Drag queens and queer visibility at the Olympic opening ceremony
Queer visibility meets the global stage: how one scene at the 2024 Olympics became a political issue.
On 26 July 2024, the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics began in Paris with a scene that caused a stir around the world. On the Passerelle Debilly, a footbridge over the Seine, the French DJ and lesbian activist Barbara Butch appeared together with drag artists such as Nicky Doll and Paloma in a tableau called "Festivité". Butch, who describes herself as a "fat, Jewish, queer lesbian", stood at a festively laid table wearing a crown shaped like a halo, surrounded by dancers from the queer scene.
Many viewers and numerous Christian voices interpreted the scene as a parody of Leonardo da Vinci's painting "The Last Supper". The artistic director of the ceremony, Thomas Jolly, rejected this interpretation: the staging referred to a pagan feast of the gods of Olympus and the wine god Dionysus, not to Christian iconography. The organisers stressed that the aim had been to celebrate diversity, tolerance and social cohesion.
The reactions were nevertheless fierce. The French Bishops' Conference and representatives of the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church sharply criticised the scene. Barbara Butch subsequently became the target of an unprecedented wave of cyberbullying, receiving antisemitic, homophobic and fatphobic abuse up to and including death threats, and filed a complaint with the police. The scene is now regarded as one of the most discussed images in recent Olympic history and shows how controversial queer visibility can still be on such a large global stage.