In what must seem like a bizarre twist to his career, Alexandre Frota, who starred in nearly two dozen gay porn videos between 2004 and 2009, according to the Internet Adult Film Database, is now an elected member of Congress in Brazil—and a member of the extreme right-wing Social Liberal Party (PSL) whose leader Jair Bolsonaro was elected the country’s president last October.
His position in Brazil’s far-right-wing movement must seem like a strange one for the 55-year-old Frota, because not only has Bolsonaro praised Brazil’s past military dictatorships, but the man called “Brazil’s Donald Trump” has openly spouted extreme anti-gay views. Perhaps most notably, Bolsonaro once said that if he discovered that his own son was gay, he would not love him and would “prefer that he die in an accident.”
More recently, Bolsonaro spoke out against what he called “gay tourism” in Brazil, according to The Guardian.
“If you want to come here and have sex with a woman, go for your life. But we can’t let this place become known as a gay tourism paradise,” Bolsonaro said earlier this year. “Brazil can’t be a country of the gay world, of gay tourism. We have families.”
Bolsonaro has not shied away from being labeled a homophobe. Quite the opposite, in fact, once declaring, “Yes, I’m homophobic—and very proud of it.”
So how does Frota reconcile his career in gay porn and his own self-declared sexual attraction to men—though he has dated only women, at least publicly, according to a profile by Quartz—with the leader of his party’s hostile views?
“That doesn’t mean that he hates gays,” Frota told Quartz. “Did he say it? He didn’t say that. It’s his choice. Maybe he doesn’t want his son to be gay.”
At the same time, Frota said that he disagrees with Bolsonaro’s anti-gay views, but refuses to condemn them any more strongly than to say of Brazil’s president that he probably should have “kept his mouth shut.”
Frota reserves his own outrage for the group that he finds most objectionable: feminists, whom he accuses of “grotesque” actions such as “urinating on the floor” or “defecating on the streets.”
But Frota is willing to break with Bolsonaro on some issues, sharply criticizing his management of the government, calling the president “a joke,” and “a ready-made comedy skit.”
In fact, he told Quartz, he has his sights set on Bolsonaro’s job.
“If even Bolsonaro was president, how come Alexandre Frota can’t be?” he said.
Photo By Edilson Rodrigues/Agência Senado / Wikimedia Commons
