This month, Sao Paulo's main streets were filled with thousands of people, clad in the yellow and green of the Brazilian flag and mesmerized by a stately figure seated atop a trailer equipped with a speaker.
From above, the scene might have looked like one of the many political rallies held in the same place by Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right Brazilian leader who infamously said he could never love his gay son.
(To be fair, the giant rainbow flag might be a clue.)
It was, in fact, one of the world's biggest pride parades, and on top of the sound truck was Fabro Rodrigues da Silva, 30, the gay son of a single mother from working-class northern Brazil.
But everyone in the crowd knew him as Pablo Vittar: 6ft 2in, a drag queen in a glittering cut-off Brazilian soccer jersey and ripped jean shorts, and one of the best-known pop stars in this country of 203 million people.
“It's so beautiful to see you all dressed in yellow and green!” Pablo Vittar shouted to the crowd, some wearing fishnets and G-strings. She called on participants to wear the colors of the Brazilian flag to reclaim it from Bolsonaro's right-wing movement. “Let's dance!”
RuPaul may still be the queen of queens, but there's an heir to the global crown.
Over the past seven years, Pablo Vittar has become, in some ways, the most successful drag queen in the world: She's released six studio albums (one gold, one platinum, and two double platinum), a fashion release with Adidas, a global ad campaign with Calvin Klein, and her songs have been streamed 1.8 billion times.
She's toured the US and Europe, taken to the stages of Lollapalooza and Coachella, performed with Madonna at her biggest concerts, and sang at the United Nations for Queen Elizabeth's birthday.
Pablo Vittar has called American drag queen pioneer RuPaul, 63, an inspiration, though the two have never met. And RuPaul has dismissed talk of a competition. “I love and support Pablo Vittar,” RuPaul wrote on Twitter in 2022. “Shame on the nasty Twitter trolls trying to create a rivalry.”
But by modern internet standards, it's hard to argue with the idea that Pablo Vittar is starting to surpass her childhood idol: Across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube, Pablo Vittar has a combined total of 36 million followers, three times RuPaul's.
In the process, Pablo Vittar has come to represent the paradoxes of LGBTQ in Brazil.
In addition to being home to some of the most famous drag stars, Brazil also has some of the most extensive gay rights policies in the world: Gay couples can marry and adopt children, transgender people can legally choose their gender, homophobic insults are criminalized and so-called conversion therapy, which aims to turn gay people into heterosexuals, is banned.
But Brazil has also long been one of the most dangerous countries for gay and transgender people. More than 1,840 transgender people have been murdered in Brazil since 2008, more than double the number killed in the next most dangerous country, Mexico, according to a study tracked by transgender advocacy group Transgender Europe. Brazil has topped the rankings every year since the study began.
“You never know when it's going to happen to a friend, when it's going to happen to a family member, when it's going to happen to you,” Pablo Vittar said in an interview. “My biggest goal in my career is to make sure young people don't feel scared when they go outside.”
Pablo Vittar has emerged as Brazil's most vocal gay voice against a right-wing movement led by conservative Christian groups that has made heterosexual views on gender, sex and marriage central to its political strategy.
Pablo Vittar was a harsh critic of Bolsonaro during the 2022 election and received a formal complaint from the former president's camp for calling for Bolsonaro to be removed from the Lollapalooza stage. When Bolsonaro lost to leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Pablo Vittar headlined Lula's inaugural concert.
“When a drag queen goes on stage, it's already a political act,” Pablo Vittar said. “I'm teaching the kids and their mothers behind me that they can be in my shoes, that they can't be afraid, that they can't give up on who they are.”
For Pablo Vittar's gay and transgender fans, she is a powerful inspiration.
“She gives us a great sense of security,” said Joao Rabelo, 28, a public relations officer in Pablo Vittar's native northern Brazilian city. “Now I can walk the streets with my boyfriend in peace and without fear of death.”
Though the public mostly sees Pablo Vittar dressed as a woman, the star lives his life as a man. “Gender is something society constructs,” says Rodrigues da Silva (the star's real name). “What matters most is how we feel inside. I feel like a boy, and just because Pablo Vittar appears doesn't make me a woman.”
As for pronouns, she's indifferent — unless she's cross-dressing. “When I'm cross-dressing, please, I use the feminine pronoun,” she said.
In a way, this lifestyle has created two separate lives for Fabbro: the man and the drag queen.
Fablo is a reclusive man who lives with his mother, stepfather and sister in an upscale house in a small city in the midwestern part of Brazil. When he works as Pablo, he lives in a small apartment in São Paulo, the largest city in Latin America.
Favreau is shy and doesn't like to talk about himself. Pablo is the opposite. “If a blonde was here, she'd probably hit on me,” the star said of his alter-ego in an interview, not cross-dressing. “She's sassy and mischievous. I'm not.”
And he speaks of his drag act in the third person. “Because she's really in the third person,” he says, “when I do something as Pablo Vittar and it spills over into my life, I hate it because I'm a shy person. I want to crawl into a hole.”
Rodrigues da Silva was born in Maranhão, Brazil's poorest state, to a single mother who worked as a nursing technician. By the age of 5, he had already wanted to perform on stage, starting out in the church choir. “I just wanted to sing,” he says, “and let people hear me.”
He says his classmates mocked him for being effeminate, but his mother always supported him. As a teenager, he started singing on YouTube and in bars, and on his 18th birthday, at a Halloween party at a gay club, he tried drugs.
“I'd never experienced such an intense feeling of freedom, being able to express what was going on in my head,” he said.
Around the same time, a video of him singing Whitney Houston songs went viral, and club owner Yan Hayashi and music producer Rodrigo Gokey immediately saw the potential and began managing Rodrigues da Silva under the name Pablo Vittar (a name that paid homage to a drag queen Rodrigues da Silva had known for some time).
Pablo Vittar soon landed a job fronting a band on a late-night variety show. She then began releasing music, and by 2017 had a number one song in Brazil.
Pablo Vittar has since become one of Brazil's most reliable and popular artists, with her high-pitched voice, elaborate dance moves and high-energy shows. She's also garnered a decent international following, mostly among the LGBTQ community, and is currently working on an album in a mix of English and Spanish.
Chicago native Owen Maron, one of Pablo Vittar's three managers, is tasked with figuring out how to turn the Portuguese-speaking drag queen into a bankable international star, but he's consistently been impressed with the response.
“Even if people don't know the language, they love her and what she represents, and the show speaks for itself,” he said.
Her music ranges from pop to electronic to Brazilian music, and her latest album features popular music from the north and northeast of Brazil where she grew up, including accordion forro and synthesizer technobregas.
After being interviewed as Ms. Rodrigues da Silva, she appeared a few hours later dressed as Pablo Vittar at a charity concert in her home state of Maranhão, a transformation that usually takes three hours. (Like athletes who collect free sneakers, she has collected 200 wigs donated by a London wig manufacturer.)
She wore a skin-tight top depicting the state flag, a blonde wig, white boots, a tiny skirt and a G-string, and her hairstylist used a fan to cool her bottom while she waited to take the stage in the Brazilian heat with the male dancers.
“It's my favorite place in the world,” she said, before strutting onto the stage and the crowd erupting.