I’m always a little perplexed when people say they wish they could travel through time. Because you can – nowadays, it’s never been easier. Hop on a plane and you can visit places that are stuck in the past or places that are stuck in the future. And even some that are a bit of both.
Virgin Atlantic is now offering daily flights to Saudi Arabia, with Heathrow to Riyadh return flights starting at a very reasonable £447. Richard Branson has pulled off a deal with Saudia, the national flag carrier, enabling you to travel on to Mecca and Jeddah if you fancy it. This is all part of Saudi’s attempt to rebrand itself as a tourist destination, which also includes the construction, at mind-boggling expense, of a new six-runway, seven-terminal hub at King Khalid airport – which certainly throws thirty-odd years of fuss, dither and political knicker-wetting about a single extra runway at Heathrow into sharp perspective.
This Virgin-Saudi deal surely takes the baklava
But the most interesting thing, for me, about this new Virgin venture is that this is the airline that has fallen over itself in recent years to brand itself as ‘LGBT’-friendly. (If we must use that obsolete initialism, and Virgin certainly still does.) The ‘Our People’ section of the Virgin Atlantic website tells us that:
Our PRIDE network is dedicated to creating an inclusive environment for our LGBT+ people and their allies. We work closely with our PRIDE network to champion LGBT+ rights, including the sponsoring of Manchester Pride as well as our annual sponsorship of the Attitude Awards to celebrate success in the LGBT+ community.
And then there’s their 2022 advert, entitled ‘See The World Differently’. To the tune of ‘I Am What I Am’ from La Cage Aux Folles – how very original! – we see various tedious stereotypes of the sexually unconventional partaking of Virgin’s services. These include women with short hair and tongue piercings, a man in a glittery wheelchair, and – shock horror! – a lady pilot, of all things. There are even – brace yourselves – male cabin crew who are a bit effeminate!
‘At Virgin Atlantic, we’ve always championed individuality,’ reads the corporate blurb under the ad on on YouTube. ‘Wherever you’re going, onboard or in life, we salute you. Here’s to those who are their own captains, a crew like no other. Those who were born to fly. Those who See The World Differently.’
When launching this stomach-turningly naff little film, Virgin explained its thinking to the ad industry thusly:
The new campaign is a colourful celebration of the diversity of the world around us. Of loving every inch of yourself and taking pride in what makes you special. Everyone’s welcome onboard with Virgin Atlantic, and you can be wonderfully, unapologetically yourself.
Whoops! Three years on, and it seems we can see exactly how deep this heated enthusiasm for the ‘colourful’ runs. Saudi Arabia is, of course, governed under Sharia law, where same-sex sex is totally illegal and a capital crime. The hadith runs that, ‘Sodomy is proven either by the perpetrator confessing four times or by the testimony of four trustworthy Muslim men, who were eyewitnesses to the act’ (the nosy buggers!).
It’s difficult to get accurate information about the enforcement of this particular part of the sunnah in Saudi. The emirs don’t like to acknowledge homosexuality even happens in their land. But though technically a capital offence there, there don’t seem to be regular executions at least. Still, you’d think this stricture might clash with the ‘inclusive values’ of Virgin Atlantic.
The absence of Pride branding from Western company logos in the Middle East is legend. The treasured corporate values vanish in a puff of glitter when confronted by absolutely enormous wads of Arab cash. But this Virgin-Saudi deal surely takes the baklava. You will search in vain for any of that woke Western waffle in their bumf for this enterprise. And as your Virgin airbus enters Saudi airspace, the bar shutters slam down and the cabin crew reportedly broadcast the announcement, ‘Please note, in Saudi Arabia it is illegal to show same-sex affection in public’. Turns out you are no longer what you are. Now that’s what I call a vibe shift.
It appears it was literally all surface, then – the depiction of lesbian and gay people as quirky and flamboyant clichés, as non-specific gender-benders somehow linked to transvestism. Which here runs smack into the reality of what actually makes us different: sex. Questioned on this, Richard Branson airily told the Times, ‘There are plenty of gay people in Saudi Arabia … I’ve got a lot of gay Saudi friends who do not feel uncomfortable living in Saudi’.
The things we tell ourselves when the petroleum dollars pile up! I’m sure the kind of people Branson is chums with are wealthy and connected enough to avoid trouble, if they’re ‘discreet’ … for the average Ahmed or Aisha in the street, it could well be a different matter.
Elsewhere in this piece, Branson is breezily confident that Saudi is changing and modernising itself. It’s quite touching to hear someone still apparently clinging to the somewhat battered 20th-century notion that a bit of capitalism will civilise the natives, doncherknow.
I’ve never been a keen traveller myself. I was put off by films that depict the grim fate of Westerners in backward lands – such as Midnight Express and Carry On Abroad – and so I prefer to stay in a semi-civilised country like ours used to be. Budleigh Salterton is my idea of dangerously exotic. But if I was a jetsetter, I’d be rightly peeved at the enthusiasm with which Virgin has dropped their ‘inclusive’ branding for this endeavour. Try being ‘wonderfully, unapologetically yourself’ in Riyadh.
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