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Pabllo Vittar is the first drag queen to sing at the legendary Rock in Rio; he reached number one on Spotify Brazil; he's done—in the past—world tours and massive advertising. But he's not someone who came here to fit in. He came to break everything with glitter . More than a pop star: he's a fabulous anomaly, a drag queen who turns a hit into a discourse and the dance floor into a trench. From a Brazil burning between conservatism and desire, Pabllo exports twerk, sweat, and highlighter as weapons of revolution. In this interview with Presentes, he talks about bodies, languages, idols, politics; and the vertigo, both glorious and dangerous, of being oneself in front of the entire world.

You have to have a body to do what Pabllo Vittar does. Not just a body trained for jumping, thongs, and heels; you have to have a mutant, undisciplined body, capable of dancing when everything is on fire. 

She was born in Maranhão, in northern Brazil, one of those regions where the heat and hostility are brutal. She grew up in a country where Catholic devotion coexists with police brutality, raised by a single mother. When she was told "Northeastern faggot," she responded with a soprano voice, shaved legs, and a performing vocation that could have been priestly, if she hadn't preferred the dance floor as her altar.

Pablo Vittar is already a mythological figure straight out of some futuristic queer poem: a siren of the digital age who sings of love, revenge, and joy. She's compared to RuPaul, Lady Gaga, and Beyoncé, but those comparisons fall away as soon as she takes the stage. Vittar is far from imitation; she/he/they embody it. Perhaps the legacy of a superb lineage of drag queens who preceded her, another genealogy, that of Latina transvestites, those who didn't have a place in academia or on mainstream TV, but who still learned to pose, to die, and to return.

There's something profoundly political about the way she moves: every sharp note is a stab in the throat of conservatism, and every voguing is a mockery of the heterosexual order. It's no coincidence that favela queers, nameless teenagers, love her like a marginalized pop goddess, one of those born on the outskirts and ending up setting the city center ablaze.

Violence was a constant in his upbringing, but so was the desire to live and to never apologize. From that margin, he began to build an identity that would go on to become pop. There is no neutrality in his aesthetic or his music. Pabllo's body doesn't fit the pre-established norm, and that's what makes him so explosive. His figure—tall, hyperbolically feminine, vocally exuberant—wasn't molded by the industry, yet it was imposed on the industry by a legion of fans who didn't feel represented by anyone else. Transvestites, dissident teenagers, undocumented trans girls, kids from the favelas, racialized bodies. What hegemony makes invisible, Pabllo sings and dances.

Music for LGBTIQ and all rights

During the Bolsonarist years, his existence was a provocation. In a country governed by a president who publicly rejected LGBTIQ+ identities and dreamed of a nation without queers, without artists, without joy, Pabllo responded by dancing in stadiums, kissing his dancers on television, and headlining international festivals. His resistance was festive, but no less fierce. His body—transvestite, racialized, and popular—was a banner at marches, a backdrop for school occupations, a queer slogan in the favelas. When Lula took office, Pabllo headlined the concert that celebrated a new term in Brazil.

She tells us in the interview that she doesn't sing to please everyone, she sings to survive , to get revenge. To shine. Because in a world that insists on killing you, shining is a radical act. Loving, relaxed, kind, generous, always with a huge smile and a burst of laughter ready to burst. That's how Vittar presented herself in a Zoom for this interview. We talked about the Brazilian, Argentine, and Latin American realities, about minorities in general, about the joy of pop, her upcoming trip to Mexico, her desire to come back to Argentina: a diva in all her splendor.

― Brazil saw you born, and the rest of the world quickly embraced it. What do you miss about that initial anonymity, and what's the appeal of global recognition now?

― I miss being normal (laughs). It's not that I don't feel like a normal person, but doing normal things like getting drunk on the streets, like I did when I was younger, things like that. Now, whenever I can, and thanks to this, I travel, and that's incredible. I was recently in Japan, and it was great. But one of the achievements of being a star is being able to change people's lives, with creativity, with strength, showing that it's possible to change your life; that it's possible to transform your dreams into achievements. That makes me very happy, having been able to realize a dream I've had since I was little: to be a singer, to be a voice, to be an icon, for my fans, for my family in the community.

― Pabllo Vittar is an aesthetic manifesto, a political statement in heels. What happens to you when the lights go out? 

"My love, I am what you're seeing now (more laughter). I'm a very sensitive person, who suffers a lot with the personal things in my life. I suffer a lot with the love I often can't have, moments that are taken from me, snatched away. But when I'm with Pablo Vittar, everything transforms into a fantasy. I live my fantasy very fully and full of love. But when I throw away my wig, I'm a very fragile little thing."

“I have always been proud of who I am”

― Brazil, like most likely the rest of South America, is a very turbulent country that was, but not now, governed by very conservative rhetoric. Were you afraid to be so explicit about yourself? 

"It's very natural for me to be like this. I've been like this since I was little, you know? I remember when I was in school, always dancing and singing. I was never ashamed of who I am, speaking out, highlighting my feminine side. I was always very proud of this, because it's who I am . In my music, I would never be any different, because I am me. When we were in the most conservative times here in Brazil, every time I went on stage, it was like saying, 'We won't be silent, we won't give up on our dreams, on our rights.' I was always full of energy to achieve more and more and more. They never managed to make me feel less.

― Does it bother you when people ask you about your gender identity, or do you see it as a political opportunity? 

"It's always an opportunity to speak, to communicate above all. To speak, above all, so that so much transphobia doesn't happen to my sisters and brothers. They won't silence me, I can't allow it, because they're my family, my brothers and sisters, who are beautiful . It's always a way to educate society, a way to bring issues into focus. I see pop, pop music in general, electronic music, everything we dance to, as a kind of political territory right now."

― Do you think pop can change anything? Or maybe even make people uncomfortable, and that's enough? 

"We can change anything, anything. And I know that very well. I think a lot about how most people enclose so many other rhythms within pop music. But when I started making music, I always wanted to make pop music because it was pop songs that changed that kid into the person I am today. Yes, we can change other things too." 

From Copacabana to the world with Madonna and Lady Gaga

He danced with Madonna at what was the queen of pop's biggest concert, the 2024 show on the beaches of Copacabana, Rio. A year later, he returned with another megastar, Lady Gaga, and another massive show at the same venue. His alliances don't begin or end when he leaves the stage.

― About your collaborations now with Nathy Peluso, and previously with Lady Gaga. What do you gain from a featuring and what do you contribute? 

― Originality for both: what I gain and what I contribute. I always look for artists who add different forms to the productions. I look at how the artist performs their concert, how they behave on stage, something that challenges me, that seduces me. All the artists I collaborate with have always seduced me, and I like the songs too. It's a beautiful job.

What did he do with Lady Gaga? When Gaga's song "Fun Tonight" was first heard in Portuguese, with a northeastern accordion, a zabumba drum roll, and Pabllo Vittar's voice crying "I can't wait anymore to pretend everything's fine," something went awry—broke—on the official map of pop. The Brazilian remix of the album "Dawn of Chromatica," curated by Lady Gaga, was born. And a moment was also born: Pabllo Vittar's entry into the global canon, not by translating himself, but by making the center speak his language. 

Until then, northern pop divas had flirted with Latinx, queer, and peripheral. But this was something else. Gaga didn't just open the doors to the acid-pink castle of "Chromatica": she let an Afro-indigenous drag artist, based on electronic forró, redecorate it. She invited her to change the very structure of a song. And Pabllo did it his way: painful and danceable. A remix that sounds like a shouted goodbye in a gay bar in Recife and also like a victory: that of the abject body entering the goddesses' club. Without ceding her voice, without whitewashing herself. Pabllo doesn't sing in English: she sings with hunger, with an accent, with a sweet rage. Lady Gaga had created "Chromatica" as an emotional science fiction planet, inhabited by queer and traumas processed through the beat.

Pabllo entered like someone arriving from another, more earthy and precarious universe to dance on his own ruins. There's something irreverent and fierce in this fusion. As if, for the first time, a drag star from the global south was not only being honored, but also summoned to rewrite the architecture of international pop. The remix of "Fun Tonight" was an intervention because there is history there: that of dead transvestites, feminized bodies expelled from the norm, poor queers who dance so they don't die. 

And they came together on May 3, 2025, in Copacabana. Lady Gaga arrived for the first time in over a decade in a Brazil that would welcome her with a free mega-concert. But before the first pink stage lights illuminated the sand, another diva took control: Pabllo Vittar, in her Club Vittar DJ guise. The event—part of the “Todo Mundo no Rio” project, which seeks to reactivate the cultural economy—brought together more than 2.5 million people, a record for a female artist on the beach. That night, Copacabana was the stage for a historic show and witness to a symbolic moment: the alliance between a drag queen from the northeast and a global diva, sharing body and territory. And Pabllo didn't see Gaga as a goddess; he illuminated her. And Gaga arrived on a terrain already ignited by a local queer queen. The party wasn't just global: it was radically South American and dissident.

Fantasies without algorithms and with Nathy Peluso 

With Nathy Peluso, it's a different story: the scene takes place in Rio de Janeiro but could have happened on a dance floor in Buenos Aires, a carnival in Salvador, or an after-party in Madrid with the scent of guava and smudged eyeliner. Pabllo Vittar and Nathy Peluso stand face to face: two expansive, bilingual, theatrical bodies. A choreography brings their legs together, but what vibrates is something else. A kind of tacit alliance: we know they didn't want us here, but we arrived dancing. In April 2025, they released "Fantasía," a song made to be played on a loudspeaker and listened to with your eyes closed. Reggaeton, Rio funk, a touch of soft electronica, and two voices that twist and turn. Their meeting seemed inevitable. For years, they had orbited the margins of Latin pop with a common desire: to push the limits of genre, body, and language. 

Vittar had already conquered territories previously forbidden to transvestism. Nathy Peluso, raised between Luján and Madrid, between rap and performance jazz, had been shattering all suspicions about what it means to be Latina through accent and excess. When they crossed paths, there was a spark. "Fantasía" is a song about sharing, but also about taking ownership. Sharing desire and taking ownership of the beat, the body, the place that for so long had been denied to voices like hers. The lyrics, light and catchy, don't need to go any further: the body already says it all. There is a fantasy, yes. But it's not heterosexual, nor white, nor proper. It's a fantasy that breathes, that sings in Spanish with a northeastern accent, that raps with her tits out. A fantasy that doesn't fit into any algorithm, and that's why it summons us.

In an increasingly homogenized pop world, where even rebellion has an expiration date, the meeting between Pabllo and Nathy served as a glitch . A systemic error that became a success. Because if these two artists share anything, it's that they made their careers from the margins and with their whole bodies.

““Let’s unite so that we can be heard”

― If you stopped being Pablo Vittar tomorrow, what would your last act be? 

― Oh, oh, I don't know, I don't know (laughs). It would be a very Brazilian thing, I guess, right? Something people would say years later: “Please, Pablo, come back to music, we want more.” Something very much my own. 

― I would like you to give a message to the community in Argentina.

"Yes, I know you're going through a very difficult time. But it's also a time when we have the opportunity to unite to achieve whatever we can, to make our voices heard... You know what? All minorities are uniting to do something better and change this situation, like the one that plagues Argentina so much right now. Just as we did here in Brazil and managed to change our political landscape, I believe Argentina will soon have moments of happiness and regain faith in everything. That's my wish!"

Pablo Vittar puts on her makeup like a warrior, moves like a star, and laughs like someone who's already won. Because she's already won. 

She doesn't sing just for pleasure. She sings to live. She sings so that others can live. In one video clip we see her spitting fire, in another destroying the prison; in all of them, she mocks the cis mandate, the white mandate, the mandate of shame. She sings from the future. She is a direct consequence of the transvestites who were murdered, of the queers who didn't make it, of the dissidents the system tried to erase. 

That's why it's so uncomfortable. That's why it's so moving. Sing for those who couldn't sing.