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 Cramped in a tiny office above Rio de Janeiro's central train station, I am having trouble hearing Yone Lindgren amidst the cacophony of ringing telephones, conversations between the staff, and the construction workers hammering away incessantly at the flimsy partition walls which enclose CERCONVIDH- Brazil's first ever referral center for victims of homophobic violence and discrimination.
Lindgren is coordinator of this team of 10 dedicated people who give their time, energy and financial resources to make sure that Rio's gay men, women and transgender people are able to pursue their rights as citizens as fully as possible.
"We do the work the government doesn't," she says. Work which involves not only attending a helpline for victims of homophobic abuse, but also referring users on to the relevant psychological and medical specialists and following through the legal aspects of their cases. In addition the volunteers hold fundraising events just to make sure they can keep providing such a service.
And the service could not be more urgent. National and international human rights organisations such as the Gay Group of Bahia, Global Justice, Amnesty International and the International Lesbian and Gay Human Rights' Commission consistently identify Brazil as a gross offender of homosexual rights, where hatred leads to torture and over 100 murders reported in the national press each year.
And these figures may just be the tip of the iceberg of homophobic violence. For not only do many cases never come to light because families do not wish their dead relative's sexuality to be exposed, but the every-day violence LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people suffer is much wider and more nuanced than those sensationalist accounts which the press offer.
According to a study released this week, based on a survey at last year's Rio gay pride march by a coalition of LGBT activists from the Arco Iris NGO, and academics at the Cândido Mendes (UCAM) and Rio state University (UERJ), 64% of LGBT people have suffered some form of discrimination because of their sexual identity.
This includes acts as diverse as bullying at school or in the workplace, threats and name-calling from strangers and, as often occurs with trans (transgendered people), denial of access to public or semi-public spaces such as shops and bars.
One can't help but be baffled by these alarming statistics, which are expected to be similar when findings of a survey carried out in São Paulo are made public, considering that Rio, and its larger neighbour, are home to some of Latin America's most vibrant LGBT cultures.
Last month's gay pride parade in São Paulo brought together 2 million people, who chanted and danced for over 12 hours on the Avenida Paulista, the city's main thoroughfare, making it the largest gay pride event in the history of humanity. This Sunday the march along the beachfront in Copacabana, Rio, expects some 600,000 participants.
These cities, and other state capitals, such as Salvador and Curitiba, are also the base of extremely well-organised movements. Anti-discrimination laws and equal work-related benefits for homosexual and heterosexual partners embedded in municipal and state codes, are the result of their campaigning.
Whilst the project for same sex civil union in the federal chamber in Brasília, the Brazilian capital, would surely not have reached that stage without the relentless activism of such groups.
"There has been an explosion of acceptance here in Brazil recently", says Silvia Ramos of UCAM, pointing to mainstream indicators such as the landslide victory of an openly gay man in the Brazilian version of Big Brother and gay characters in prime-time soap operas, such as Globo TV's America.
"But we don't know whether the guy that beats up a gay is the same one that claims to "have gay friends", or if we are dealing with a society that is split between tolerance and intolerance".
That intolerance jars with the popular image that Brazilians hold of themselves - that which is exported of a vibrant and happy country, where anything goes, the land of what Brazilian sociologist and historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda has referred to as "o homem cordial" (the cordial man).
For Sandra Carvalho, of the Rio office of Global Justice, that cordiality is a myth. "Brazil is a violent country in terms of interpersonal relations", she says.
And that violence is often highly ambiguous: "The police that kill the poor and the black living in the favela (shanty-town) often come from poor, black families in the favela themselves".
Any policy which seeks to deal with the crisis of homophobic violence in Brazil then, must deal not only with the multiple types of violence, verbal and physical, which scourge the lives of LGBT people, but also, as Ramos argues, take this contradiction or ambiguity around acceptance as its point of departure.
But for some members of the LGBT communities, such as the trans, there may not be any ambiguity over societal tolerance in the first place.
"We're a joke for the Brazilian society", says Hanah Suzart, President of ASTRA-Rio, the association of transgendered people, which concentrates on STD prevention and building self-esteem in the trans community.
To highlight the point, she talks of the "elbow effect": the daily humiliation trans suffer in the shop, the bank or the doctor's surgery, when onlookers nudge each other and comment indiscreetly.
The image of Rio as paradise, with the travesti as its ultimate symbol of carnavalesque transgression is a "utopia", according to Suzart. Instead it is "conservative, homophobic, prejudiced and elitist", with a (state) government that "will take us back to the era of the inquisition".
Certainly amongst activist ranks, there is a less than amicable relationship with this government, which is seen as representing "evangelicals", who don't prioritise LGBT concerns.
There is however a closer relationship with the federal and municipal governments, the latter which is supporting the city's pride march.
The federal government, for its part, has formed an alliance with LGBT NGOs nationwide by supporting the programme Brasil sem Homofobia (BsH) (Brazil without Homophobia),
Launched last year, it aims to train LGBT activists, incorporate material on homosexuals into school curricula and support referral centers in order to overcome homophobia.
On paper it looks impressive, but there are doubts as to whether it will ever become a reality.
"The funds were supposed to have been coming for the last five years. The problem is that the federal government made a recommendation and said "faz quem quiser" (whoever wants to do it, go ahead). But local governments don't want to."
As long as funds are slow or partial in arriving, the "goodwill" of civil society will continue to be exploited by governments, reaching one of its most stark incarnations in Suzart's situation.
Since the NGO which she runs out of her one-bedroom apartment has operated with sporadic or no external support, Suzart keeps it going herself. Through sex work.
"I go out at night and prostitute myself, get back in the early morning, sleep for an hour and a half, get up and take the bus to go give a talk. I have to pay my bus fare somehow. I have been asked if I have pimp. My pimp is the (state) governor."
Whilst sex work is legal in Brazil and many transgendered people consider it to be a dignified profession, Suzart's situation highlights a relationship of unequal power.
Committed individuals spend considerable physical, emotional and psychological efforts doing the state's "dirty work", often with little recognition, in order to construct a safer and more just society.
Some have hope that things may change later this year. Lindgren recently returned from meetings in Brasília to mark BsH's first birthday. She is confident that funds are on their way.
With an injection of the requested 400,000 reais (US$ 200,000) they would be able to offer a much more efficient and sustained service to their users, lifting the organisation out of a precarious financial dependence on its staff, LGBT organisations and their constituency.
And with the enormous LGBT pride parades which are now occurring across Brazil, it is becoming increasingly harder to ignore this critical mass.
On Sunday I will be there marching alongside them, and whilst the images of Carnaval and a "live and let live" mentality are often tropes which mask the real suffering of every day survival, their temporary revival under the sun of a winter afternoon will be yet another act which is forcing Brazilian society to recognise and honour its diversity, whilst allowing LGBT people to reclaim paradise in their own vision.
Luke McLeod-Roberts is a journalist who is in Rio de Janeiro carrying out research for his MA dissertation on strategies to combat homophobic violence in Rio.
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