Sao Paulo’s main streets were packed with thousands of people this month, draped in yellow and green Brazilian flags and attracted by a commanding figure atop a tractor-trailer equipped with loudspeakers.
Viewed from above, the scene could be mistaken for one of the many political rallies held at the same location by former President Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian far-right leader who infamously declared that he would never Love a gay son.
(To be fair, though, the giant rainbow flag would be a giveaway.)
In fact, this is one of the largest pride parades in the world. The man on the sound truck was Phabullo Rodrigues da Silva, 30, a worker in northern Brazil. The gay son of a classy single mother.
However, everyone in the crowd knew him as Pabllo Vittar, a 6-foot-2 drag queen wearing a glittering Brazilian soccer jersey and ripped denim shorts, the man with a 2.03 One of the hottest pop singers in a country with a population of 100 million.
“It’s so beautiful to see you in yellow and green!” Pablo Vitale shouted to the crowd, many of whom were wearing fishnets and thongs. She called on revelers to wear the Brazilian flag and take it back from Bolsonaro’s right-wing movement. “Let’s dance!”
RuPaul may still be the queen of queens, but the heir to the global crown has arrived.
Over the past seven years, Pablo Vita has become by some measures the most successful drag queen in the world. She has six studio albums (one gold, one platinum and two double platinum), her own fashion album with Adidas, a global advertising campaign with Calvin Klein and 1.8 billion views of her songs Play volume.
She has toured the United States and Europe; performed on stage at Lollapalooza and Coachella; performed with Madonna at her biggest concerts; and sang at the United Nations for Queen Elizabeth’s birthday.
Pablo Vittar calls pioneering American drag queen RuPaul, 63, an inspiration even though they have never met. RuPaul dismissed any talk of competition. “I love and support @PablloVittar,” RuPaul wrote on Twitter in 2022.
By modern internet standards, however, it’s inarguable that Pablo Vitale has begun to surpass her childhood idol. Pabllo Vittar has a total of 36 million followers on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube, three times as many as RuPaul.
In the process, Pablo Vittar gradually became a representative of Brazil’s LGBTQ paradox.
In addition to being home to a slew of budding drag stars, Brazil has adopted some of the most extensive gay rights in the world. Gay couples can marry and adopt children; transgender people can legally choose their gender; homophobic slurs are a crime; and so-called conversion therapy, which aims to turn gay people straight, is also banned.
Yet for years, Brazil has also ranked among the worst countries for deaths among gay and transgender people. More than 1,840 transgender people have been murdered in Brazil since 2008, more than double the number in Mexico, the country with the second-highest death rate, according to tracking by advocacy group Transgender Europe. Brazil has topped the list every year since tracking began.
“We never know when it will be my friends, when it will be my family, when it will be me,” Pablo Vita said in an interview. “That’s my biggest career goal: to get young people out there without feeling this fear.”
Pablo Vittar has become one of Brazil’s loudest gay voices, pushing back against the country’s right-wing movement, led by conservative Christian groups, that has adopted a heteronormative vision of gender, sexuality and marriage as its political strategy core part.
Pabllo Vittar, a scathing critic of Bolsonaro during the 2022 election campaign, was criticized after calling for Bolsonaro to be ousted from the Lollapalooza stage A formal complaint from a former presidential campaign. When Bolsonaro lost to leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Pablo Vital headlined Lula’s inaugural concert.
“The appearance of a drag queen on stage is already a political act,” Pablo Vital said. “I show the kids and the mothers behind them that they can be like me and not be afraid and not give up on themselves.”
She is a powerful inspiration to Pablo Vittar’s gay and transgender fans.
“She gave us a sense of security,” said João Rabelo, 28, a publicist in the northern Brazilian city where Pablo Vital was born. “Today I can walk down the street with my boyfriend and not be afraid of death.”
While the public mostly thinks of Pablo Vittar as dressing up as a woman, the star lives the life of a man. Mr Rodriguez da Silva (the star’s real name) said gender “is a social construct”. “The most important thing is how we feel inside. I felt like a boy, and when Pablo Vital arrived, I didn’t become a woman.
She is indifferent to pronouns─when she is no longer in drag. “If I do drag, for God’s sake, do it in a feminine way,” she said.
In a way, this lifestyle creates two different lives: Fabbro the man and Pablo the drag queen.
Phabullo is a homebody who lives with his mother, stepfather, and sister in a luxurious house in a small city in Brazil (the equivalent of the Midwest). While playing Pablo, she was living in a small apartment in São Paulo, Latin America’s largest metropolis.
Fabbro was shy and hated talking about himself. Pablo is the opposite. “If the blonde was here, she would hit on you,” the star, who is not in drag, told me in an interview about his alter ego. “She’s playful. She’s naughty. I’m not.
Yes, he talks about his drag performances in the third person. “Because she is really the third person,” he said. “When I do something as Pablo Vittar, it permeates my life and makes me shy, and I hate it. I want to crawl into a hole.
Mr. Rodriguez da Silva was born in Maranhão, Brazil’s poorest state, to a single mother whose father was a nurse technician. At the age of 5, he began to seek the stage, starting in the church choir. “I just want to sing,” he said. “I want people to see me singing.”
He said his classmates teased him for being a sissy, but his mother always supported him. As a teenager, he began singing on YouTube and in bars. Then, at a Halloween party at a gay club on his 18th birthday, he tried drag.
“I’ve never experienced such a great sense of freedom – being able to express what was going on in my head,” he said.
Meanwhile, a video of him singing a Whitney Houston song went viral. Club owner Yan Hayashi and music producer Rodrigo Gorky soon saw the potential and began managing Mr. Rodrigues da Silva as Pablo Vita (Pabllo Vittar). (The name pays homage to a drag queen Mr. Rodriguez da Silva previously knew.)
Pablo Vitale was soon performing with the group on late-night variety shows. She then started releasing music, and by 2017, her song became the number one song in Brazil.
With his soaring voice, exquisite dance moves and energetic performances, Pablo Vital has become one of Brazil’s most dependable stars. She’s also gained an international following, primarily from the LGBTQ community, but is now working on an album that’s a mix of English and Spanish.
Chicago native Owen Mallon was one of Pablo Vittar’s three managers tasked with figuring out how to make a Portuguese-speaking drag queen a profitable international star. However, he has been impressed by the response.
“Even though people didn’t understand the language, they loved her and what she stood for, and the show speaks for itself,” he said.
Her music ranges from pop to electronic to Brazilian. Her latest album covers the pop music of northern and northeastern Brazil, where she grew up, including forró for accordion and tecnobrega for synthesizer.
After being interviewed as Mr Rodríguez da Silva, hours later she appeared as Pablo Vita at a benefit concert in her home state of Maranhão. The transformation usually takes three hours. (Like an athlete who collects free sneakers, she collected 200 wigs donated by a London wig maker.)
She wore a tight top that mimicked the state flag, a blonde wig, white boots, a tiny skirt and a thong. Her hairstylist used a fan to cool her butt as she waited to join the male dancers on stage in the Brazilian heat.
“My favorite place in the world,” she said. Then she strutted onto the stage and the crowd erupted.
