a

I first became aware of the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard in the Dutch fagzine  Butt back in 2006. In an interview, he spoke openly about himself and his art. He caught my attention again in 2013 when his solo exhibition ‘ Ignorant Transparencies’  was reviewed in the New York Times. A recurring element of the show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise G allery was the figure of the  Pink Panther —the cartoon character from the crime comedy of the same name. In one room stood an almost four-meter-tall statue of  Pink Panther wearing a top hat, smoking crystal meth. Here and there, the body was smeared with paint. I remember thinking whether this was a reference to  Pink Panther  from the confession video of the right-wing extremist terror group National Socialist Underground (NSU). Between 2000 and 2006, the terror group committed nine murders of entrepreneurs with Turkish immigrant backgrounds along with  one from Greece. Official investigations focused on the victims themselves and their relatives, leading to their further victimization and stigmatization, while hardly investigating a right-wing extremist motivation. The committed murders were trivialized with cartoon sequences of  Pink Panther and news images, mocking the victims and their surviving relatives.

Pink Panther was appropriated by the right-wing, but to this day, it’s unclear to me whether Melgaard knew this and merely wanted to comment deconstructively or, in the worst case, reinforce it.

The uncertainty remained. I explored which queer individuals had shifted to the right.

b

I like darkrooms. I used to go there every day. The lightless rooms with black walls were located at the back of porn cinemas, gay saunas, and clubs. Men retreated there to have sex with each other. Others lingered in the darkness until a random touch set desire into motion. The darkrooms protect you from the glaring reality of everyday life. Here, I could escape the gazes of the outside world and the internalized gaze regime of other gay men. After September 11, I longed for it even more.

(As a teenager, I cruised in the restrooms of department stores. On the partition walls above the peepholes or glory holes, contact ads were written with pens, many explicitly looking for a Turk to “take” the inserters. But I didn’t fit this image of the active and hyper-masculine Turk. At the same time, I saw other graffiti outside in our neighborhood: “Turks Out.”)

The further I advanced from the edges of the darkroom, where some light still fell in, into the depths of darkness, the better I was protected from these gazes.

I remember that for a while, I didn’t understand how  white gay men could vote for right-wing populist or right-wing extremist parties, or even found their own.

c

In the w hite cube. On October 15, 2016, a few weeks before the presidential elections, Milo Yiannopoulos, a prominent representative of the Alt-Right movement, and other participants opened the exhibition “#DaddyWillSaveUs” at the Wallplay Gallery in New York City. “Daddy” refers to Donald Trump.

“Daddy,” a term from queer subculture, sexually charges power dynamics along an age gap or body type. The title of the exhibition eroticizes Trump and, indirectly,  his many sexual assaults. So is the perpetrator now supposed to be the protector?

Yiannopoulos holds the view that Trump’s racist and Islamophobic policies and those of the Republican Party would benefit the queer community. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, poses a danger to the community because, through its immigration policies, queer-hostile people come into the country. With the Democrats, queers would always remain victims, even if the party claims the opposite and promises equal rights. With the election of Trump and the Republican Party, this cycle could be broken. Moreover, the queer community itself is responsible for the negative image of the Republican Party in its own ranks, because it has identified with the victim narrative spread by the Democrats.

During the opening speech, Yiannopoulos wears a white tank top featuring a Glock pistol depicted in rainbow colors. Under the trigger, the warning “We. Shoot. Back” is written, each word set as if it were a shot. The rainbow flag, a symbol of LGBTQIA+ equality and acceptance, has become a weapon here.

Does “Daddy” protect you, or are you “Daddy’s” shooter?

d

Always the attempt to give the backward politics of neo-fascism a contemporary image.

A meme from that time serves as an aesthetic guideline for right-wing extremists:

Set against the backdrop of a landscape from the science fiction films of the 1980s, Yukio Mishima is placed—this blend of old and new would become characteristic of this “ school”  of right-wing memes. Mishima is a ultra-nationalist author  who promoted right-wing extremist tendencies in Japan, whilst  simultaneously fascinating through his homoeroticism. In  the meme he appears like a hologram in an  early concept of virtual space. Written in neon lettering above him : “In a world gone mad… Righteousness is Rebellion.” Mishima was cut out from a photo taken about a year before he killed himself in front of the officers of his private army. In 1969, he had himself photographed in a warlike pose. The black-and-white photo shows his muscular, sweat-glossed upper body. Tense , Mishima holds his sword firmly, as if in the midst of a battle. It’s the noble, razor-sharp weapon of the legendary 17th-century blacksmith Seki no Magoroku, who  would end his life and that of his lover on November 25, 1970. A white headband, the Hachimaki (“helmet scarf”), adorns his head and symbolizes the effort or courage of the wearer. Samurais wore Hachimaki, as did kamikaze pilots before their missions. Written on his headband is  the medieval samurai battle cry “Shichisho Hokoku” (“Serve the nation for seven lives”), with a rising sun—the motif of the Japanese national flag—between the characters. With this photo, Mishima promoted his martial image, and it later adorned the covers of books about or by him.

Before neo-fascist memes with pop-cultural references appeared, pop culture had made Mishima desirable.

Yiannopoulos is not like the masculinist-fascist gays Yukio Mishima, Ernst Röhm, or Jack Donovan. His fascism disguises itself as queer liberation.

e

After an art history seminar, I often fled to a darkroom to find myself again. Not far from the Reeperbahn, there were more darkrooms than supermarkets.

During this time, I read books by authors who wrote about cruising, like  Tricks 1  and  Tricks 2  by Renaud Camus. In these books, he describes his sexual experiences over half a year in Paris mostly . Camus defines “tricks” as a special kind of encounter . In the introduction, he explains that a trick must be a stranger or almost a stranger and that “semen must have flowed.” I could relate to him. He cruised and had a fondness for art. In one episode, he brings someone home with him. Readers learn that he owns works by Andy Warhol and Gilbert & George, and even knows them personally. His circle of friends also includes Francis Bacon, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, David Hockney, and Bob Wilson. All these artists were part of the new canon of art history when I was studying. Camus hosted  soirées in Paris. On one of these occasions, he introduced  Warhol to Roland Barthes. In 1979, Barthes dedicated  his famous essay on Cy Twombly to Camus and two other people (“For Yvon, for Renaud, and for William”). Roland Barthes also writes the foreword to “Tricks” and uses his fame to give the book more visibility. This happened many decades before Renaud Camus published his misanthropic worldview in  The Great Replacement.

The Great Replacement  is racist and has since its publication served as a rallying cry for global white supremacy. During a torch rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, armed and paramilitary-dressed neo-Nazis chanted “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us,” alluding to Camus’  main motif. The theory of the Great Replacement conspiratorially claims that the white, somehow Christian population is gradually being replaced by non-whites—through mass migration, demographic growth, and the declining birth rate of whites. Camus conjures up a plot against whites, who, according to his dystopian vision, are gradually being subjected to “genocide ”. When asked about Charlottesville, Camus will say that while he rejects violence, he supports the sentiment behind the slogans. A year later, under the same rallying cry, an assailant kills eleven  worshippers during a Sabbath morning service at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Another attacker justifies his rampage the following year in El Paso, where 23 people lose their lives, with the fear of a “cultural and ethnic replacement” and a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Brenton Harrison Tarrant joins this series of murders: On March 15, 2019, he shoots fifty-one   people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and justifies his actions in his manifesto  The Great Replacement,  a title he borrowed from Camus.

Although there are hardly any migrants from Turkey in New Zealand and Australia, where Tarrant comes from, he portrays people with Turkish immigrant backgrounds as enemies in his manifesto. He wants to place his right-wing terrorist rampage in the series of historical battles of Christian Europe against the Ottoman Empire. Like an encyclopedia, he handwrites the names and years of the victorious wars of Christians against Muslims on his semi-automatic rifle, the drum magazine, the spare magazines, and the rest of  his equipment. The white inscriptions encompass more than a thousand years of history. In capital letters on the handguard of the rifle, the word “Turkofagos” stands out—the nickname of the Greek independence fighter Nikitas Stamatelopoulos, who fought against the Ottomans between 1821 and 1832, which can be translated as “Turk-eater.”

“Deadly are the bullets, not the ideas,” Camus will dismiss the indirect responsibility for these murders.

Camus will claim that  Tricks  and  The Great Replacement  originated from the same motivation. They have fearlessly committed themselves to a “truth” that society closes its eyes to. “I have always believed,” said  Camus, “that the essential task of any writer is to penetrate the hidden areas of society and language where things happen that must not be spoken, mentioned, or described (…). Forty years ago, that might have been homosexuality; today, it’s the dissolution of the people that has become unspeakable.” He will insist that both books are committed to the same ideal and the same struggle. This is a fatal distortion. Incomprehensible…

Only when I reread “Tricks” did I notice how much Camus was bothered by Muslim or Arab men while cruising:

Camus stages the rejection of Arabs against the theatrical backdrop of Notre-Dame in Paris—more precisely, at Square Jean-XXIII, a cruising area behind the cathedral. Especially on weekend nights, when the discos like Manhattan emptied, it was very busy here. A small, narrow, irregularly winding path behind the cathedral led to Square Jean-XXIII. The Arabs are annoying to him; he leaves no doubt about that. He pushes an Arab away in the fifth episode when the man stands behind him while he’s licking the nipples of Daniel with the helmet (a motorcyclist). Similar scenes repeat in the 13th episode. Camus gives a Spanish tourist a blow job in the bushes behind the bust of Carlo Goldoni. Several men surround the two. He singles out only one from this group. Camus: “Moreover, the figures around us, especially the Arab, became increasingly intrusive, so I finally got dressed again. The Spaniard followed suit and was the first to leave the bushes.” From time to time, his rejection intensifies. In the 28th episode with Jean-Marc, it finally says: “A rather ugly North African was persistently groping my upper body, although I was increasingly trying to fend him off until I was finally forced to push him away energetically.”

Already here, he characterizes the Arabs against the backdrop of the cathedral as unwanted intruders into the Christian West. As if they were echoes of the Muslim “invaders” of The  Great Replacement …

f

#DaddyWillSaveUs celebrates the Republican Party as the new cool. Lucian Wintrich presents his pro-Trump photo series ‘ #TwinksForTrump’.  The almost life-sized portraits show young, slim men in “MAGA” caps, often scantily clad and posing in upscale country club settings. Apparently, these models are meant to convey that queer people of color support Trump and see him as their “Daddy.”

Martin Shkreli, a U.S. hedge fund manager from the pharmaceutical industry, exhibits a pill consisting of a red and blue capsule—a nod to the movie  The Matrix.  This pill motif has become a popular symbol of the Alt-Right movement. Shkreli made headlines the previous year when his company raised the price of the HIV medication Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per tablet—a more than 5 000% increase. This endangered the lives of HIV-affected  individuals who could no longer afford the medication.

Among the exhibitors are also right-wing extremist personalities like Gavin McInnes, co-founder of  Vice  magazine.

Then there’s Yiannopoulos’s performance  Angel Mom.  On the blood-splattered wall behind the bathtub hung dozens of black-and-white images of people who, according to Yiannopoulos, were murdered by illegal immigrants. Under the photos are names noted like on wanted posters, supplemented by a short paragraph describing the fate of the person depicted. They didn’t have to die, he tells the audience before the actual performance, if the “elite, globalist philosophy” hadn’t placed its principles “above human life.” Because the media systematically misrecognize the danger of Islam, he wants to commemorate with his performance the victims of Islamist terrorism in Orlando and 9/11 and the mothers of the deceased, hence the title of the performance “Angel Moms ”.

The performance shows Yiannopoulos, almost naked, stepping into a freestanding, enameled bathtub with curved feet. The tub is  one-third filled with a viscous, bright red substance that is or is supposed to be pig’s blood. Yiannopoulos wears gold chains, sunglasses, and a white “MAGA” baseball cap signed by Trump. He poses lasciviously, surrounded by cameras and admiring fans. “Milo, babe, look over here!” a voice pleads. “Milo, you’re so hot!” she calls out to him, encouraging him to strike more lascivious poses. With expansive gestures, he then begins to spread the red solution on the wall with the photos of the dead. His white cap has completely absorbed the blood. At some point, he splashes the blood onto the audience, allowing  numerous selfies with him before the performance ends.

None of the people he supposedly commemorates are mentioned by Yiannopoulos by name. It’s hardly conceivable that he sought the consent of the relatives of the depicted—or that they would agree to such a performance.

g

Among the opening speakers of  #DaddyWillSaveUs is Geert Wilders, a right-wing populist Dutch politician. Some consider him the successor of the right-wing populist Pim Fortuyn, who was murdered in 2002.

In the Netherlands, Fortuyn had an unprecedented career and was one of the country’s most famous personalities. He was a member of the party Leefbaar Nederland (Livable Netherlands). In 2002, the party expelled him when his Islam-defaming statements culminated in the proposal to suspend Article 1 of the constitution—the equality before the law—for Muslims. In the same year, he founded his own party, Lijst Pim Fortuyn (List Pim Fortuyn), in early February. A month later, his party won the municipal elections in Rotterdam, ousting the Labor Party from the city council. For the parliamentary elections in May, he and his party were predicted to have a landslide victory. A few days before the election, activist Volkert van der Graaf shot him.

Fortuyn’s and Camus’  rhetoric are similar: On one hand, their open talk about their sexuality provokes the prudish and conservative part of the public, and on the other hand, their statements stir up already deep-seated aversions toward the Muslim part of the population. Both brand Islam from the perspective of the gay rights movement (representative of other emancipation movements) as sexually repressive. Fortuyn also rejects them. They are backward-looking to him because they focus only on sex and ignore other forms of intimacy.

In another interview from 1999, Fortuyn compares the darkroom to a cathedral. Raised Catholic, Fortuyn tells the newspaper:

“I absolutely don’t want to commit blasphemy, but I must tell you that during certain acts in the darkroom, I reconnect with the atmosphere of Catholic liturgy. The darkroom I regularly visit in Rotterdam is not completely darkened; like in an old cathedral, the light filters in, so to speak. Under such circumstances, the act of love definitely has something religious. Religiosity and merging—which one sometimes experiences during sex—can be two sides of the same coin.”

The provocation of his literary elaborations lies in the blasphemous connection between cathedral and darkroom, as well as liturgy and cruising. He rejects the gay Muslim in the “cathedral” and Camus against the backdrop of Notre-Dame.

h

Camus and Fortuyn each embody the academic white gay man. Fortuyn studied sociology  and Camus social sciences; both taught at universities. Later, they used their self-presentation, intellect, eloquent language, and quick-wittedness for right-wing extremist politics. Their sense of aesthetics, luxurious lifestyle, elegance, and extravagance reflect the class narratives and taste codes of the affluent bourgeoisie. They lived princely—Fortuyn in the Palazzo di Pietro in Rotterdam and in a country house in Italy, Camus in a medieval castle in Plieux. Their hedonism, open sexual permissiveness, confident dealings with high society, and provocation of the puritanism of their time made them identifiable  figures for white gay men. Both received recognition in a white heterosexual majority society.

In 2002, Camus, similar to Fortuyn, founded his own party called Le Parti de l’In-nocence. The wordplay “In-nocence” sounds like “innocence” in French. His party aims to promote values like bourgeoisie, decency, and civility, with the pursuit of innocence considered a central virtue. By writing it with a hyphen, Camus highlights the Latin root “nocere,” which means “to harm”—an “in-nocent” is thus someone who causes no harm. He claims that France’s culture and civilization are threatened by “nocence.” “Nocence” includes all who are not white and Christian.

i

Yiannopoulos’s performance was intended to be provocative. But the truly horrifying aspect of the  act was his  use of photos of the deceased as props, which he smeared with blood. In his short speech at the beginning of the performance, Yiannopoulos placed his work in art history and evoked the public scandal around Andres Serrano’s photograph “Immersion (Piss Christ).  Piss Christ shows a small plastic figure of Jesus on the cross, submerged in a glass of Serrano’s urine. This photograph was created between 1986 and 1990 and is part of a series in which Serrano works with various bodily fluids like blood, semen, and milk. The works were initially received positively, but when  Piss Christ was exhibited in 1989, a fierce debate about blasphemy and artistic freedom erupted. The controversies intensified when U.S. senators like Al D’Amato and Jesse Helms, both members of the Republican Party, condemned the work as blasphemous and criticized the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which had provided Serrano with financial support. This public outrage led to death threats against Serrano and  withdrawal of exhibitions. Over the years,  Piss Christ was attacked multiple times, both physically and through protests.

With Yiannopoulos, things get muddled. He wanted to provoke a scandal like Serrano, to shock the Democrats. But like with  Piss Christ,  conservatives and neo-fascists have a problem with Yiannopoulos’s art.

2017 (a year later): Trump has won the election. Yiannopoulos, however, dramatically falls out of favor with Republicans after his trivialization of sexual relationships between adults and minors. Consequently, his invitation to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)—one of the most important events for conservative politicians and activists in the U.S.—was withdrawn, highlighting the rapid distancing of the Republican establishment. He not only lost his appearance at CPAC but also his job as an editor at the influential right-extremist news website Breitbart News. Additionally, his book deal was canceled. He ran into significant financial troubles. When a mix of apologies and justifications didn’t help him further, he distanced himself from his former political alignment and vowed to dedicate the rest of his life to the “destruction of the Republican Party.”

j

Darkroom has become empty. I look up. A black sky without stars. An infinite void…