The Revolution Will Not Be Queered--Not Yet
The popular Eurovision vote was much less queer than the Establishment jury vote, but it was otherwise more political.
Whose idea was it to stage the spectacle of Eurovision 2024 in Malmö, Sweden? Would that not have amounted to staging it in Bradford in the UK?
In the film adaptation of the semi-autographical play East is East (1999), Bradford is indicated as “Bradistan.” That scene was 1970’s Britain.
The fact that Bradford had become a locus of South Asian (mostly Muslim, Pakistani) immigration is not presented as a problem any more than every colonial-era Germantown in the United States had ever been presented as a problem. But, in more recent years, Bradford has been implicated in the “grooming” of prostitutes, … and the grooming business has illuminated something of “a clash of civilizations.” Put it that way. At the same time, however, there are some suggestions of grooming-adjacent activity in the film My Son the Fanatic (1997), but, that film presents something of a role-reversal. From IMDB.com: “Pakistani taxi-driver Parvez and prostitute Bettina find themselves trapped in the middle when Islamic fundamentalists decide to clean up their local town.”
The actor Om Puri headlines both films. In the former he is portrayed as the conservative paterfamilias trying to maintain some semblance of traditional order in the household, a tricky business given his progeny has been largely Anglicized. Some explicit queerness not presented in the stage play does make it into the film adaptation. In My Son the Fanatic, Om Puri is himself more Anglicized, and the viewer might find himself appreciating that the fundamentalists have some important points to make.
The scene in Malmö is a little different. Politico had this to say in 2015:
Malmö’s Jews have suffered a series of anti-Semitic attacks directed at their synagogue and are leaving the town in increasing numbers. Much of the ethnic tension in Malmö is concentrated in Rosengård, an area largely composed of refugee housing. Many now fear that such a concentrated community will discourage Malmö’s refugees from taking steps to integrate, and effectively cut them off from the rest of the town.
It was in 2015 and 2016, of course, when Auntie Angela Merkel and the Germans welcomed more than 1.2 million (mostly Syrian) migrants. Malmö attracted much the same type of immigration.
Malmo, Sweden's third-largest city, has a large Muslim community, with the biggest groups originating from Iraq and Syria… Gang crime has flourished in Malmo and other large Swedish cities for years, fuelled by the drugs trade and linked to poor integration of the immigrant community.
The was Reuters a few weeks ago in a piece titled “Israel issues Sweden Eurovision travel warning amid planned protests.”
Eurovision, of course, had already become politicized with the war in Ukraine. Russia had been barred from participating the last three years, and Ukraine won the competition in 2022. Protesters complain that Israel should have been barred in 2024.
We can all appreciate that it’s been difficult to appreciate a football game, an American football game, Eurovision or any other content since at least 2020. Enjoying certain content and preferring a certain team puts one at odds with others who infuse everything with politics. The West, for example, did it’s best to queer-up and kneel its way through the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Qatar was just not gay enough for Harry Kane. And sump’n about racism. This year’s Eurovision, meanwhile, seemed to join three political currents: the queering of everything, the still-unfolding war of attrition in Ukraine, and now the latest and sharpest engagement between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
The Eurovision voting reveals important divergence between the Establishment media and the popular will across these three dimensions. I would suggest that the voting is consistent with the following propositions:
The Jury vote elevated queerness.
At the same time, however, it is not obvious that the Jury vote reflected politicking with respect to Israel or Ukraine.
In contrast, there is much evidence that the popular vote reflected a strong pro-Israel and pro-Ukraine orientation.
Explicitly Satanic content attracted a modest volume of votes from both the jury pool and popular pool. There is a market for this stuff.
There are also some suggestions in the popular vote that there is a small market for queerness.
I assemble two types of evidence. First, I mapped the distribution of points assigned to countries in the Eurovision final by the jury vote against the distribution of points that proceeded from the popular vote. Each country’s popular vote and jury vote are weighted equally across countries and across the jury/popular vote divide. Voters from a given country among the 25 countries participating in the final can vote for any of the other 24 countries in the final. So, Greece can’t vote for itself, but it can (and does) assign all of its voting weight to Cyprus. Cyprus reciprocates.
Before getting to the numbers, let me quickly review the Eurovision performances that I took some time to see. My viewing amounted to research about the underlying content, although I had to use my VPN and spoof Internet access in Europe in order to access it. One can view content here: https://eurovision.tv/videos
Ireland: Explicitly Satanic, grotesque
UK: Syphilitic
Armenia: A pleasant throwback to the 1990’s campy Eurovision style
Portugal: Pleasantly modest presentation
Spain: Super gay bathhouse aesthetic
Finland: … also projects a bit of a bathhouse aesthetic.
Estonia: One might call it … “techno trad”? Not bad.
Italy: Boring with a little too much flesh pressed into awkwardly designed costumes
UK: Still gay
Cyprus: Refreshingly tame by current standards
Switzerland: I do not subscribe to the tranny, pretty-boy aesthetic, but well done.
Slovenia: Satanic-ish. Oh, well.
Georgia: Well done! Georgia would likely get my vote.
France: Would make for a politically-tame, politically-correct choice
Austria: Tame by today’s pornographic standards
Israel: Refreshingly straight-up and clean
Sweden: Boy-band vibe. Refrain: “She’s unforgettable!” Not gay enough. Fun.
Croatia: Campy-1990’s style blended with rapper aesthetic. I was disappointed to find that it bored me.
Germany: A bloke bigger than Adele belts out some lines with a few Adele-type stylings. Not bad.
So what do we see in the voting?
Points above the 45-degree line in the graph indicate countries more heavily favored in the jury vote than in the popular vote. Points below the 45-degree line indicate countries more heavily favored in the popular vote. Points along the 45-degree line reflect broad agreement between the jury vote and the popular vote.
The jury vote assigned the most points to Switzerland by a large margin. Switzerland was followed by France, Croatia, Italy and Ukraine. Ukraine just managed to edge out Ireland. In the jury ranking, Israel clocked in at a distant 12th place.
The popular vote assigned the most points to Croatia. Israel closely followed Croatia in the popular vote, and Ukraine was not far behind Israel. France clocked in as a distant 4th place in the popular vote point totals edging out Switzerland by one point. Ireland was a distant 6th place.
So, both the jury vote and popular vote assigned very much the same weight to Satanic, “queer” content from Ireland. The popular vote assigned much weight to Ukraine and Israel whereas the Jury vote did not.
I cannot say that the juries strictly voted for queer content, but it does look like the juries endeavored to find a queer champion from among the queer entries. Among the queer choices, Switzerland was probably the tamest, the least likely to offend a given viewer. The UK entry did not seem to please anyone.
The popular vote point totals and the jury vote point totals are aggregated by a simple rule: they are added together, and, according to this rule Switzerland prevailed by a healthy margin in the final point total. Ukraine came in 3rd, and Israel came in 5th outpacing 6th-place Ireland by a large margin.
Now, let’s examine a map that has been floating around the ether. Someone took the time to map each country’s popular vote into the country winning that country’s popular vote:
The popular vote in all of the blue countries favored Israel. The yellow countries favored Ukraine. Neither Ukraine nor Israel could vote for themselves. Instead, the popular vote from Israel favored Luxembourg (?), and the popular vote from Ukraine favored Switzerland (??). Greece favored Cyprus. Cyprus reciprocated and favored Greece. Lithuania favored its neighbor Estonia. Croatia favored its neighbor Serbia. Other countries favored Croatia (including Serbia) with the exception of Armenia, which favored France.
Serbia and Croatia might make for a natural, anti-Ottoman alliance. How would Bosnia fare in a the popular Eurovision vote?
Overall, what do we get? The Establishment is still on its make-everything-gay kick, but there does seem to be some broad (if not deep) appreciation out there in the general population for gay, and even Satanic, content. But, it looks like a lot of folks really did take the opportunity to push back against the vigorous anti-Israel sentiment being projected on the streets of Malmö and in the media more generally. Note also that the countries bordering Russia, Russian-allied Belarus, and Ukraine largely favored Ukraine.
Do we know much about the typical Eurovision popular voter in terms of class, gender etc? I intuitively not expect them to be an average person, but might well be wrong, and it may differ strongly between countries.