“Crying at the EuroClub: Queer Diasporas, Rainbow Europe, and the Politics of Escapism at the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest”

CONTENT WARNING: crude sexual language; references to sexual assault, genocide, and Islamophobia; images with blood.

DESCRIPTION: The Eurovision Song Contest is a televised musical spectacle that is often referred to as the “gay Olympics” for its campy nature and championing of global queer visibility (Baker 2017). Songs from the Contest’s history have long been embedded within the queer European cultural milieu and have soundtracked queer nightlife spaces and Pride events across Europe, allowing people to embody the Contest’s queer resonances. Drawing from fieldwork conducted at the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, Sweden, I argue that nightlife events at Eurovision, particularly the Euroclub, function as queer diasporic spaces comprising those who travel across Europe’s literal and figurative borders in order to safely express their queer identities (Gopinath 2018; Patton and Sánchez-Eppler 2000). Eurovision, and the EuroClub by extension, is defined by the idea of a rainbow Europe (Ayoub and Paternotte 2014), rooted in secular liberal humanism, whereby queer activism and visibility are central tenets of the European project. While nightlife spaces generally offer utopic escapes from fraught realities (Garcia-Mispireta 2023), the Euroclub is driven by a homonationalist sexual economy wherein certain national, class, gender, and racial identities become privileged over others (Puar 2013). Since Malmö is home to Scandinavia’s largest Palestinian refugee community, these tensions over identity and belonging were heightened amid protests against Israel’s participation in the Contest. Ultimately, considering the relationship between Eurovision, nightlife, and the politics of belonging draws us toward an understanding of how diasporic and transnational sexual minorities engage lived and aspirational modes of Europeanness in real time through acts of collective musicking.

This paper is drawn from Paul David Flood’s Ph.D. dissertation, provisionally titled “’United By Music’: Europeanism, Migration, and Belonging through the Eurovision Song Contest, 1990-2024”

BIO: Paul David Flood is a Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology and Eastman’s 2024 recipient of the Presser Graduate Music Award, which supported his fieldwork at the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, Sweden in May 2024.