The Olympics’ celebration of ‘queer’ hid a sinister truth

The official website of Paris 2024 promised the Olympics opening ceremony would ‘depict the very best France has to offer’. The best France has to offer turned out to include a cross-dresser crawling on all fours in fishnets while tickling his fake breasts, as well as a dude in a leather skirt sporting an al-fresco testicle. Oh là là!

LGBTQ+ content is front and centre at these games as never before. In addition to the tawdry drag-queen sets and the performatively queer-friendly Lady Gaga, there were three torchbearers in drag ahead of the opening ceremony. The Olympic organisers have also made great play of hosting something called Pride House. Situated on a huge barge, this house is ‘for all LGBTI+ people and their allies to express themselves’ – presumably, in case they felt prancing around half-naked in high heels in front of a billion TV viewers wasn’t self-expression enough.

It’s tempting to assume all this is just some ham-fisted attempt by the French to get down with the kids. It’s more serious than that though. The opening ceremony, which US first lady Jill Biden described as ‘spectacular… every step of the way’, was in fact a provocative way to draw attention to what is a remarkable triumph for the LGBTQ+ lobby. For the first time, its misogynistic ideology has been showcased as the establishment-approved culture of a leading Western nation and, by extension, the West itself.

The prominence given to LGBTQ+ tropes in the Olympics has been criticised by some French observers as an Anglo-American imposition on their national culture. The truth is stranger. In fact, the opening ceremony and its ‘queerness’ represent a homecoming. Because Paris was where the demented ‘queer movement’ and ‘queer theory’, the ramshackle gospel that animates it, began.

The ‘queer’ movement emerged in the wake of the May ’68 student protests in Paris. May 1968 was as much a sexual revolution as an attempted political one. The students behind les événements were inspired by a hotch-potch of badly digested ideas, such as those contained in Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which blamed the rise of the Nazis on sexual repression. This conviction that sexual liberation was the means to achieve radical political change became the fundamental tenet of the Front Homosexual d’Action Revolutionnaire (FHAR), a French gay-rights organisation.

FHAR’s founder, the writer and philosopher Guy Hocquenghem, is now often described as the first ‘queer theorist’. He dismissed the idea that gays should compromise with straight society and its supposedly outdated mores, and insisted they should angrily flaunt their uninhibited sexuality instead – a bit like that snarling drag queen with the beard as he crawled through a puddle during the opening ceremony.

Hocquenghem and his circle, which included his friend, the historian-philosopher Michel Foucault, quickly attracted international attention among the radical left. It appealed in particular to Gayle Rubin, then a young American anthropology student, who travelled to Paris in the early 1970s to immerse herself in Hocquenghem’s circle’s ideas. Once back in the US, Rubin began to construct the American version of queer theory. It was she who urged Judith Butler, now the High Priestess of All Things Queer, to read Foucault – with disastrous results for society and the English language.

Today’s LGBTQ+ movement inherited the ’68ers’ uncompromising self-righteousness and a belief in the overriding importance of ‘polymorphous perversity’ – a term championed by neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse’s bright idea was that capitalism would collapse if only ordinary people would discard all sexual inhibitions and embrace polymorphous perversity. This ludicrous idea has haunted the queer movement ever since.

Marcuse lifted the idea of polymorphous perversity from Sigmund Freud, who claimed, without any evidence, that it described infant sexuality. I think you can see where I’m going here. If you want to know why the modern ‘queer’ movement keeps refusing to take child safeguarding seriously then one reason is that the idea that children are in some sense ‘sexual’ was baked in at its own infancy. Mainstream gay groups may have disavowed this disturbing psycho-babble at the time. But with Rubin and her ilk championing it among young activists already spoon-fed Foucault at university, parts of the LGBQT+ movement have once again embraced polymorphous perversity – though they prefer to use the more innocent-sounding term ‘sex positivity’, for rather obvious reasons.

The uncritical adoration of disinhibited sexuality explains why the ‘queer movement’ has such a hard time taking concerns about child safeguarding seriously, often deliberately misconstruing them as homophobia. A perfect example was the inclusion in the opening ceremony’s highly sexualised drag queen scenes of what looked like a 12-year-old girl.

This moment triggered unfounded allegations on social media that the performers represented a threat to children. In truth, the real threat comes not from individual performers but the ideological assumptions they and the Olympic organisers are unwittingly promoting when they showcase ‘queer culture’. The ragbag ideas contained in queer theory can lead to some truly grotesque conclusions.

Take Guy Hocquenghem himself, the progenitor of queer theory. He argued vociferously for the right of adults to have sex with children. Along with Michel Foucault and the actor Jean Danet, he organised a petition in 1977 against the age of consent law, which called for the decriminalisation of all ‘consensual’ relations between adults and children. By then, the gay movement was considered so cutting-edge a swathe of the French left signed it, including Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida and a future government minister, Bernard Kouchner.

The law didn’t pass but the high-profile advocacy of sex with children has had a terrible real-life impact on French society. It helped lessen the horror of child sex abuse. One of the loudest champions of the 1977 petition, Gabriel Matzneff, became a literary giant despite the fact his books openly described his own paedophilic encounters with both underage girls and boys. President Mitterand even invited Matzneff to the Elysée. When French-Canadian writer Denise Bombardier criticised his views on a French TV show in 1990, she was excoriated by the entire literati as ‘provincial’. Matzneff’s publisher called her ‘a bitch who needs a good fucking’.

Matzneff was no exception though. In 1976, leading ’68er Daniel Cohn-Bendit published an article describing his experiences working at a kindergarten in which he told how little girls sometimes opened his flies and stroked his penis. He became a luminary of the Greens and an MEP.

It was not until recently that there has been something of a reckoning with the sexual attitudes and behaviours of the May ’68 generation. In her 2021 book, La Familia Grande, Camille Kouchner, the daughter of Bernard, revealed her brother had been sexually abused by their stepfather, Oliver Duhamel, one of France’s most high-profile intellectuals. She claimed that incestuous abuse was an open secret among the French liberal elite.

Her story helped speed a change to the law. Hard as it may be to believe, up until 2021, a conviction for rape against a man who slept with a child under 15 required proof the child did not consent. The failure to change the law for so long can in part be blamed on the advocacy of the French ‘queer’ movement.

The queer movement’s disgraceful attitude to sex with minors travelled back to the US with Gayle Rubin. In her seminal queer-theory essay from 1984, ‘Thinking Sex’, she presented what she called ‘boy-lovers’ as heroic sex rebels who were victims of a ‘savage and undeserved witch-hunt’.

The uncomfortable truth the Olympics has singularly failed to acknowledge is that, from the start, the uncompromising, radical wing of the LGBTQ+ movement, which now loves to call itself ‘queer’, embraced ideas that should never be accepted by mainstream society. That’s why organisers of public events should be more careful when they promote ‘queer’ culture. They may think they are championing diversity and inclusion. But if they look at recent French history, they will see they’re promoting something far darker.

Malcolm Clark is a TV producer. Visit his substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.