AZ: Do you think there is fear in civil society to be associated with trans artists? Alongside the attacks that you received, was there a support movement external to the trans world?

RC: We are always a marginalized body, but we are attempting to leave this condition of marginality. However, the attacks had to do not just with criticizing the piece. I was threatened to be murdered, shot, beaten on the street, they threw bombs in the theater during the play, they staged protests in front of the theater, they wrote things in the entrance, they set things on fire, they attacked theater staff, they put my address on Facebook, they circulated fake news, and so on.

Everything was done to delegitimize my work, because it is easy to make my body guilty – it is too easy since it is guilty and stereotyped already. We received help from many people, but I did not get any legal support from any institution, not even medical support, and I suffered a lot with all this. So, it is weird that we got support, but we got none at the same time. My fight was a very lonely one – with the constant fear of leaving home, of being recognized in public places, and so on. Moreover, we did not get support from people in the arts world, because many of them think it is too much for a travesti to interpret Jesus. We travesti cannot be the image of Jesus, because we are sinners, immoral bodies, with no soul, with no god. There is a religious discourse that attacks our bodies daily and publicly.

AZ: Why did you choose the figure of Jesus? Do you feel a connection with it, or with history? What was the creative process of associating a trans person with Jesus like? 

RC:  When Joe Clifford formulated this comparison – this hermeneutics – she was very young and she was not allowed to enter a church, so she wrote a piece about this. I find it sensational, because if you think about which body would be crucified today, there is no doubt that it would be a trans body. Therefore I say that if Jesus was to come back today, he would do it in a trans, black, peripheral, and fat body. However, people [believers] do not really read the Bible – its message does not resemble what they actually do. When people see a pastor or priest talking, they take for granted everything he says – including on topics like homosexuality. 

AZ: Had you experienced previous attacks due to your artistic activity?

RC: Nothing like with Jesus. This was a very particular case. Imagine that we organized an online presentation during Corpus Christi, and people tried to cut the internet connection. Many politicians used this piece to campaign for election, so the play went viral. Because this is a very easy thing to do – there is just one thing that unites Catholics and Evangelicals, and it is LGBTQ issues. They might disagree on everything else, but they get together when it comes to condemning LGBTQ. Because you can kill your mother, or a female actor, you can throw a child from a window, rip the heart from somebody’s chest as it happened in Brazil – and nobody will get worried. As I say, not even our mothers cry for our deaths, because 90% of trans people are forced to leave their homes when they are between 12 and 14 years old. The average life expectancy for a trans person is between 26 and 35 years. We do not even have the right to get old. We are talking about a population that works for the 90% in compulsory sex work. Even if I had never experienced attacks as in Jesus, as long as I’ve worked as an actor people have tried to remove me from stages. Moreover, I was not allowed to interpret male roles because of my femininity. Therefore, since 2002 I started working as a director because I felt that it did not matter if I was more feminine. However, since 2007 – which is when I came out as trans – I became a “voluntary agent of prevention,” meaning that I was working in the health department of Santos helping trans people who were doing sex work. Therefore, since 2007 I really started studying the trans body. I started from healthcare, psychiatry, and I studied biographies, films, academic works and so on. Today I have what I call a “travesteca” (trans-library) with more than 100 books addressing the trans topic. With the work “Dentro de mi Moura Outra” (“Inside Me Lives Another Person”) I used my identity and research to talk about my life and the process of becoming trans – and since then I always worked on the topic of transgenderism.

AZ: How did you and others trans people’s way of working change with the pandemic and the lockdown? 

RC: We experienced great problems with the pandemic. For instance, art institutions are not contracting trans people. So we are asking, which artists are going to survive this? Which artists will still be artists at the end of the pandemics? Which artists do we want to save? Which artists need to be helped? In Brazil it happens that they are just contracting famous people, artists who already have contracts with big broadcasters and who do not need money in the pandemics, so they are earning even more than before. Trans, black, and peripheral artists are not being called. Therefore, we have an institutional necropolitics that this government is practicing. We are the only country that ended the lockdown without actually having a lockdown – big cities like Sao Paulo are living a normal life. In this situation, dissident bodies will survive if we help and support each other from the bottom, as we have always done.