Sequins, glitter, LGBTQ+ flags. We are not at Gay Pride, but at Eurovision in Vienna. The difference? Little, almost nothing.
From the choices of outfits, from the sexiest ones to the craziest disguises, going beyond genres (identity and musical), the Eurovision Song Contest is a kitsch orgy in which everyone is allowed to participate or even just watch. It's a place where the audience explodes into screams for a gypsy violin solo as for a change of clothes on stage. The audience – millennials, late millennials and more or less young boomers in free expression of their identity and sexuality – is an integral part of the scenography, inside and outside the Wiener Stadthalle arena in Vienna. It's a party without borders, where the 60-year-old English pub paunch, completely drunk, and with a smear of glitter on his bald head, takes photos with the very tight drag queen who challenges the Austrian cold in a very short dress.
Inside the arena, as in any self-respecting Gay Pride, the upright box is everywhere. We were saying, is there a violin? Excellent, but whoever plays it must have at least a silver dress, knee-high boots, a headwind machine and run through the flames (right Finland?). Everything is camp. Or rather, everything that happens on stage is meant to be camp to please, excite and stimulate the audience. Dance troupes dressed as computers, erotic choreographies, an all-female Croatian group dressed as Handmaid's Tale who seems like the Bulgarian Voices Choir and the Bulgarian artist who instead plays the perfect pop star for the cover. Some rather senseless things happen on stage, like Lordi, the transvestite Finnish metal band who won the festival in 2006, headbanging during a cover of In the blue painted bluewhich still resonates here thanks to the victory in Modugno in 1958.
And what about Lithuania featuring a silver alien dressed as the Hunchback of Notre Dame? Or of Sweden showing off a Myss Keta from the fjords with her boys from Porta Stockholm in a hyperpop key, that is, the most gay-friendly possible reinterpretation of the disco hits of the end and beginning of the millennium? Or of Australia, apparently Europe's favorite state, with its singer being lifted into the sky thanks to a platform emerging from the center of a golden grand piano? Ok the music, the song, but here what matters is the show: the important thing is to be excessive, to pierce, to nail the TikTok dance that will go viral.
In all this bandwagon, the dated and truly masculine performance of our Sal Da Vinci could have clashed, but the beauty of the LGBTQ+ community is precisely this all-encompassing inclusiveness, which materializes with the ability to read everything in an ironic, camp key. And what is more kitsch than a mature Italian singer who, dressed in white and bare-chested, sings in the old fashioned way while people get married around him on stage, kisses in a virile way and dances with hetero vigor? And so yes, al very gay Even Sal is happy with Eurovision with his tacky Catholic neo-melodic music made up of church weddings, divine blessings and rings. The straightest things, after all, are the ones that often seem the most ambiguous of all. And Eurovision willingly reminds us of this.
While 25 artists ranging across genres, colors and aesthetics alternate on the stage of the final with a disarming speed that Sanremo should emulate (it takes the technicians 43 seconds to change the scenography from song to song, giving a frenetic pace to the broadcast), the audience is always the great protagonist. As we were saying: very colourful, madly excited by the most extremely kitsch moments, be it the super-pop of the artist from Cyprus or the Evanescence-style nu-metal of Romania. Every falsetto, every operatic song, every sexual reference is underlined by a drag night roar. Everything, or almost everything, is a big yes. The slogan is in fact “United by music” but also “United by queerness”.
But if we think that Eurovision is only colour, however, we are wrong. Precisely because it is so linked to the LGBTQ+ community and its works, a large part of the audience makes itself felt in the most political moments of this edition. The moral compass is very clear. Ukraine seems to be received with more deliberately heartfelt applause. And then there is the question of Israel. Many nations – Spain, Slovenia, Iceland, the Netherlands and Ireland – boycotted this year's edition in protest over the organization's decision to confirm Israel's participation. And if, during the performance of its representative, apart from a few whistles and a Palestinian flag, little happened, when during the vote the risk of victory in the photo-finish became clear, the audience roared deeply, the tension rose, until it was released with joy when Dara, the Bulgarian singer, managed to turn the situation around and win the 70th edition of the event.
Eurovision, objectively, is artistically horrendous but at the same time it is also one of the most comical things – unintentionally or otherwise – in television music entertainment. However, definitely the queerest thing of all. And fortunately, today, he continues to choose this position.
