Oh No, the Olympics Threw a Big Queer Dinner Party!

What Madonna can teach us about the Paris opening ceremony, the manufactured controversy around it, and many liberals' silly attempts to pretend it wasn't exactly what it was

Some of you may be too young to remember this. These stories get forgotten if they’re not told enough. So, here goes…

It was a Friday, early in March of 1989. The third, to be precise. I was only twelve at the time when the music video premiered, full of nastiness like a beautiful white woman with her boobs half out making out with a Black Jesus inside a church while the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses. She sang about praying and probably fellatio and confused religious and sexual ecstasy and, by the time it was over, I shit you not, the Earth shivered and split open just like it did in the third act of Superman: The Movie. Satan himself climbed out of the fiery abyss, summoned by this pop-strumpet’s sacrilege, and declared himself King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and the fairy godfather of all things dark and evil and totally horny. It looked like it was all over for America and the world and tax-exempt institutions such as the Catholic Church. But lo, that’s when the once unimaginable happened. The Pope and Jerry Falwell rallied Catholics around the globe and America’s Evangelicals and Protestants in an epic team-up long before Kevin Feige made these kinds of events a semi-regular thing. Together, these noble warriors raced into the bilious fray like the Avengers or Super-Friends, kicked Satan’s unholy ass, and sent him and his slutty-lipped prophetess back to Hell.

And that, millennials, is why the 21^st century turned out so fucking awesome.

Ask your parents about it, but trust me, I was there. Madonna, the pop star who wrote and performed “Like a Prayer”, was never heard from again. Satan, neither. It was the greatest example in history of the morally righteous uniting in one voice to destroy an artist and ensure nobody else ever dared use religious iconography for anything other than justifying almost every terrible thing human beings have ever done to each other.

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The reality is, the Pope really did call for a boycott of a pop singer and the outcry from America’s religious right forced Pepsi to abandon a brand-new sponsorship contract with Madonna.

Madonna got to keep the $5 million Pepsi paid her.

The controversy immeasurably helped her career, too. Thirty-four years later, the Queen of Pop said of it, “Artists are here to disturb the peace.”¹

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Fast forward to 2024. On July 26^th – just over a week ago at the time of this article’s publication – the Summer Olympics’ opening ceremony took place across Paris. In response, a whole lot of people who grew up with “Like a Prayer”, along with their aging parents who had freaked the fuck out over the song way back in 1989, joined hands and freaked the fuck out again over another piece of art. Boycotts have been called. Politicians have used it to rally followers prone to being triggered by every whisper in the night. And religious leaders around the world have screamed louder over it than actual threats to their flocks such as climate change, pedophilia, capitalism, war, pedophilia, violence against women, the rise of fascism, pedophilia, and climate change.

That was the generally “conservative” reaction. Meanwhile, “liberals” have taken to social media to make what I find silly arguments about the whole thing being the result of the ignorant Right failing to understand Greek history, ancient myths, and a relatively obscure artwork that I’d wage fewer than 1% even knew existed in the first place.

Let’s look at this situation in detail. Not because I wish to court controversy – even though Yahweh or Zeus or Ra knows this will offend the easily offendable – but because I believe it lives at the heart of what 5AM StoryTalk is about. Here, I seek to help us all look at art in new ways, interrogate it anew, and, in doing so, try to understand the human experience better through the lens of art. I can’t promise you that anything I say here is the only right answer, but I can promise you two things: what I’m about to say is one of the right answers and the reactions to the Paris opening ceremony are the point despite apologies from the Olympics’ creative director to the contrary.

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So, what got so many people clutching their pearls over the 2024 Summer Olympics’ opening ceremony? Brace yourselves for the shocking images you’re about to experience.

Oh, the horror!

Oh, and this:

My brain…my brain…I can feel the gay infecting it, oh no!

If you haven’t seen the performances or somehow have escaped these images so far, quick, tell me what you see…I’m willing to bet it’s “The Last Supper” as it’s commonly known in and outside of Christian circles. The reason being that Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper is arguably the second-most-famous piece of art in history after Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (the guy was clearly an underachiever). I bet there are lost tribes of people living in the Amazon who can recognize this painting. I mean, not really. But, maybe?

“Listen, guys, this is my last dinner. I love you all, but said I wanted Buffalo Wild Wings - not bread and wine. I could’ve just made that myself.”

What you might also notice – that is, if you had a remotely well-rounded liberal arts education or simply entered pretty much any art museum in the world – is Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, fertility, and all-around freakiness. Basically, he was the god of fun and everything else that makes life worth living.

“Party on, dudes.”

The reason the Olympics’ Renaissance-style tableau is so controversial is a combination of two things:

The first: the performers are made up of a group of drag queens, a famous transgender model, a near-naked singer, and a lesbian activist named DJ Barbara Butch.

The second: a lot of people are easily offended, as I’ve already mentioned, and a lot of people make a lot of money off of the easily offended.

In response to the controversy, which everyone from Donald Trump, to Kirk Cameron’s sister, to the Catholic Church have condemned, the Olympics’ creative director Thomas Jolly issued an apology: “I did not intend to be subversive or to mock or shock.”²

[Cough – “Bullshit” – cough.]

“In France,” Jolly added, “we can believe or not believe, in France we have a lot of rights, and I wanted to convey those values throughout the ceremony.”

This apology is a cowardly farce as far as I’m concerned - as opposed to the controversial tableau, which is a triumphant piece of art, as I’ll show with Madonna’s help. Because I totally rang her up and asked her for her thoughts. We’re great friends. No, really. I’m, er, super-cool like that.

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Thomas Jolly, who is a prominent artist in France, has repeatedly claimed he took his inspiration from Dionysus and the trope of the Greek Bacchanalia or, in Ancient Rome, Bacchus – what can best be described as epic keggers where everyone got smashed and put their genitalia and mouths wherever they felt like. Sounds decided un-family-like, sure, but at the heart of it is liberty and France is, if anything, all about the liberty.

Many have even pointed out that the scene in question was inspired by Dutch artist Jan van Bijlert’s The Feast of the Gods, which was painted sometime between 1635 and 1640.

Look at how three arms and one leg perfectly frame Dionysus at the center of this image. Gorgeous, methinks…but who brought the baby to the party?

In fact, this has become a huge talking point for many liberal types:

“Oh, you conservatives with your disdain for the arts and education. It wasn’t The Last Supper, you silly dumbfucks – it was an obscure painting from the 17^th century, duh, everyone who knows anything knows that.”

French actor/singer Philippe Katerine, one of Jolly’s performers, weighed in on the subject, telling French media, “What is certain is that with Thomas Jolly, we never talked about religion, nor about The Last Supper.”³

Well, there you go. Definitely not The Last Supper then. Score one for those liberal deep thinkers!

“For the ‘Festivities’ segment, Thomas Jolly took inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting to create the setting,” Olympic producers announced in a statement The Wrap obtained.⁴

Oh.

Biscuits.

“Clearly, there was never an intention to show disrespect towards any religious group or belief,” the producers continued. “[Jolly] is not the first artist to make a reference to what is a world-famous work of art. From Andy Warhol to ‘The Simpsons,’ many have done it before him.”

Then, there’s this:

That’s an Instagram screenshot shared by Barbara Butch, who sat in the role of “Jesus” in the tableau, wearing a badass silver aureole halo crown head-dress and low-cut dress.⁵

“Oh yes! Oh yes! The new gay testament!” she wrote before later deleting the post. But deleting the post was as pointless as Jolly’s apology.

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Here are a few of the things I think it would be helpful, as critical art thinkers and human beings in general, to bear in mind about the Olympics’ Big Queer Last Supper:

• The very first shot of the performance was very much intended to immediately evoke The Last Supper. Yes, it’s a Greek Bacchanalia, but that is the vehicle with which to shadow-populate a Biblical scene with gay, trans, and drag performers.

• Even if the inspiration had entirely been van Bijlert’s The Feast of the Gods – and it’s not – what this completely erroneous fantasy fails to take into account is that The Feast of the Gods itself also evokes The Last Supper, which was painted 150 years earlier and hugely influenced artists across Europe in the centuries afterward. Art feeds on itself, constantly regurgitating what was in new contexts to provide new relevance and meaning as the world changes.

• There’s nothing especially extraordinary about the opening ceremony’s dramatization of a “sacred” event that almost certainly never happened to begin with. In fact, almost every important piece of art on the subject theatrically reimagines the scene with types who would’ve never been there to begin with. Like Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, which takes some pretty spectacular dramatic license by filling the titular supper table with thirteen lily white European men instead of thirteen dark-skinned Middle Eastern Jews.

• As the Olympic producers point out, the use of The Last Supper’s iconography is commonplace throughout art history, popular culture, and our world in general. For example, here’s Mel Brooks using it for a laugh in The History of the World, Part 1 (1981):

• And here’s “The Sopranos” doing it with a bunch of gangsters:

  

• And here’s “Battlestar Galactica” doing it with another cleavage-bearing woman out front as Jesus:

  

• In fact, Empire magazine put together a whole list of instances where The Last Supper was used to promote films and TV series, artillery and all, which you can read here. At no point do I recall a single politician or religious leader calling for any of these pieces of art or the networks and streamers that shared them to be boycotted. The difference, of course, is none of them are explicitly “queer”.

• Oh, and here’s me at my wedding:

  

  Amazingly, it only took suggesting this to my wife to convince her it was a good idea. I married a good one.

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Now, step back from the outrage if you can, step back from the controversy and the need to react one way or another to what we’re discussing here because our culture now demands that, and try to look at Thomas Jolly’s live reinterpretation of The Last Supper just as a piece of art. What was he trying to say by including and celebrating such a diverse range of human experiences in a world where prominent authors spend all their free time online trying to erase – or at least silence – such experiences from public discourse?

I used the word “celebrate” intentionally. This performance was, whatever you thought of it, an act of joy. What does it say about our culture, about the critics reacting negatively to it, that such joy is dangerous?

I have so many other questions I could ask here, but that’s the point. You should have them, too. Because you’re supposed to react to art. It’s not always meant to give you the warm and fuzzies. It’s also meant to provoke, to scare you, to wave a mirror at you so you can see who you really are or, if you can’t control your mouth, reveal to the rest of the world how bigoted you are through online breakdowns about other people existing on their own terms rather than yours.

Thomas Jolly achieved something wonderful with this specific chapter of the 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. He made The Last Supper relevant in a way I haven’t seen before. He should’ve never apologized for it in any way. It got a reaction out of viewers, both good and bad and even embarrassing - and that’s what great art does.  

As Madonna said in 1989, “Art should be controversial, and that's all there is to it."⁶ She knew it 35 years ago. And I have trouble believing Jolly didn’t understand as much when he conceived this performance.

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If you enjoyed this particular article, these other three might also prove of interest to you:

1. https://www.billboard.com/music/pop/madonna-thanks-pepsi-airing-1989-like-a-prayer-commercial-2023-mtv-vmas-1235412265/

2. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/video/2024/jul/28/paris-olympics-organisers-apologise-opening-ceremony-last-supper-parody-video

3. https://www.smh.com.au/sport/not-a-provocation-drag-show-performers-thought-biblical-painting-was-inspiration-20240731-p5jxs8.html

4. https://www.thewrap.com/paris-olympics-producers-last-supper-inspired-opening-ceremony/

5. https://www.smh.com.au/sport/not-a-provocation-drag-show-performers-thought-biblical-painting-was-inspiration-20240731-p5jxs8.html

6. https://www.nytimes.com/1989/03/19/arts/madonna-re-creates-herself-again.html