urn the witch!' shouted dozens of demonstrators gathered outside the SESC Pompeia community centre in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2017, while they set on fire an image supposedly representing Judith Butler, who was giving a lecture at the venue. In another incident that same year, outraged conservative groups blocked the entrance to the QueerMuseu exhibition at the Santander Cultural Centre in Porto Alegre, a major city in southern Brazil. The same happened again in 2017 at the Mondrian and the de Stijl Movement exhibition at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Centre in Rio de Janeiro, where two lesbian visitors were insulted and verbally attacked by an employee's boyfriend; his attack, however, did not stop there: he wrote 'Out with lesbians' on an interactive panel created to encourage the exhibition's audience to contribute their thoughts. Since 2017, intolerance has spread beyond museums and cultural venues, and taken on scandalous proportions across the streets of Brazil. Intellectuals, artists, and activists devoted to LGBTQI+ and feminist causes began receiving overt threats both online and on the streets. In our case, aggressors threw stones, fireworks, eggs and urine-filled balloons at our house 1 and graffitied the word 'faggot' on one wall. Such cowardly, and still ongoing, attacks are reminders that our neighbours are eager to create a 'gay-free zone' . Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, elected in 2018, took pride in stating that 'gay neighbours decrease property value' (ACapa website 2011). During his electoral campaign, murders, thrashings and public humiliation scenes became a nationwide phenomenon promoted and exacerbated by the far-right, with feminists and LGBTQI+ people being their preferred targets. In view of those circumstances, many of us have taken refuge abroad in a phenomenon we call the 'rainbow diaspora': a term that represents a new traumatic mark on Brazil's LGBTQI+ memory. These are but a few examples of how museums, cultural institutions and individuals have been marked by ultraconservative hatred towards non-normative sexualities that has taken over Brazil in recent years. In brazen public speeches by the country's highest political authorities, LGBTQI+ people like ourselves have been addressed as enemies of the nation for being considered a threat to the traditional Brazilian family. Because we are not situated within the 'heterosexual matrix' , our bodies started being understood in the political arena as 'abject bodies' , 'bodies that do not matter' , which for that very reason can be destroyed (Butler 1990;1993).