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Putin super gay meme tv#
What we are witnessing is a real-world version of that old TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in which five camp, well-dressed men would tell straight fatties with beards to lose weight, clean their teeth and invest in a Prada shirt. All that rainbow flag-waving is really about drawing attention to us, and our goodness, not to Russia or its gays. This disparity between the intensity of Western displays of Sochi-related gay-friendliness and the likely impact they will have on the ground in and around the Kremlin is striking: it suggests we are witnessing the emergence of a new form of international politicking, one designed not to achieve tangible political or territorial goals but simply to send a message across the internet, through the media, into the ether, effectively, about ourselves and our cultural superiority to the backward hordes. Every Western commentator and campaigner keen to be thought of highly has added the gay flag to his or her Twitterfeed, Facebook page or Tumblr, but this will of course have zero impact on Russia’s internal politics. Google made its logo gay-coloured for Sochi, but it won’t be pulling out of the Russian market. The UN has made gay-friendly comments about Sochi, but Russia remains a permanent member of the UN Security Council. So Toronto may have raised the gay flag, but there is no discussion of Canada breaking off relations with Russia. What is striking about this coming together of the corporate, political, media and activist spheres in a collective expression of gay-friendly angst with once-Communist, still-backward Russia – kind of pinks against pinkos – is how little practical consequence it is designed to have. If that doesn’t topple Putin, I don’t know what will.
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Every day brings news of another corporation or outlet waving the gay flag, ostensibly to express fury with Putin’s recent passing of a deeply authoritarian law that forbids the promotion of homosexuality to under-18s, but really as a way of saying: ‘Look at me! I like gays! I am good!’ This Will and Gracing of the modern political sphere can be seen in the Guardian’s and New Statesman’s gay-themed refashioning of their mastheads for Sochi, in the furious spread around the internet of a meme showing Putin wearing lipstick (like a gay person!), in a hipster British brewer’s release of a ‘queer beer’ called ‘Hello, my name is Vladimir’, in Toronto City Hall’s raising of the gay flag for the duration of Sochi, in the United Nations’ decree that everyone in the West should ‘raise their voices’ for the gay community, and – get this – in Jon Snow’s decision to wear a gay flag-coloured tie on Channel 4 News during Sochi. The nodding-dog enthusiasm with which virtually every Western institution and publication has embraced Sochi as an opportunity to lambast backward Russians, and more importantly to demonstrate their own gay-friendly decency, has been extraordinary. Where once the West would have sought to assert its superiority to Russia in economic or ideological terms, now, like a bespectacled East Coast American liberal looking with horror upon redneck Southerners who, shudder, do not support gay marriage, it tries to get one over on Russia through the issue of lifestyle, through culture, through waging a Culture War rather than a political one. Westerners’ pointing of a big fat finger at allegedly homophobic Russia – a gay-coloured, comedy-sized foam finger, of course – shows that now even between nations the politics of lifestyle trumps older realpolitik matters. The increasingly bitter lifestyle spats that have been a feature of domestic Western politics for at least 30 years – pitching liberals against conservatives, the gay-friendly against the traditionalist, the cosmopolitan against the parochial – have now well and truly broken through to the international stage. The thoroughness with which Sochi has been turned into a platform for a showdown between enlightened Westerners who like gays and wicked Ruskies who apparently do not, with a vast outpouring of ersatz homophilia from every Westerner with a conscience and an internet connection, confirms that the Culture Wars have gone global.