bolsonaro and his administration represent.

In Rio de Janeiro, the samba school Mangueira won this year’s parade competition by putting on a show that retold Brazilian history from the perspective of its black and indigenous heroes. It also paid tribute to Marielle Franco, a black, gay, progressive councilwoman who was assassinated last year. (While her murder remains unsolved, the police reportedly suspect the involvement of a paramilitary group; recently, links have emerged between the group and the Bolsonaro family, though the latter are not implicated in the murder.) In the historic city of Olinda, revelers threw beer cans on an effigy of the president. Outside Mr. Bolsonaro’s former home in Rio de Janeiro, partygoers dressed up as oranges — a reference to a money-laundering scandal currently plaguing his administration. And a now-ubiquitous chant, which can be most respectfully translated as “Hey! Bolsonaro! Get screwed!” dominated events from the north to the south of Brazil.

By all accounts, Mr. Bolsonaro did not have a great Carnival. He was recovering from major abdominal surgery — the latest phase in a long, delicate recovery from a stabbing last September. But he was able to follow the events from his smartphone. And it soon became clear that the anti-Bolsonaro demonstrations had gotten under his skin.

On Tuesday morning, he lashed out at a music video by two prominent musicians that poked fun at his restrictive views on gender and sexuality. His response was to tweet out a music video of his own, featuring an anonymous singer that called out the two famous artists by name and praised “the captain” Bolsonaro. In a follow-up tweet, the president fired off a warning: “Just as important as the economy is the rescue of our culture, which was destroyed over decades by governments with a socialist bent.”

But the now-infamous tweet from Tuesday evening proved a bridge too far even for many of the president’s conservative allies. “Bolsonaro’s tweet is incompatible with the posture of a president, let alone one on the right,” tweeted Congressman Kim Kataguiri, a leader of the national movement to impeach the former leftist President Dilma Rousseff. “Nothing justifies the president sharing pornography on Twitter.” Shows of support were few and far between, coming only in the president’s Twitter replies from a handful of followers. His allies and cabinet members squirmed to explain why a man who ran on a family values platform had just driven a daylong news cycle that saw red-faced TV presenters explaining the concept of a golden shower. Vice President Hamilton Mourão, currently at loggerheads with the Bolsonaro family, dodged reporters’ questions on Wednesday about what his boss was thinking. “I’m not a ventriloquist,” he said.

The presidential palace, for its part, issued a statement on Wednesday evening. The scene “scandalized not only the president himself, but a significant part of society.” The statement went on to describe the videotaped incident as “a crime” (it didn’t specify which) “violating family values and the cultural traditions of carnival.”

Mr. Bolsonaro is not the first politician in Brazil’s current conservative moment to chafe against the libertine spirit of Carnival. Mayor Marcelo Crivella of Rio de Janeiro, who is a Pentecostal Christian and a bishop (and a popular target of mockery at many a Carnival block party), in recent years slashed government funding for the city’s street parties. “Carnival is a portly baby that needs to be weaned,” he told the news site G1 ahead of this year’s celebrations, adding, for good measure, that women would understand the metaphor.

But Mr. Bolsonaro should heed the lessons of history: Brazilian politicians who take on Carnival rarely triumph. As a journalist noted on Twitter, in 1961 President Janio Quadros “tried to regulate behavior” at Carnival, under the slogan “‘Janio is the certainty of a moralized Brazil.’” Mr. Quadros may have been morally certain; he also resigned after eight months.