Tiago: I am Tiago Abreu.

 

Bruno: And I am Bruno Filmann.

 

Tiago: We are autistic and we met on Tinder.

 

Bruno: Yeah, Tiago had something about vaguely mentioning autism in his description. So, I got interested and I asked him about it.

 

Tiago: When he asked me if I was autistic, I thought: "Wow, one more person who will stop talking to me or will start acting strange after knowing that I have a disability". But then he said that he was autistic and my biography gave him this impression, and I was like, "wow!

 

Bruno: I’ve had similar problems before of not knowing whether to talk about my disability or not, because many times people, when you talk about your disability, they end up treating you differently, or they don't want to deal with it or they end up feeling intimidated, I think.

 

Tiago: And with us it was a little different. We started to make some video calls and things started flowing and happening and a few months later... officially boyfriends! Well, that's it: we are an autistic couple.

 

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[intro music]

 

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Olga Aureliano: Gay Love on the Spectrum is the premiere episode of Defiças Portrais, the channel of the project Portraits of Brazil with Disabilities made by co-creative duos from all over the country. In this episode, Bruno Fillmann and Tiago Abreu explore the relationships between the autism community and the gay community: cultural references, the use of apps, and the impacts of disability. Let's embark with them.

 

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[intro music]

 

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Tiago: I discovered that I was on the autism spectrum in my late teens and I was formally diagnosed in 2015, when I was 19 years old. The issue of homosexuality was much earlier actually, since I was a child, I already identified something. In fact, even autism itself - it was two things that went together. I always felt different, but I had a very religious upbringing, so I only really came out of the sexuality closet long after I came out of the autism closet.

 

Bruno: I got my diagnosis in 2019, if I'm not mistaken, it was quite late also, more than Tiago, but I had my whole life an idea like that that I didn't think exactly like other people and had difficulties and facilities that were not common. As for homosexuality, I only started to think and be aware of it during my pre-teen years. I personally never had any problem or great problem accepting myself, either as a gay man or as an autistic man. It was only in the sphere of sexuality that I was quite afraid of coming out publicly, but it was more in the sense that adopting a label seemed like a very final thing to me, a fear came over me that, "what if I'm wrong and I have to go back years later?" Which of course, was a silly fear. And as far as autism, I didn't have a stigma related to the diagnosis and a lot of the diagnosis just made a lot of sense to me, explained a lot of things. I guess I would say that I never saw autism as something that would bring a new dimension to me, but rather an explanation of a dimension that already existed, mine.

 

Tiago: Because I was diagnosed with autism later on and had a religious upbringing, I had several phases in relation to relationships. I remember that, for example, until my diagnosis, I was already fully aware that I was gay, but I avoided it as much as possible or tried to live as a celibate, because I didn't want to deceive women, you know? So I stayed in this gray area. When I was diagnosed with autism, I had the opportunity to hide myself inside the autism closet, because there is that stereotype of the autistic person as a person who is not interested in relationships, asexual, and then people could interpret it as: "Oh, he doesn't have relationships, because he is autistic," and this worked for me. Until the moment my body asked more for relationships and things like that, and I couldn't help it. And then the first time I was with a guy, the first thing that went through my mind was, "This is a one-way street!” But things were quite difficult in the beginning, mainly because of the fact that knowing the right moment to say that you are a person with a disability or not, and the gay scene is a bit difficult, let's face it.

 

Bruno: yeah, I definitely think [it is] a problem also for autistic and heterosexual disabled people, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit that autistic people who seek homosexual relationships have more difficulties in finding a partner.

 

Tiago: The gay community has some norms and some ways of functioning that can either facilitate or complicate people's lives. And then, when I talk about facilitating, I think a lot in comparison with the heterosexual population in the sense of getting sex. In society, especially the macho one that we have, there exists a very strong difficulty among heterosexuals, in the sense that there is a disparity between the man taking the initiative, the woman do not giving him much opportunity... and in heterosexual relationships the question of sex can be very difficult. In the gay community, the issue of sex can even be exaggerated, in the sense that it is very easy to get sex. On the other hand, there are also some challenges regarding what is more valued or not within the gay community. And here we are talking about body standards, behavioral standards. Among the behavioral standards, we have the issues of autism that will sometimes complicate this context; and in body standards, especially, we are often talking about people who are thin, who have a certain represented color, who have certain sizes of height and body parts. And this in a practical sense, in some contexts, can be somewhat excluding, right? Not only for people on the autism spectrum, but gay people in general. The gay community also ends up selling the idea of being an inclusive community, where everything is peace and love and people who are already excluded from society can integrate, right? Because, after all, we are all in the same boat. But this is not necessarily the truth (laughs). We are not in the same boat on some issues. So, all these points end up converging in the difficulty of a part of the gay community to accept and assimilate disability well. After all, how many people that you may have dated are disabled? In my case, besides Bruno, I have only once been out with a guy with a disability, a guy who had cerebral palsy, and I only found out about it on the date itself. I didn't even have this context, the photos didn't indicate anything. So where are people with disabilities in the apps as well? It is a very complicated question.

 

Bruno: that's true, I think it's important to clarify here - in case it wasn't clear - that we are referring, specifically more, to the gay men's community because it is our network of experience. Other LGBT communities have other distinct problems. This problem of the supremacy of aesthetics is a problem that is quite endemic to the gay community. I see a lot of discussion about an epidemic of loneliness among gay men, and I think there is both a historical context for this because of all the oppression that this group of people has suffered in recent years, and a context based on the characteristics of this group itself that, in my experience, is not immediately obvious to straight people. It is a group made up mostly of men who are socialized to be more competitive and aggressive, and therefore a community that has this predisposition to competition. Besides this, different from heterosexual relationships, when you have a homosexual relationship both people are submitted to the same standard of beauty, so it ends up being almost an arms race of appearance. And of one trying to be more beautiful than the other, that the value of a person is measured by their sexual achievements and the sexual achievements of this person are dependent on their appearance and it ends up creating that very strong idea of the standard, right? The ideal man. And this ideal standard cannot be physically reached, by a large part of the population. You can't change your skin tone, your height, the fact of having a disability or not. So, this ends up creating serious problems of self-esteem, loneliness, depression and the like.

 

Tiago: And not to mention things external to the gay community, which also inflate these problems, right? So, from my experience, the very question of religion, for example, which was something that exerted a great weight on me, even after I no longer considered myself a religious person. In the sense of thinking that, given all the values that people around me had, I could never live a normal life, and be read as normal, have the tranquility to, for example, take my boyfriend home, go somewhere without the fear of some relative, right, that is more prejudiced to be or to pass by or to see him, anyway, the stories spread. The autism community doesn't necessarily deal very well with the issue of sexuality either. Not that there aren't a lot of sexually diverse people, but there are some values built into the autism community and the history of autism that are very much linked to an erasure of the sexuality of autistic people.

 

[sound effect like a chime, marking the beginning of the Godmode - Underwater Exploration track]

 

Tiago: The autism community in Brazil started to form especially in the 1980s. There was already some research within the scientific community, mainly focused on still understanding what autism was. But a more social discussion about autism started its first steps, especially in mid-1983, when the Association of Friends of Autistic People - the AMA, in São Paulo, was founded. This was the first autism organization founded in Brazil, and it was organized by parents who wanted their children to be at the very least reached by medical knowledge, which, at the time, was practically nonexistent. In Brazil, at that time, a psychoanalytic knowledge was still very strong in Brazil, which blamed the cause of autism directly on the mothers, mainly, as the guilty ones for their children's autism. And at that time, what was understood by autism was what some people call today severe autism, which is a range of the autism spectrum, mainly characterized by many difficulties in communication, and many times also in daily autonomy. And the fact that autism, with many quotation marks - "severe" - was characterized as the face of autism for a long time, this prevented families from being able to think about issues of sexuality, which the debate was very much on its initial phases. There were many families that couldn't even get their children into school, couldn't even get a diagnosis. So, the discussion about sexuality seemed very distant. And precisely because autism is characterized as a disability that involves the domain of social interaction, and autistic people can often have difficulty lying or lie badly or have that issue that is called sincericide an image of autistics as pure beings, without evil, without sexuality, blue angels, was being built. This expression "blue angel" is a very particular expression of the autism community in Brazil, which actually nobody knows for sure where it came from. We know that the blue to characterize autism is a construction that took place in the last decades, and that it is more associated with the male universe. So, the "blue angel" is the autistic man, who has no evil, who has no sexuality, and this ends up being very complicated for all the autistic people who break this norm. So, autistic women, artists, LGBT people, even black autistic people, right - because when we talk about autism, if you go to Google and type in "autism" what will come up? It will show a boy, a white child. So, this is the image that people have, not only in Brazil but also abroad, about autism. And then, how does a gay autistic person look like in the autism community, where it is normalized to talk about a blue angel? Where this is not normally problematized? How are you going to arrive at an association, for example, where there is this whole issue of the color blue and so on, and then you say that you are a gay autistic who likes to kiss boys (laughs)? So, it is really a very complicated issue.

 

[end of track]

 

Tiago: It is clear that this blue angel issue started to be more questioned in the autism community with the emergence of autism activism, which has its beginnings in the last 10 years. Autism activism in Brazil is a very recent reality and it still has a certain air of formation. Not that... There are people who have been there for a long time, but I say it in the sense that autism activism in Brazil is not yet mainstream, it is not yet the most visible stream in the autism community. The only exception is really for autistic people who will talk about autism on social media. So, you can even think of some autistic people on YouTube, on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter pages that are really going to have higher visibility. And there is a part of the content producers and also the autistic activists who have started to insert themselves more often into this debate about sexuality, especially in the last three, four years.

 

Bruno: That's true. Besides the innate difficulty of autistic people in social relationships, there is also a whole context of society, which often makes it even more difficult for autistic people to have social and sexual relationships, and relationships in general.

 

Tiago: I think that those who are inserted in a context like us, who use apps etc., especially in the gay community, end up having the challenge of sometimes saying that they are a person with disabilities. I remember that when we started talking, you yourself said that some people took the information that you were an autistic person much more seriously than they should have. So, I was wondering, what were your experiences like in terms of telling someone that you were an autistic person?

 

Bruno: I think part of this comes from the difficulty that autistic people have with social cues, right? To know what is appropriate to say, what is not, when it is, when it is not. For me it was never a big secret. I think it involved a kind of prejudice of an idea that people had, as if I was being too personal talking about what I am, about who I am not, anyway. At least that was the impression I got, you know? Many times people act as if I had invested upon them a great revelation, you know? A great truth from the universe.

 

Tiago: In my case I also had that impression, but unlike you, to say that I was autistic person for a period of time was really a big revelation. In the sense that, I wanted to avoid any kind of problem, any kind of risk. And that, besides being an autistic person, I have an interest in autism as a topic, right? In a general way. So, at some point, this would end up being relevant in a date, in a fling, in a relationship. Not necessarily in a fling, right? Because there it is more a matter of casualness, but I had some different responses to the fact that I am a person with a disability that later made me think a lot, over time. I remember in 2018, I started talking to a guy on Tinder and it was going really great. He was a classmate of mine at the university in the biomedicine course, if I'm not mistaken. And then I told him that I was on the autism spectrum, after a while of us talking. Then he asked me if I was aggressive and I was like, "No, I'm not aggressive, why? Then he answered, "No, because my ex-boyfriend was aggressive”. And it was a something that was completely out of context. I didn't understand in what the heck this comment made sense. But as it happened, after he saw me in person, he lost interest. The impression I got was that the autism information was where it all started to go downhill, you know? In a certain way. And then at the same time I also met a guy who knew I was autistic, because I was starting an autism podcast that I have which is Introvertendo (Introverting) and, at that time, I was in a very defensive context. Anything I did wrong, I would get tense and think- "it is the autism". And I think that this also took away his patience in a certain period. In the end it didn't work out, and he in a way which was quite rude, said that I was hiding behind autism. And so, since then, I started to be very afraid of talking about the fact that I was an autistic person or wanted the information about autism to be in the subtext. Then, a while later, in 2019, I started seeing a guy and he found out that I was an autistic person on our very first date. He was talking about his personal life, he said very personal things about himself, about his father's death and so on. And so, I found a context of safety to say that I was an autistic person. He reacted very well, he continued to go out with me, we went out together a few times; but on the other hand, the information that I was an autistic person seems to have put him in a situation of treading on eggshells, he didn't want to have any kind of behavior that could be read as oppressive or ableist. And this, evidently, started to prevent him from expressing what he was interested in, whether from a relationship point of view or from a sexual point of view. Things didn't go very far, and in the end I never found the perfect way to say that I was an autistic person. That's why when you asked me if I was an autistic person, I started to get scared, because our conversation was very nice and I definitely didn't want it to be another failed story.

 

Bruno: I think that the dating apps we have nowadays are a double-edged sword, right? Because yes, on the one hand there is a democratization of dating, of relationships, you have much easier access, right? People in the countryside, people with disabilities, LGBT people...have a much easier time now with the dating apps. But it also has its negative sides, right? The whole business model of these dating apps is to keep people using the app, so it goes against their interests that people find stable relationships. And they end up turning people into commodities and the dating apps are practically product catalogs, right? You browse through Tinder, it's not much different than browsing through a clothing catalog or a car catalog. So, they work exactly with this idea that there is someone better on the next click, on the next click. And we are always looking for something better, something better, you know? And I think this can have quite damaging effects for a person who doesn't exactly fit the standard in these apps, you know, of the profiles of what is a luxury item is in these apps.

 

Tiago: Yes, yes, I agree with you. And I would also add that in this context of these apps, the characteristics of autism relate in a way that puts us at a disadvantage in some interactions. First, that we are talking about applications in which all forms of encounter are given by direct forms of conversation and so on. This often makes very clear our difficulties in social skills and in understanding if the person is interested or not. And note, it is much easier than simply the way people met before, I don't know, like going to bars or being introduced, right? To each other. Because in the apps you have a match, but many times some autistic people don't even manage to get a match, either because they don't know how to sell their fish, to use a very figurative expression (i.e. they don’t know how to sell themselves), or because they don't have an interesting biography, or because they don't choose good pictures, or because they have very restricted topics of interest and then they can't talk outside this scope. And we create a very noisy and negative situation, you know, very aversive for many people within the spectrum. It took me a long time to learn how to use these things.

 

Bruno: You brought up a point that I think is quite positive in these modern dating methods. In the sense of the autism community, it's a different way of looking for suitors, right? And it's a much more explicit way, in my opinion, that helps a lot. So, when you give a match, when the person answers you, you're sure that they have a minimum amount of interest in you, right? Because I always had a hard time knowing when someone was interested in me. I was always very afraid of, like, violate the person, you know? Like, misunderstanding something, and turning into an embarrassing situation for both of us. So, I really like this aspect, where there is almost a relationship contract, you know?

 

Tiago: Yes. And I think that as long as you also understand the mechanics of these applications; and also here, mentioning the ones from the gay community like Hornet, Grindr and so on, which are often more sex oriented, you can create subjects in conversations that can also be a great difficulty for autistic people, based on what is inside the person's biography and so on. When you are in the physical space, many times you don't know very well with what you are going to talk about, but there, you can have access to other social networks of the person and manage, in a certain way, to start a conversation. But even if you can make conversation, there are other issues of autism that in the gay community, as well as in relationships in general, there is not much tolerance, which are the restricted interests. I sometimes like to stay a long time talking about specific issues and I can't tell very easily when the person is disinterested. In my first meeting with Bruno, which we actually had over the internet, we had a video call. We talked for four hours straight about several subjects and they were subjects that I think maybe for a common meeting, people would find strange, but maybe for us it was super normal. We talked about autism itself, we talked about politics, about society, some very deep issues, and it was at that moment that I also started to realize that at least in Bruno's case - because I had never been in a romantic context with an autistic person - that there was much more tolerance to error than in other contexts. I was feeling more allowed to make mistakes without being punished, I was quite at ease.

 

Bruno: I definitely also felt more confident with Tiago. There was much less pressure to project a normal image, so to speak.

 

Tiago: A part of the autistic community, in general, tries very hard to incorporate symbols even linked to the LGBT community, like the rainbow, for example, right? Which is very much characterized in the symbol of neurodiversity. But the opposite doesn't happen very much. There aren't many references to autism in the gay or non-heterosexual context. In cultural productions, in general, if we take the mainstream films, series about autism, generally the characters are straight. And at least in my case, there wasn’t much knowledge about autism from the people I met, from the people I formed relationships with. The gay community definitely doesn't have a lot of knowledge and a lot of references to autism.

 

Bruno: LGBT representation as a whole in the media is a fairly recent phenomenon. Me and Tiago, we are getting old, right? So, we’re from another time. And like, it's from about 10 years ago to now, that there's a lot more representation of all forms of LGBT in the media. I don't know, I think it's Will & Grace that started in the 90s, right? Like, before that, it was pretty heavy oppression against any gay, trans, whatever. So, I don't know if it's a little unfair to also demand representation from all groups, you know? In a context of homosexuality or trans or whatever. I think that intersectionality is important, but I don't know if it is so right to demand that we demand, you know, that we need to have representation from every single group, in every other group, you know, not very possible. But recently there was Special, which is a series that deals precisely with a man with a disability, and in the series he has cerebral palsy. His experience in the gay community, you know, but of course it's just the experience of another gay white man, there are a ton of movies and series about this, you know? So, I think that yes, more and more we are opening more doors for new experiences. So, I am quite optimistic in this aspect. I think that we will see more and more representation in the media.

 

Tiago: And in the case of Special, there was also a gay autistic character in the story. It was a very interesting series in that it first explored, right, a gay man with a disability and at the same time the estrangement that he had for being disconnected from the community of people with disabilities and how he approached it. So, although the first season was a little more superfluous, the second season enters a bit more into these debates. This also made me think a lot about my own relationship with the circuit of autism and with the issues of my sexuality, which were two little boxes that I tried to keep as far away from each other as possible, you know? So, I saw myself very much in that character Sid, which were things that when they came together didn't work out very well. And, anyway, I'm not just autistic, I'm not just gay, these things are part of my life and they are interlaced in such a way that, in many contexts, I don't know how to separate one from the other, obviously. And I think that the autism community has a long way to go to deal with this, not only out there but here as well. But it seems a bit hopeful to me in the sense that, little by little, we are starting to incorporate the understanding that autistic people have sexuality, autistic people have an interest in sexual relationships, that there exists a very difficult reality of autistic people, that as people with disabilities, cannot have relationships, but want to. There exists now a discussion that is beginning to occur about sex education in the context of autism, but there is also another discussion that goes along with the debates related to sexuality and sexual orientation in the autism community. We have an emergence in recent years of a portion of the autistic community that is trans, which has drawn a lot of attention, being quite expressive, including here in Brazil and especially on the internet. And I think that these next 10 years of this decade will be very marked in this sense.

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[track Godmode – In 3]

 

Tiago: There is a cultural issue that we cannot ignore, because autism obviously manifests itself in people and this phenomenon only exists because there are autistic people and these autistic people are everywhere in the world. And each country in the world has its particular characteristics, its political issues, its regional characterizations, and Brazil is not a different country. We live in a continental country that has among its values, the idea of people who are extremely sociable, extremely happy, receptive, and many times the values intrinsic to autism do not necessarily match the values of our country. I, particularly, do not think it is necessarily easy to be autistic in Brazil, but I also don't think it is much more difficult than in most countries. Brazil still seems to me to be a relatively autism-friendly country, you know? Because our legislation has advanced a lot in the last few years, even though some issues we still have a paternalistic view on autism or on how autistic people are or should be. There is not so much denial to the idea that we are people with disabilities and that we have particularities that need to be assimilated and respected. I am an autistic person who has been to the five regions of Brazil, my parents are from Bahia, I was born in São Paulo, was educated in Minas, lived in Goiás, and now I live here, in Rio Grande do Sul, where I met Bruno. And I have also been to the North region. I, particularly, think there is still a lot for us to understand and learn about autism and autistic Brazilians, in relation to our own Brazilian culture. Bruno is obviously Brazilian, but he has also been abroad, which is an experience that I didn't have. So, I would like to know from you: how do you see this issue of being autistic in Brazil?

 

Bruno: So, in my view, autism is a scientific diagnosis, but at the same time, it has a very large social base, right? I think a lot comes from this cultural aspect. One thing I notice is that all or almost all research related to autism still comes from English-speaking countries, you know? So, I don't know... I would be interested to know if these researches done by psychologists and psychiatrists and the like, if they would also apply in a country like Brazil, Egypt, I don't know, China, Japan, which are completely different societies from these English speaking countries, right, which have different values, which have different cultures.

 

Tiago: So much so that, in critical studies of autism, there will be some authors who will point out that there is an alliteration about the image of autistics that do not live in the United States, in the United Kingdom or in those more centralized countries. So, Brazilians, Indians, even Italians would be the others, right, we would be the others. So, in a way, there is this erasure of our particularities in relation to other autistic people.

 

Bruno: In the time I lived outside Brazil, I had no contact, as far as I know, with other autistic people or with other people with disabilities. I couldn't even give an allegory of what the life experience of these people there is like there. Of course, I can give you mine, right? But I didn't have contact with other autistic people, as far as I know and I did not have a diagnose at the time. So, I can only tell reports from my memory, I don't know, I don't consider memory 100%, I think it is very shaped by our present, by the information we have from the past. But I honestly didn't notice any great differences, perhaps because the world is globalized, digital, you know? I spent a lot of time at home on the computer, anyway. Because of my lifestyle itself. But I would even find it dishonest to talk about the experience of people who live, in this case, in Germany and live with disabilities and the difficulties that people encounter on a daily basis. I think that we have to try to get rid of this idea which is very strong, of countries that are developed, countries that are underdeveloped, countries that are not developed, that are, I don't know. Economy, GDP, is not an absolute indicator of quality of life for all the people of the country. So, I think we have a very strong idea of the good countries, you know, the culturally evolved countries:  Germany, United States, France... And then, we compare them to the countries that we consider to be less developed, like Vietnam, Brazil and India. And we are quick to assume that something has to be better in those countries than in the others, and it is not true. France, for example, has several problems with the treatment of autistic people, while here in Brazil I would say that we have achieved several advances. So, I am quite optimistic in relation to the treatment that autistic people receive in Brazil. I think that we have already conquered a lot of things, there have already been so many advances, many laws are passed, like, the behavior of the population in general. I just think that we should keep fighting, that we should not take this optimism and take a lazy optimism. We should continue, always fighting to make things better.

 

[music ending]

 

Tiago: And last but not least, we will end this episode by giving tips to autistic people or other disabled gay people about life and the universe (laughs). Take your notebook and write it down.

 

Bruno: Well, my first piece of advice would be: don't worry too much about romantic aspirations. It is possible to live a totally full life, without necessarily having your perfect match. Another piece of advice would be related to what I just said, which is not to look for a perfect match, to have realistic expectations, not to look for the perfect prince, the perfect princess, you know? If you have a very fixed idea of what you are looking for in a partner, you will reject many people that you could have a happy life with. The last piece of advice I would give is to search the internet, talk to friends, family, your therapist, whoever is close to you: ask if this person has any tips on how to facilitate social contact, on how to create bonds that can develop into a relationship. You can look for, for example, videos on how to create a profile on a dating application, what photos to use, what to put in the description. These are things that neurotypical people already have difficulties with, and that for us who are neurodivergent, can be even more difficult. So these would be my tips.

 

Tiago: And I would like to give you a piece of advice, more in the general scope. That if you are homosexual and you don't have these therapeutic or family support networks that Bruno mentioned, it is very important to have people in your social life that can support you in this sense. So, sometimes, before you go chasing after other people, lovingly, it may be important to build friendships to make friends - even if it is with other people who are also autistic, who will have more tolerance, in this sense. And if you are on this path of getting to know the gay community and so on, and you're still maybe very fixated on the idea of relationships, let go of that a little bit. Go get laid a lot, you know? Get some sexual repertoire, because that's important. So that's it people!

 

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[intro music]

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Olga Aureliano: this channel is produced by the NGO Ateliê Ambrosina from Maceió-Alagoas, and headed by the Western University of Canada, with me Olga Aureliano in the mediation, I am a deaf-oralized and monocular woman, and together with Vanessa Malta, my team partner, visually impaired and type I diabetic, we do the local production. The technical consultancy is from Bruna Teixeira, who coordinates the project alongside anthropologists Nádia Meinerz and Pamela Block. The three of them non-disabled. The script, recording, and editing is by Tiago Abreu and Bruno Filmann, co-creators of the episode; the finalization and intro music is by Rodrigo Policarpo, and the transcription is mine, with proofreading by Bruna Teixeira and English translation by Deise Mônica and Mathew Medeiros. Follow "Defiças Portraits" on Spotify and Instagram to stay up to date on the co-creations that have been happening in Brazil. Until  next week.

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[intro music]

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