Abraham Briseño Moreno

On our gaydar…

We had a chance to catch up with Abraham Briseño Moreno, an Account Strategist at Criteo in Brazil. Now, in his early 30s, Abraham grew up in Mexico, and it was at a young age that he realized he wanted to explore the world. Over the years, Abraham has advocated for LGBTQIA+ rights in Tanzania, Rwanda, and much more.

Abraham tells us about some of his life.  

While growing up, I noticed how not only my interest in games or toys was different but also how my friends were starting to feel attracted to the opposite sex, and I was not, in that moment, I was paralyzed. I’ve heard about gay people, but I did not want to be one of them as my family had a formed opinion about being queer, and I did not want my family’s rejection; this brought confusion, depression, altered my personality and the way I interacted with the world.

One day, I fell in love, and this first love made me feel invincible. That’s when I decided to share my secret with my family. It was tough at the beginning, not because of rejection, but because I believe my family needed time to process the news. Deep in their hearts, they knew, but they did not want to think about it.

The support I got from them was a blessing I will always be grateful for, as I know this is not the reality for most queer people.

I decided to go [to university] for International Business as I saw that as an opportunity to explore the world. Shortly after graduating, I decided to change my path and left for a volunteering experience in Tanzania with an NGO called AIESEC. This volunteering experience as a National Comms Specialist for the NGO opened my eyes to the world.

I stayed in Tanzania for about 2 months and left for Rwanda, where I kept working for this NGO as a National HR Director, [in] a country I did not know anything about. There, I encountered moments where, while having a conversation, local people called it “the white disease” to being queer, and that’s when I knew I had to speak up and make people realize how much we had advanced in the world, but this progress had not reached their society.

My focus [in career and advocacy] is to make people feel comfortable with being and expressing who they truly are.

We deserve to be loved, not by pleasing others but by being true to ourselves. That is when we will give our very best to this world. Our community is diverse, but we forget to be inclusive. This diversity makes us strong, but forgetting to be inclusive keeps us a marginalized community as we do not unite as one and fight globally for everyone’s rights.

We believe that if it is not in sight, it does not exist, this limits our ability to make a change.