Majestic deltas, magnificent beaches, and a festival that makes Mardi Gras look like a convention of accountants—just a few of the attractions luring European surfers and canny capitalist dropouts into the vast reaches of Brazil's sparsely populated northeast coast. Anthony Chase feels the heat

By chance, I arrived in the harbor city Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará and the gateway to Brazil's northeast coast, toward evening on a Sunday. As the wide sun settled down onto the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people swarmed along the waterfront—on the streets, in the water, on the sand, across the four-lane highway, which had been closed to traffic for the Festival of Sexual Diversity.

I went out of the hotel, trying to make my way toward the distant source of the music and the pounding drums. The whole city was like a subway car at rush hour. You didn't so much walk as slither among the oiled and barely dressed bodies, the exuberant jostling flesh. I couldn't get too close to the central bandstand, but it didn't matter. As if in some medieval definition of God, the center of the party was everywhere and nowhere. Lured by the prospect of exploring the remote and relatively unpopulated coastline of northeastern Brazil, I had traveled several thousand miles only to find that I had been ingested into the emotional core of amor livre. On and on: the great droning bang and the throbbing of sticks landing on barrels and skins. It sounded African, as if the continents had drifted back together again.

I was experiencing agoraphobia and claustrophobia at the same time. Total strangers smiled and offered me food and drink and said hello. Free love, and free food and free drink, and free tokes of this and that…I gave up trying to maneuver, found an empty beach chair, and sat down. With my head beneath the seething surface of the dancing bodies, I felt relief. Like a barnacle in a coral reef, I let the sound and bodies wash around me.

Gay, straight, bi, drag, semi-drag—arm in arm the exhibitions of possible lifestyle permutation sauntered past. It was a chromosomal swarming. Every skin color. All ages. The whole genetic range. I lost the ability to find labels or categories for what was happening. Who knew? Who cared?

There was full frontal nudity. Or ostrich feathers. Or enough costume material for three operas at the Met. Some paraded. Others simply sat, applauding each new instance of the transcendentally outrageous. It was a musical ayahuasca. There were short sociopolitical harangues between the songs—"Por um mundo sem homofobia," "Não o sexismo," "Não o racismo," "Não o machismo"— which everyone ignored.

Eventually it became clear that the concert was giving way to a parade. Each of a dozen bands rode on a three-story-high platform built atop a tractor-trailer truck, which inched up the coast. The block-long rigs were draped in brilliant cloth, a motorized version of the chargers in the Middle Ages, dangling shields, blankets, trinkets, anything that could capture and intensify light. The side of each semi facing the audience and the sea was an amplified black wall of woofers, tweeters, bass, subwoofers that destabilized any tumors you might be starting to grow. The chair I sat in quivered underneath me. I skittered around on the sidewalk like a piece on a Ouija board.