Are You Not Entertained?
The Spectacle of Sochi against the Backdrop of LGBT Rights Violations
There’s a great scene in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator where Maximus, the Roman general who was sold into slavery to fight in the games, flings away his sword after a particularly brutal fight to the death and admonishes the crowd.
“Are you not entertained?” he growls, turning on the audience.
But the mob is oblivious to his affront. Rather than booing. They cheer him on with even greater lust. Nothing matters to them but the spectacle. The ascension to power of a tyrant in Rome means nothing in the provinces. There is bloodsport for comfort.
Just once, during these Sochi Olympics—set as they are against the backdrop of Kiev and Caracas burning, Vladimir Putin’s virulent anti-gay legislation and Rob Ford’s soft-shoe homophobia designed to attract the dregs of the voting pool—I would have liked to have seen a single athlete take to the podium and to thusly confront the audience, but sadly such courage seems lacking in the 21st Century business that is “amateur” sport.
This is how the movie ends: Homicidal emperor Commodus battles Maximus in the Colosseum but before the death match, he sticks a shiv in the ribs of the former general to make him an easy target. Despite massive blood loss, Maximus kills the illegitimate head-of-state, restores Rome to a republic and then dies himself, against a sonic tapestry of Lisa Gerrard’s plaintive singing in a non-existent language that sounds vaguely Latin.
Russian queers are being kidnapped and killed, arrested and detained, all under the aegis of an insane law that criminalizes their existence and which is backed not only by the Russian people but by the powerful Russian Orthodox Church. They are risking their lives to ensure the freedom of future generations. They are being brutalized and killed far from the limelight. Their suffering is captured on cell phone cameras and shared on sites like YouTube. It is not being beamed around the world on network television and it is going largely ignored while the planet basks in the glory of the young athletes whose exploits are earning billions for the conglomerates that sponsor the games, while those who can afford to travel to Sochi watch the spectacle live.
Defenders of the Olympic Games told us that athletes would rise up in protest but we’ve seen none of that and that Putin wouldn’t dare enforce the anti-gay propaganda law in Sochi during the games. But we’ve all seen images of Pussy Riot members being whipped in public and trans Italian politician Vladimir Luxuria being taken away for waving a rainbow flag. We’ve also been told that these are the gayest games ever because of the ridiculous rainbow hues of the opening ceremonies (which featured an all-male police choir singing Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, thus apparently making it all good).
Many of us recoiled at images of Canadian athletes (among others) posting selfies with Putin on social media. These young “role models” were clearly more impressed by his celebrity than his horrific human rights record.
With less than three days to go, there is little chance that any athletes will truly speak out. The spotlight will shift from Sochi and life will go on as the rest of us seek out our next sports hit while members of the Russian LGBT community are once again forced to hide for their lives.
Are you not entertained? I certainly am not.
