The SomosGay director set to be among the first LGBT campaigners to meet with Pope Francis in country where community is often persecuted by violence

In some ways, Simón Cazal’s experience of coming out was like that of any young gay man in a small rural town: there was no local scene or support group he could turn to; the books in his college library said that homosexuality was an illness.

But Cazal had the particular misfortune to come to terms with his sexuality in Paraguay: a deeply conservative country which at that point was barely out of a 40-year military dictatorship which rounded up and tortured gay people.

“When I got up the courage to tell my parents that I thought I was gay, their reaction was terrible. They said that I was disrespecting them and breaking their rules,” said Cazal. “They said that this country didn’t have space for people like me. They said that if I ‘chose’ to be gay, I couldn’t stay in the house. And they threw me out in the street.”



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Twenty years on, Cazal is set to make history. As the director of LGBT advocacy organization SomosGay, he is set to participate in a civil society roundtable with Pope Francis, who touches down in the small South American nation of barely seven million inhabitants on Friday as part of a whistle-stop regional tour.

Saturday’s encounter, albeit with several hundred other activists, will be the first time a sitting pope has publicly met with an LGBT campaigner.



Sitting in SomosGay’s colourful offices in the capital of Asunción, Cazal is clearly riding a wave of optimism that things in Paraguay are finally beginning to change. He’s quick to erupt into laughter, even when describing how he was fired from his job after attending a gay rights march in 2003, and thrown out of his apartment last year for hanging a rainbow flag from the balcony.



But his cheerfulness evaporates when he relates how, soon after unofficially founding SomosGay 10 years ago, he was attacked twice in three months – once by the police. “They knocked me unconscious and left me for dead … They broke me as a person, on every level. It was really hard to recover from so much violence,” he said.



Paraguay’s LGBT community still experiences a huge amount of discrimination. Of the 6,000 people referred to SomosGay each year, 93% have been the victim of violence. Fifty-four transexual people have been killed in Paraguay since the fall of of dictator Alfredo Stroessner in 1989. Boys are beaten up by their family for acting “too feminine”, and the NGO regularly receives reports of girls being submitted to “corrective rape”, sometimes by members of their own family, when they come out as gay. Minimal levels of care for HIV sufferers lead to easily preventable deaths.

For Cazal, the everyday discrimination is “directly related” to the outright homophobia displayed by Paraguay’s political class. President Horacio Cartes notoriously said prior to his election in 2013 that he would rather “shoot himself in the balls” than have a gay son. When police attacked an LGBT demonstration in 2014 and hospitalized activists a senior minister told local press that “homophobia doesn’t exist in Paraguay”.



“They say these things because they know they can get away with it,” said Cazal. “It makes you feel like a stranger in your own country. It discourages you. But then it makes you angry. It makes you think we’re going to stay and fight … if not for ourselves, then for the next generation so they don’t have to go through the same things as us.”

When he first received the invitation from the national bishop’s conference to attend Saturday’s meeting, he thought it was a joke. Cazal admitted that he and his colleagues were not sure if he should accept: other LGBT organizations have refused to attend due to the religious character of the meeting. “Some people said don’t even think about it, because it’s obviously a marketing move to present the pope as more open than he is and the church in a good light,” he said.

“But in Paraguay, 92% of people are Catholic and love the pope. If we reject the invitation, we’re rejecting democracy.”

Attending the meeting, he said, does not signal their support for the church – Cazal is an atheist – but offers a chance to reach the “people in the street, not the Catholic hierarchy”, he said.

“They’ll see that the pope invited gay people, and gay people went. And, at best, people will begin to think in a different way.”

Since news of the meeting came out, Cazal has been flooded with messages of support.



One wall of Cazal’s office is occupied by a mural of Batman, locked in a passionate embrace with a Robin-like figure. It’s an apt choice for a reluctant hero, who is still faintly bemused by the media coverage he has received.



And once the media circus has died down, Cazal will continue his work championing Paraguay’s LGBT community. “Here, we’re going to carry on. But with a new weapon. We have a new banner that we didn’t have before: we have the banner of the pope. And we’re going to use it for as a long as we can, to talk with people who see our existence as against their faith. This is going to give us a lot of strength.”