Jean Wyllys

Jean Wyllys
Jean Wyllys in 2015
Federal Congressman for Rio de Janeiro
Incumbent
Assumed office February 1, 2011
Personal details
Born	(1974-03-10) 10 March 1974 (age 42) Alagoinhas, Bahia, Brazil
Political party	PSOL
Website	[2]

Jean Wyllys (born Jean Wyllys de Matos Santos on March 10, 1974 in Alagoinhas, Bahia, Brazil) is a Brazilian lecturer, journalist and politician who rose to fame after winning the fifth season of Big Brother Brasil. He is also notable as being Brazil's second openly gay member of parliament. (Clodovil Hernandes was the first openly gay elected member of Parliament, but unlike Wyllys, Clodovil was not a gay rights activist, i.e. he was opposed to same-sex marriage.)

Due to this, he has been compared to Harvey Milk, an early openly gay politician in the United States of America and iconic gay rights activist.

Wyllys was born in Alagoinhas, in the north-eastern state of Bahia, one of seven children. His mother was a washerwoman and his father a car painter who suffered from alcoholism. Wyllys attended a boarding school which gave him the opportunity to get a better education than the average child in his village. Wyllys later moved to Salvador and completed his degree in journalism at the Federal University of Bahia. He first rose to fame after becoming the finalist in the Brazilian reality television show, Big Brother Brasil. He was the first openly gay participant in the show, which caused a lot of controversy amongst fans and participants alike. Wyllys described his victory as being of "great political relevance [...] I said I was a homosexual and I still won the programme in a country that is homophobic."

In 2010 Wyllys was elected a federal MP, representing the Socialism and Freedom party, with an average of 13,000 votes. His election was only possible, considering the number of votes he had in 2010 elections, through the so called "voto de legenda" (party vote), a constitutional mechanism that allows candidates who doesn't have an expressive number of votes to be elected from the votes of another highly voted candidate of the same party. In Wylly's case, the votes of another congressman of Socialism and Liberty Party, Chico Alencar, who was one of the most voted in Rio de Janeiro, helped in his election. Once occupying a chair in Brazilian Congress, Wyllys brought his activism on the LGBT movement to the scene. Once forgotten by Brazilian media since his winning in the Big Brother Brasil fifth season in 2005, five years before his election, he was finally back to the spotlight from the moment he started working on his political platform, that was primarily the fight for LGBT rights. By doing this, he ended up confronting prominent Brazilian right-wing figures, like pastor Silas Malafaia, a famous televangelist and national president of Assembly of God Churches, and Jair Bolsonaro, a congress member who became Wylly's number one enemy in the congress. The proposition of three polemic law projects by Wyllys made him a notorious figure for the liberal and leftist society members, as well as a threatening fugure for some conservative and the religious members. In those law projects are included the prostitution houses legalization, the marijuana production and use regulation, the inclusion of Arabic and Islam studies in Brazilian school curricula and the State financing for sex reassignment surgeries and hormonal treatment for transgender teenagers and adults.