RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is anyone else bored of ‘queering’? Everything’s getting ‘queered’ these days. We’ve had ‘Queering the Curriculum’. ‘Queering the Arts’. And my personal favourite: ‘Queering Palestine.’ This entails academics ‘unpack[ing] the multiple intersections of queer politics and the Palestinian struggle’. Hot tip for these profs: if Hamas ever invites you to discuss your theories, don’t agree to meet them on the high floor of a building. ‘Queering the Pavement’ is the only thing they’re interested in.

Now, with soul-zapping inevitability, we’ve had the ‘queering’ of the Olympic Games. Yesterday’s rain-sodden opening ceremony in Paris was super LGBTQIAzzz.
There were drag acts everywhere. A bearded bloke twerked for the world. A bollock-naked man in blue paint was served on a platter of fruit to a gaggle of diet-dodging drag queens. Look, if I wanted to be exposed to the camp debauchery of drag culture, I’d go to a kindergarten.

It really was a naff, dispiriting affair. It was the first opening ceremony to take place, not in a stadium, but in the heart of the hosting city. Boat after boat after boat carried the Games’ athletes along the Seine as 300,000 spectators in soaked plastic macs craned their necks for a glimpse. It seemed to go on forever. It was so bad that even square liberals on X started using the favoured slogan of the right: ‘STOP THE BOATS.’

The weather didn’t help. The lashing rain hampered the audio, making it hard to hear the ceremony’s star turns, Celine Dion and Lady Gaga (an upside of the downpour, I suppose). What we could hear was just weird. Like when a headless Marie Antoinette sang the opening bars to an ear-splitting heavy-metal ditty. The ceremony organiser, Thomas Jolly, said he wanted his spectacle to be a ‘celebration of being alive’ – here we had a celebration of being dead.

Then there was the ‘queering’. Just as you can’t switch on the BBC, visit a library or have a quiet pray these days without encountering a drag queen, so you can’t watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics without seeing portly men in moob-hugging outfits voguing and gloating. It was more Eurovision than Olympian. More Ru Paul than Ancient Greece. More ‘Sashay away’ than ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’. That’s the original Olympic motto. It means ‘Faster, higher, stronger’. Because, believe it or not, we were once a species that celebrated the moral beauty of sporting heroism rather than the ability of a middle-aged man to lard himself into a sequined gown.

The part of the ceremony that caused the biggest stink was the camp Last Supper. A bunch of drag acts gathered around a buxom woman adorned in an aureole halo crown in an unmistakable mimicking of da Vinci’s painting of Christ and the apostles at their final meal. Wearing the smug look of all glib performance artists who love nothing more than to piss off ‘normies’ – because they lack the talent for anything else – the drag queens giddily got into their disciple positions and heaped holy adoration on the lady Jesus. You could almost hear their thoughts: ‘Ooh boy, this is going to piss off old farts – yes!’

Christians are angry. As well they might be. This was ‘extremely disrespectful to Christians’, said Elon Musk. Now, naturally, there’s a backlash against the backlash. Calm down, the woke are saying. Stop being such prudes and snowflakes, they’re chortling. It’s just a little light mockery, they’re insisting. Which is big talk from a section of society that would be weeping into its keffiyehs and demanding heads on spikes if the ceremony had featured a drag-act Muhammad being served a smurf on a plate of fruit with his cock out.

For me – a non-prude and non-snowflake who fully supports the liberty of blasphemy – the question is not ‘How could you disparage Christ like this?!’, but ‘Why would you disparage Christ like this?’. At an Olympics opening ceremony. In front of a billion viewers (well, until we switched off). I have no problem with drag acts in Soho, or Le Marais, of course. But at the opening ceremony to an international celebration of human brotherhood? I’m fine with mockery of religious idols and beliefs, if that’s what you want to do. But at the Olympic Games? Why? Why sully this ancient competition with the infantile Christ-bashing of the conformist godless drones of the modern culture industry?

The shallowness of these provocateurs is summed up in the fact that they would never ridicule Islam. Just imagine if a drag queen at the ceremony had clambered on a pantomime winged horse in open mockery of the Muslim belief that Muhammed flew to heaven on just such a fantasy creature. Paris would be in flames right now. Thomas Jolly would be in hiding. The papers would be full of chattering-class angst over the evils of ‘Islamophobia’. Instead – because it was only JC who got it in the neck, not Muhammad – the liberal press is full of praise. What a ‘unique’, ‘queer’ and ‘very French’ ceremony, they’re trilling.

The knowing profanity of the ceremony was not ‘stunning and brave’ – it was dumb and cowardly. Christianity is a safe target in 21st-century Europe. If you really want to stir shit up, give us a drag Muhammad next time. Give us queens cosying up to the Prophet wearing a boob tube and lipstick. You won’t, of course, because you know the potential consequences. There is something sick about well-paid performance artists taking cheap shots at Christianity in a country where people have been shot to death and literally beheaded for raising questions about Islam. They’re the brave ones, not you. And yet rather than show solidarity with them, you look the other way, and throw shade on far easier targets. What moral weaklings.

It would be a mistake, though, to see yesterday’s wet, lame spectacle as irreligious. For in truth, it represented the ascendancy of a new religion: woke. It’s actually fitting that, before the eyes of the world, France replaced Christ and his disciples with ‘queers’ and drag queens. It was a dramatic rendering of a real trend: the usurping of old moral values by the dispiriting belief system of the new elite. Indeed, if you want to be cancelled today, forget mocking Christ – try referring to a ‘transwoman’ as ‘he’. They’ll have your head like Marie Antoinette’s. Yes, if it’s blasphemy they want, let’s give it to them. Transwomen are men, drag queens should stay out of schools, Islam has loads of mad beliefs – what else should we add?

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy