Eurovision scapegoats
Climate change and the awesome power of drag queens (with audio)
The Eurovision Song Contest will be on again in a few weeks. Eleven years ago, Conchita Wurst took first place and - according to some - caused a cyclone one week later.
As our climate enters new unprecedented states of instability, queer people, as we have always been, can prove useful to those in power as a distraction or a scapegoat.
In May 2014 two seemingly disparate events occurred in Europe: a music festival and a cyclone. Through the power of blurring correlation and causality, a few powerful people managed to thread these events together to tell a story of queer sin and righteous divine punishment.
The Eurovision song contest is one of the world’s largest non-sporting events and has an audience of hundreds of thousands. It’s famous for its queer fanbase and visibility—and as ever, such visibility comes with backlash.
On the 10th of May, 2014, Conchita Wurst, a bearded drag queen character played by Thomas Neuwirth, won the competition. Backlash came immediately from right-wing politicians and the Russian orthodox church, among others. In a message that she later confirmed was intended for politicians opposing LGBTQIA+ rights, Conchita held her trophy high and proclaimed "We are unity and we are unstoppable.”
Several days later, on the 13th of May, a massive cyclone designated Tamara/Yvette moved in over south-east and central Europe causing mass casualties, thousands of landslides and billions of euros of damage. Although it’s impossible to say with certainty if any one event is caused by climate change, subsequent studies suggest that the storm was unusually stationary and brought extreme rainfall, all in line with models of anthropogenic climate change.
Instead of looking to climate change as the cause however, several church leaders in the region invoked Conchita Wurst’s performance at Eurovision.
“This [flood] is not a coincidence, but a warning,” Patriarch Amfilohije of Montenegro declared. “God sent the rains as a reminder that people should not join the wild side.” Other church leaders made similar declarations that the floods were “divine punishment” for the “abomination” of Conchita.
In this victim-blaming story, environmental disasters, which disproportionality affect the most marginalised, including LGBTQIA+ populations, can be caused by God’s anger at people joining “the wild side”.
It’s not that I think the Eurovision song contest is somehow a force for good - it’s literally a corporate propaganda machine that regularly pinkwashes oppressive, colonial states. And still this example is part of a long tradition of scapegoating groups such as drag queens, sex workers and trans women. As these groups are already associated with narratives of societal corruption and the destruction of the family, they can be easily folded into conspiracy stories which are exploited by powerful people to manipulate the public. As disasters, stress and fear become increasingly overwhelming, we can expect a lot more of it. This was eleven years ago, things have only gotten worse since then.
There are connections to be drawn here. Queer hatred, transmisogyny, marginalisation and the destruction of the environment. But which connections we draw, and the stories we tell about them, make all the difference.
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