Around this time of year TV schedules groan under a blizzard of feel-good festive movies, all of which share essentially the same plot: a hard-charging corporate bigwig burnt out on life in the city returns home to Middle America for Christmas, where they learn important life lessons from folksy neighbours, fall in love with the quirky owner of a coffee shop, and use their business nous to save the local factory from closure. Eventually everyone gathers around an oversized Christmas tree and pretends to sip eggnog from patently empty mugs. The credits roll and so do our eyes.
Alan Cumming seems to have stumbled into a real-life version of this plot. The New York City based actor, best known for his roles in the early-2000s Spy Kids franchise, is back in Scotland to take up the artistic directorship of the Pitlochry Festival Theatre. He’s launched a new festival called Out in the Hills, a programme of exhibitions and performances which ‘celebrates all things LGBTQIA+, and invites everyone to find new ways to look at the world and each other.’ Residents of Pitlochry, a sleepy Perthshire town of under 3,000, many of them retirees, will certainly experience a new way of looking at the world. Their preferred pastimes are typically golf and fishing, not queer performing arts.
Come January, they will be treated to Camp Trans Scotland, an exhibition that ‘leads the audience into a time and space built on and by nature, community care and trans ancestry.’ We’re about to find out the Picts were non-binary, aren’t we? The exhibition ‘takes us far from the demands of cis society,’ and will ‘restore the strength to face the relentless attacks on trans people.’ You can hardly walk the length of Atholl Road without encountering a gender-critical street gang.
For fans, or perhaps enemies, of Arthurian legend there will be The Green Knight (but gay), in which Niall Moorjani (a ‘non-binary, neurodiverse storyteller’) reimagines Sir Gawain the Green Knight as ‘a joyous romp full of silliness, queerness, and sharp humour’. I fear the verse ‘Now geared was Gawain gay / lifted his lance right there / and gave them all good day’ might have been misinterpreted.
For those who prefer their entertainment less hifalutin, there’s Match of the Gay: LGBTQIA+ Voices in Football, an ‘open and honest conversation about courage, visibility, and inclusion in the beautiful game’, and Queer as Folk! , billed as ‘a big gay ceilidh‘ – ‘joyfully queer, inclusive, and unmissable’ – that ‘reimagines the ceilidh as a space of belonging for all’. The Gaels have no one to blame but themselves. All those blokes in skirts dancing ‘The Gay Gordons’ was bound to give folk the wrong idea.
It all sounds thoroughly inoffensive, if maybe trying a bit hard for this particular locale, though any arts festival that ventures outside of London or Edinburgh is to be thanked for its willingness to slum it with we mere provincials. Who knows, maybe Bertie, confirmed bachelor and kirk choirmaster, or Mavis, the reigning over-65s ladies golf champion, will stroll in one day and come to a life-changing revelation. That would be very sweet, but someone should explain to Cumming that he’s not saving the local factory or, for that matter, the world.
He tells Channel 4 News the rationale for his new festival: ‘I am protesting the fact that we don’t celebrate the contributions that LGBTQ people have given to us enough.’ That’s what there’s not enough of in the arts: LGBTQ culture. Sometimes when I’m skimming the Skinny I can go entire paragraphs without reading about a groundbreaking new play that subverts heteronormativity from an intersectional perspective. Cumming says he chose to begin his artistic directorship with a queer festival as ‘a protest’ at a time when ‘trans and queer people are under threat’. But what exactly is he protesting against?
This is a festival in Scotland, where the most powerful people in the land are full-fledged ‘allies’. Just a few years ago, every party in the Scottish Parliament except the Tories – and even some of them – fell in line behind Nicola Sturgeon to pass the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, a piece of legislation that delivered almost everything trans rights activists asked for and did so in spite of overwhelming democratic opposition. Holyrood sat into the wee small hours night after night, the SNP suffered its worst ever rebellion, and when Westminster blocked the bill the Scottish government under Humza Yousaf threw taxpayers’ money into a futile bid to overturn the decision. Now, under John Swinney, the government is dragging its heels on implementing the law on the definition of sex as clarified by the Supreme Court.
His idea of ‘the powerful’ is at least a generation out of date
NHS Scotland allows trans women to use female changing rooms, Police Scotland pursues feminists for imaginary crimes against rainbow umbrellas, the Scottish government directly funds trans rights lobbying, the National Library of Scotland shuns books that challenge gender dogma, gender-critical feminists are terfona non grata at comedy festivals, and the publishing world cancels writers for refusing to bend the knee to gender ideology. It is hard to think of another movement which enjoys the patronage of government, opposition, the public sector, the NGOs, the corporate world, the HR departments, the arts – almost every institution of public life.
Of course, that’s not to deny threats to trans people from street-based violence or discrimination, which should attract the full force of the law, but it is to suggest that if Alan Cumming wanted to be truly daring he would commission an exhibition on how a previously obscure aspect of postmodernist theory came to capture the entire ruling class of a country. He’s not going to do that because that would be transgressive among the political and cultural elites he rubs shoulders with. When someone wangs on about art being a form of protest against the powerful, then proceeds to restate every high-status opinion of the day, you can be confident that his idea of the powerful is at least a generation out of date and amounts to nothing more than the octogenarian Daily Express reader who lives rent-free inside his head.
Alan Cumming, the hard-charging cultural bigwig, has returned home to Scotland – just in time for Christmas! – except he’s in the small town to impart, not learn, life lessons and to scold us over threats to the ever-expanding LGBT-etc acronym that, in Scotland at least, are as imaginary as the eggnog in an actor’s mug. Those of us in the old, unfashionable letters of that acronym have had just about enough of being emotionally blackmailed for opposing an ideology that is taking a wrecking ball to the concept of sex on which rests the legal rights of gays, women and gender-dysphoric people themselves. Scotland doesn’t have the time to play a part in Alan Cumming’s Hallmark activism fantasy. We’re too busy trying to repair the damage his brand of activism has already wrought.
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