https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/07/27/paris-olympics-a-smug-spectacle-of-wokeness/
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.