Viewers who saw nothing more of Eurovision 2024 than the grand final broadcast would likely have thought Nemo’s win for Switzerland was putting the troubled contest back on an even keel for 2025. A founding member of Eurovision and the contest’s first host country had earned its first victory since 1988, when the Swiss contestant was a young Céline Dion.
Moreover, Nemo’s status as the first non-binary winner to use they/them pronouns in English seemed to give Eurovision’s cherished Gen Z audience a zeitgeist moment of LGBTQ+ and non-binary representation to match Conchita Wurst’s iconic victory in 2014.
Behind the scenes, though, parts of the contest’s fan culture, and some of the very artists who give over their creativity, stories and performance personas for Eurovision to leverage into what is supposed to be its inspiring atmosphere of diversity, have gone through something closer to Gen Z’s Harry Potter moment during the past Eurovision season – a moment where fans who believed in, and found community through, a pop-culture property’s progressive values have had to confront evidence that its creator does not share those values after all.
Welcome to the show, let everybody know
Many lifelong Eurovision fans who are also committed to resisting so-called ‘artwashing’ and ‘pinkwashing’ practices by the Israeli state, often as a political commitment they draw from their own queer identities, have concluded there is ‘no moral and ethical way’ to engage with Eurovision this year, or potentially in future, while Israel’s broadcaster continues to take part.
The European Broadcasting Union’s quick, though still not instant, decision to suspend Russia from competing in Eurovision 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine raised hopes that the EBU would act similarly towards broadcasters from other states whose military operations targeted civilians on such a scale. Israel’s, and Azerbaijan’s, continued participation in 2024 showed this would not always be the case, creating pervasive perceptions of a double standard which have driven the narrative of this year’s boycott campaign.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel’s call for a boycott of Eurovision 2024, issued on the same evening that the queer Palestinian musician Bashar Murad narrowly missed being selected to represent Iceland this year, made some fans cut ties with this year’s contest immediately and left others reconsidering whether to watch or attend right up until the final night.
However, no Eurovision contestant who shared commitments to solidarity with Palestine was ultimately able to break whatever contractual obligations their broadcasters had placed on them in order to boycott the event – raising questions about their material working conditions that still can’t be answered without much more transparency from broadcasters or much more assiduous investigative journalism.
Nemo and eight other artists – Olly Alexander (UK), Bambie Thug (Ireland), Gåte (Norway), Iolanda (Portugal), Megara (San Marino), Saba (Denmark), Silvester Belt (Lithuania) and Finland’s Windows95man, plus Belgium’s Mustii who added his signature afterwards – did publish a joint statement at the end of March expressing their discomfort with the Israeli military attack on Gaza, expressing what was likely the very limit of what broadcasters’ legal teams would allow them to say.
(PACBI still rejected their continued participation as a ‘colonial and patronising attitude’, much as it had rejected Hatari’s attempt to engage critically with Eurovision being held in Tel Aviv by choosing to travel there in 2019.)
Once in Malmö, several artists who were attempting to express solidarity with Palestine in whatever coded ways they could slip past the EBU’s increasingly restrictive management of the event – from Iolanda’s keffiyeh-pattern nails and cooperation with Palestinian fashion designers Trashy Clothing, to Bambie Thug’s efforts to call for a ceasefire and a free Palestine in the Ogham script they had painted on to their body – experienced intimidating behaviour from members of the Israeli delegation and abuse in Israeli media.
The EBU disqualified the Netherlands’ Joost Klein, a pre-contest favourite, on the morning of the grand final in response to a complaint by a female production crew member which is now under investigation by Swedish police, but did not take action against Israeli delegation members’ behaviour towards pro-Palestine artists, despite Bambie in particular raising multiple complaints about the behaviour and about transphobic commentary in Israel’s broadcast of their semi-final.
Nemo, Bambie Thug, Iolanda, and Greece’s Marina Satti – who had openly expressed boredom while Israel’s representative Eden Golan was taking questions during their qualifiers’ press conference on the Thursday night – appear to have been the most heavily targeted, and formed a quartet of mutual support who could be seen during the grand final voting sequence celebrating with each other whenever one of their songs received 12 points: Bambie even handed Nemo their own barbed crown (tying into the slogan of their participation, ‘Crown the Witch’) to wear during their winner’s reprise.
Bambie also struck up a friendship with Belt, a young bisexual singer whose dreams of representing his country at Eurovision and sharing a stage with his boyhood hero Olly Alexander turned into a ‘traumatic experience’ in the backstage atmosphere of Malmö 2024 – to the point that, after having to perform immediately after Golan in the grand final and shoulder the burden of redirecting the audience’s emotions back to the rest of the event, he wished ‘it had all ended after the first semi’ instead.
The winning speeches of 2014 and 2024 reveal something very different about the atmosphere and position of queer performers in the contest, and growing consciousness of how the event has made use of queer performers since 2014.
Are we unstoppable?
In the aftermath of Russia’s introduction of anti-LGBTQ+ laws and annexation of Crimea in 2013–14, and the beginnings of a rise in ‘anti-gender’ political mobilisation across Europe, Conchita Wurst famously dedicated her win to ‘everyone who believes in a future of peace and freedom. You know who you are. We are unstoppable!’
Nemo’s winning speech , in contrast, pushed back at the EBU’s own management of the event, calling on ‘this competition [to] continue to live up to its promise to stand for dignity and peace everywhere’. They continued to resist the EBU’s tight control over visual symbols during their press conference when asked about the significance of the non-binary flag they had displayed in the green room and the flag parade, following an incident outside the arena where security had confiscated a non-binary flag from a distraught fan.
(As I’ve commented since the 2016 contest, such incidents have the potential to happen as long as organisers fail to brief venue security on the design and significance of pride flags besides the rainbow flag – something that appeared to be handled better in Liverpool in 2023.)
Nemo stated that they too would not have been allowed to display a non-binary flag if the EBU had had its way:
‘That is unbelievable. I had to smuggle my flag in, because Eurovision said no. And I did it anyway, so I hope some other people did that too. But come on, like, how… this is clearly like a double standard. And, as I say, I broke the code, and I broke the trophy. The trophy can be fixed, maybe Eurovision needs a little bit of fixing too.’
Bambie Thug went even further in their comments after the grand final, distinguishing Eurovision as an event from Eurovision as a community created by its artists and fans:
‘behind the scenes you don’t know the amount of pressure and the amount of work that we have been doing to change things. And I am so proud of Nemo for winning. I am so proud that all of us are in the top 10 that have been fighting for this sh*t behind the scenes. Because it has been so hard and it has been so horrible. And I am so proud of us. And I just want to say – we are what the Eurovision is. The EBU is not what the Eurovision is. F*** the EBU. I don’t even care any more. F*** them. The thing that makes this is the contestants, the community behind it, the love and the power and the support of all of us is what is making change, and the world has spoken. The queers are coming. Non-binaries for the f***ing win.’
Their take on Eurovision as a space created by its fan community and artists, not the EBU, could only have emerged in recent years when artists have got to know each other weeks before the event through the pre-party circuit and be able to stay connected online during the buildup in ways that bypass their broadcasters’ message control.
This overlaps with the wider space of fans’ participatory culture or what Jess Carniel has called ‘participatory diplomacy’ – ‘a particular intersection of public diplomacy and participatory culture wherein the audience actively participates in its cultural platform to shape its political message and meaning.’ Artists can interact directly with this community, though – like Eurovision’s own digital workers, who create content without being able to influence policy – they can also become targets of campaigning behaviour which piles up into abuse.
Spread the news, I’m gonna take the fight
As young queer Europeans with attachments to Eurovision, artists like Bambie Thug and Nemo would have been going through a Harry Potter-like process of reconsidering what the event meant to them in the climate since 7 October even if they had not been taking part: Bambie, for their part, has said outright they would have boycotted if they had not become the Irish act (and more than 400 artists supporting the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign called for them to do so anyway). As artists, they each chose not to withdraw or were unable to.
In Malmö, each then went through a second process of disenchantment as artists, discovering what the backstage environment would be like for them as artists who had expressed solidarity with Palestine and finding out that the EBU would not protect their wellbeing as fervently as it has tried to insulate Israel’s broadcaster from any representation of Palestinian symbols on screen – including the censure issued to Swedish Eurovision representative and host Eric Saade, who is of Palestinian descent, for wearing his father’s own keffiyeh around his hand during the first semi-final’s opening act.
Throughout the spring of 2024, the rehearsal period, and even more so once live broadcasts had begun, a mood of disenchantment and divestment from Eurovision as an object of fandom sprung up among politically engaged fans, in which each new incident could bring more fans to switch off.
For some it was the censure of Saade’s keffiyeh. For others it was an overtly transphobic joke in the Swedish semi-final (likely even more wounding than the transphobia-by-omission of a line about men not having breasts in the 2013 interval act), the amount of jokes about apoliticality and peace in the presenters’ script, or Klein’s disqualification. This latter, separate crisis fused with the complaints of the pro-Palestinian quartet to provoke Bambie, Nemo, Satti, and the French entrant Slimane into various acts of dissent in the grand final dress rehearsal, though they did not repeat these on grand final night.
While the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign predominantly speaks of economic divestment – that is, companies and public institutions such as universities ceasing to invest in Israeli firms – it is emotional divestment among fans which has potential to do the most harm to Eurovision in the long term.
Avada kedavra, I speak to destroy
The Harry Potter franchise’s example represents a telling parallel of a worst-case scenario for Eurovision’s image both because of the significance of social justice and LGBTQ+ causes in the growth of its fandom, and because it is more than just a parallel: some fans will now have experienced this process with both fandoms in the past several years.
Indeed, even parts of Bambie Thug’s Eurovision entry – with its opening line ‘Avada Kedavra, I speak to destroy’ and their outfit reveal incorporating trans flag colours – have been interpreted as commenting on this background.
Since 2017–18, JK Rowling’s expression of what are now her well-known views on trans people in society have dramatically reshaped how many fans who were attracted to the queer-affirming atmosphere of Harry Potter fandom feel they can relate to the franchise or even ended their investment in it altogether.
To fans who have been on this journey of disenchantment, seeing another person wearing a Gryffindor scarf or Hogwarts merchandise no longer means recognising someone with whom you share a fan identity: now it means realising the other person either does not know the symbol’s further meanings or has chosen to ignore them.
Similar emotional divestment from Eurovision among queer fans with anticolonial political commitments was already visible in the run-up to Eurovision 2024 and would likely have become even greater in the event that Israel’s entry had won – an issue that will not disappear in 2025 now that the BDS movement is calling for supporters ‘to boycott all future editions of Eurovision until Israel is banned.’
A further impact of emotional divestment from an event like Eurovision which, unlike a franchise based on works by a single author, depends on musicians and creative teams from almost 40 countries producing new content every year is its capacity to damage what would have been potential artists’ aspirations to follow their love of the event and the role models it has shown them into the dream of actually taking part.
Like other large-scale cultural and sporting events, especially those which heavily invest in messages of diversity as a unifying force for their participants and fans, Eurovision aims to create a charged atmosphere of identification with its values throughout its physical and virtual spaces which makes the experience exhilarating and sets it apart from everyday life.
Critical geographers such as Angharad Closs Stephens argue these ‘affective atmospheres’ – like the party atmosphere of the London 2012 Olympics/Paralympics and their narratives of a racially and sexually diverse Britain – also have a disciplining effect which makes it uncomfortable to express dissent in the middle of upsurges of collective emotions like pride.
At the same time, they allow for the possibility that feelings moving through crowds at intense moments can also produce ‘unpredictable’ expressions of detachment as well as attachment, such as the booing of the then UK Chancellor of the Exchequer at the 2012 Paralympics in protest at his government’s cuts to disability benefits – or the booing of contest executive supervisor Martin Österdahl during this year’s grand final when he tried to make his traditional announcement that the booing was ‘good to go’.
You’re good to go
Artists performing in Eurovision are the raw material of each contest’s affective atmosphere. The event and its management need fans and more casual viewers alike to invest in and identify with their favourites, to support one over another, to vote for them and bring in revenue, to perform their own support for them as live audience members, to drive a thrilling voting sequence with their preferences, and to choose one as a winner who will become part of the contest’s heritage and meaning, not to mention deciding the politics of location for the following year’s event.
Each host broadcaster’s producers frame a narrative of the event, host city and host country around the artists, and strive or should strive to present each artist in what they see as the best possible way, but do not determine what the artists and their creative teams contribute.
To understand artists’ situation within these atmospheres, however, we also need to understand the politics of emotion inside workplaces and institutions which depend on workers’ personal investments and passions for what those organisations are supposed to do, then all too often ostracise or punish those who reveal their hypocrisies or complain.
These dynamics are another fact of what Lauren Berlant called ‘cruel optimism’, the unrequited hope that contemporary cultural politics and the economy encourages us to place in objects of desire that will never structurally be able to deliver what we expect of them, which I started relating to Eurovision before this year’s grand final in my last blog post here. They are pervasive across the creative industries, education, activism and media, which all harness and consume workers’ passion, but at Eurovision must be particularly febrile because of the intensity of the production ‘bubble’.
On a greater scale than ever before, artists in this year’s competition have taken the beginnings of collective action against the impact on their wellbeing that taking part in Eurovision has had, while past artists such as Montaigne, Mae Muller and La Zarra have also spoken out about artists’ wellbeing and the impact of the EBU continuing to include Israel’s broadcaster.
News of artists’ collective dissent in the 36 hours before Nemo’s win might temporarily have felt restorative, proving Joanna Holman’s recent point that artists in today’s world of direct access to fans through social media, and indeed fans who create or discuss their own content, can no longer be expected to passively accept the event organisers’ narratives about what Eurovision means when they perceive that it is not living up to its own values. From such shared workplace experiences are labour movements made.
The numbers of active fans who will hear of these actions are, however, just a fraction of the broader mass of viewers, who will only witness the relations between artists through what takes place on camera and is allowed to be shown in the Eurovision broadcast.
Let me taste the lows and highs
This wider audience would not know, unless their own broadcaster’s commentators told them, that Bambie Thug missed their appearance in the dress rehearsal grand final due to the complaints about Israeli TV’s commentary they were having to put into the EBU, that Slimane abandoned his set-piece a cappella moment in that same rehearsal to make a statement calling for peace, or that last year’s Norwegian and Finnish Eurovision representatives, Alessandra and Käärijä, refused to act as spokespeople for their national jury votes after Klein’s disqualification.
Alessandra, indeed, stated on Instagram she had decided to withdraw because Eurovision’s new ‘United by Music’ motto had become ‘just empty words’:
‘There is a genocide going on and I’m asking you all to please open up your eyes, open up your heart. Let love lead you to the truth. It’s right in front of you. Free Palestine.’
The bonds of friendship in adversity forged between pro-Palestine artists at Eurovision this year resulted in unprecedented images of mutual support on camera when the quartet of Nemo, Bambie Thug, Iolanda and Marina Satti each received their points.
And yet, in what was screened at Eurovision 2024, the friendships between these four artists and 14th-placed Silvester Belt will just have resembled the same good cultural relations story that the UK’s Sam Ryder and Ukraine’s Kalush Orchestra could tell in 2022 after getting to know each other in Turin, in a context around which Eurovision’s key stakeholders had much more consensus.
Before this year’s contest, I questioned whether politically engaged queer artists would still want to take part in Eurovision after 2024, or would still want to allow lyrics and looks expressing their own intimately personal stories – like Nemo’s winning song – become the face of a ‘Europe’ which protestors have charged with turning a blind eye to genocide.
What contingently appeared instead was a spark of collective action among a group of predominantly queer, pro-Palestine artists who have expressed a distinction between ‘Eurovision’ as an event controlled by producers and the EBU, and ‘Eurovision’ as the community that has grown up around it by identifying with the values it encouraged them to feel good about.
Yet the ‘Europe’ affirmed by Eurovision’s votes in 2024 was one where multiple queer and trans identities of performers in different European countries, from Ireland to Lithuania, were welcomed – and Nemo was not censured for displaying their non-binary flag in the opening flag parade – while the EBU and Swedish television had simultaneously been ruling that symbols of Palestinian heritage were unacceptably political.
When the EBU and host broadcaster have the monopoly on what will be included within the broadcast ‘text’ of each contest, it is questionable what level of collective action among artists short of outright mass withdrawal can produce meaningful change within an organisation that can only make high-level policy with consensus among its member broadcasters, who are in turn accountable to their states’ governments, and which has been very effective at harnessing emotions of love, joy, friendship and solidarity to build up the atmospheres of this commercial event. These atmospheres are as exhilarating and enticing as they are mechanisms of discipline.
And at the heart of this struggle remain the questions about Eurovision, queer identities and the multiculturalism of Europe which have needed to be discussed ever since Eurovision 2014, in the aftermath of the Sochi Winter Olympics, launched Conchita as a symbol of a liberal, tolerant Europe and relaunched Eurovision as a space where affirmation for sexual and gender non-conformity reigns.
European queer of colour critique, such as the work of Fatima El-Tayeb and Jin Haritaworn, was speaking out against how mainstream western European gay culture has marginalised ways of being queer which are not secular or consumer-oriented ways of being since before Conchita even took the Eurovision stage: Bashar Murad’s entry in this year’s Icelandic final, co-written by the drummer from Hatari, seemed to allude to this very dynamic in his lines about the ‘test’ that a queer Palestinian like himself has to pass in the ‘wild, wild west’ to which the narrator of his song had migrated.
(Had Murad won the final, based on his live performance, Palestinian dabke dancing would have been represented on stage at Eurovision 2024 – from the same country whose representatives held up Palestinian flags during the voting of Eurovision 2019.)
In the liberationist queer politics which both Nemo and Bambie Thug to various extents have identified with, solidarity with Palestine represents a linkage of queer and anti-racist struggles that seeks to defeat ‘pinkwashing’ strategies globally, whether they are implemented by the Israeli state, their own countries’ governments, or wherever else they appear.
Yet the difference between the Conchita moment of 2014 and the Nemo moment of today is that the EBU of 2024 has much more actively promoted Eurovision’s LGBTQ+ significance to boost engagement with Gen Z youth audiences and demonstrate the contest’s social impact, while constraining the expression of any solidarity with Palestine at a time when this too is a significant queer cause. If the EBU’s policymakers do not take further action, it will again be down to fans, potential artists and the contest’s own creative workers to find their ethical way through an event that has much to lose in 2025.
Catherine Baker 