People who follow the politics of the Song Contest have spent years explaining that the Contest brings up the same contentions over international relations that the wider public are more used to with world sport, especially since the late 1990s when its growth as a mega-event really began: from who gets to be recognised as a state and participate, to what athletes can say or do when they’re representing their countries.
Eurovision’s LGBTQ+ meanings became increasingly public over this same quarter-century, intertwining with international LGBTQ+ human rights politics and the backlash against them, and anticipating contentions that the Olympics and world football have both faced.
Flags As Identities
Flags matter so much at Eurovision because the Contest as an event invites the audience to see performers as symbolically embodying their nations. Their national flags, not their broadcasters’ logos, are routinely on screen; presenters announcing voting results read out the nations’ names, not the broadcasters’ or even artists’ own. Artists who express LGBTQ+ identities and symbols are affirming that these are integrally part of the nation they represent, even when that belonging is not fully accepted at home. Eurovision’s international broadcast simultaneously affirms them as part of the event’s community of values.
Recent Contests have seen several artists carry pride flags alongside their national ones in the Grand Final’s opening parade, or bring them to the green room. Sometimes they have displayed them to directly reflect identities of their own, like Sheldon Riley or last year’s winner Nemo; sometimes they have brought them in allyship, like Iceland’s Systur proudly showing the trans flag; sometimes the combined flags require no further explanation, as they did for Marco Mengoni, who raised the progress pride flag and Italian flag simultaneously on the Liverpool catwalk – reportedly without his broadcaster RAI’s knowledge – while Italy’s new far-right government was joining the international backlash.
These artists were not just making personal expressions of identity and solidarity, or symbolising a place where they could celebrate their national belonging without having to silence these sides of themselves – whether or not that would always be true in their society at large. They were also demonstrating that Eurovision as an event was comfortable with the idea that LGBTQ+ expression, including trans expression, is an ordinary part of life and suitable to broadcast into family homes.
The routine LGBTQ+ and trans inclusion that Eurovision has made space for in its flag parade is no small thing in a world where anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-trans campaigners’ number one argument almost always revolves around protecting children – be that the hate poured out transnationally against Conchita Wurst, the Russian and Hungarian model of anti-LGBTQ+ laws, the alarmist arguments against trans young people’s health care that have captured successive UK governments, or far-right campaigns against drag queen story hour.
Flags As Place
The same thing goes for other flags linked to heritage. In a Europe which has always been multicultural but where a growing number of Europeans have complex family stories of migration and diaspora, belonging is a complicated thing. Australian artists with and without Indigenous heritage have often displayed Indigenous flags, acknowledging an Indigenous sovereignty which is very poorly understood in Europe and which conservative white Australians still resist. Here, too, Eurovision has made space to celebrate nationhood in what seems like a more progressive way than is always possible away from the disco balls.
Or that was the case until Basel.
What one hand gives, the other takes away
The EBU’s new policy for artists displaying flags is the flipside of a much more inclusive policy for arena audiences. Unlike last year, spectators can now bring any flags that are legal under host country law – immediately removing the needless uncertainties over the wider family of pride flags that have bubbled up every so often since 2016, and allowing fans with connections to non-participating nations, including Palestine, equal ability to celebrate that heritage in the Eurovision crowd.
I and others have wanted to see an approach like this towards audience flags for years, in the interests of enabling all fans to celebrate the complex multiple identities they bring with them and having Eurovision deliver on its inclusive promise. But the contest’s new policy on artists’ flags takes away with one hand the freedoms that audiences have just been given in the other.
In official event spaces (the stage, green room, turquoise carpet, and EuroVillage), artists can now only display their country’s official flag – and flags for the parade must now be handed out by the host broadcaster (so no surreptitiously rolling something else up in it – or reusing the same flag from year to year, as Serbian artists have done until now).
This brings Eurovision’s policy for artists closer to flag management at the Olympics, just as the expectations for artists’ political expression now formalised in Eurovision’s new code of conduct begin to bring the event closer to the Olympic Charter’s ‘Rule 50’ limits on athlete activism. (Olympians like US shot-putter Raven Saunders in Tokyo and exile Afghan breakdancer Manizha Talash in Paris have still tried to find ways around Rule 50 – with more serious consequences for Talash, whose ‘Free Afghan Women’ cape got her disqualified.)
It also closes down a space that has produced images of performers simultaneously celebrating national belonging and LGBTQ+, often trans, identity and has then broadcast these images across Europe and beyond, precisely when many fans feel those images and the stamp of a pan-European broadcasters’ association standing behind them are needed more than ever.
On the same day as Eurovision 2025’s first semi-final, for instance, international trans NGO TGEU (Trans Europe and Central Asia) marked the upsetting findings of ILGA-Europe’s latest ‘rainbow index’ and its own trans rights map with a statement that, for the first time, attacks on trans human rights across the region were now outweighing progress.
Trans people and those close to them in the UK, for instance, are reeling from the current and feared impact of anti-trans guidance from the government’s nominally independent equalities commission after the Supreme Court ruled in favour of an anti-trans campaign group last month (Croatia’s Marko Bošnjak and Malta’s Miriana Conte, both part of the wider queer community, both alluded to this context in their turquoise carpet interviews with drag queen Odette Hella’Grand – and even the UK act Remember Monday’s blue, pink and white outfits struck some viewers as a significant choice.)
TGEU’s statement framed the current international assault on trans rights as ‘a strategic assault on fundamental freedoms, equality, democracy and on Europe itself’ – the kind of struggle where, according to the liberal and inclusive values Eurovision has proclaimed, one would expect the contest of Nemo and Conchita and the trans people of Europe and Central Asia to be standing on the same side.
Yet Nemo’s own experiences of that breakthrough flag parade moment for non-binary identities at Eurovision suggest there had already been more ambivalence backstage, in a contest where producers were heavily scrutinising any gestures of solidarity with Palestine.
Known for, like, the queerest thing in the world
The disenchantment with contest management in Malmö that they voiced as winner and have expanded on this year stemmed from an interwoven set of issues involving the EBU’s handling of KAN’s participation months into the Israeli military’s war on Gaza, the reported behaviour of some KAN delegation members backstage, and their having had to ‘smuggle in’ the non-binary flag which featured so prominently in their flag parade appearance and the green room.
Shortly before this year’s contest, Nemo openly supported calls for KAN not to participate in Eurovision because the Israeli state’s ‘actions are fundamentally at odds with the values that Eurovision claims to uphold – peace, unity, and respect for human rights’, and has called the new flag policy for artists ‘stupid as fuck’:
You can’t be known for like the queerest thing in the world, basically, a contest that has been associated with queerness and gay culture for so long, and then be like, ‘oh, we don’t allow Pride flags for the artists’.
Bošnjak, who came out to the Croatian public days after winning the national selection, might or might not have wished for a moment of affirmation like Nemo’s in the flag parade, but now cannot choose whether to stage one. Sissal, who is Faroese, has been openly dismayed the policy forces the island nation’s identity within Denmark to be invisible, and posed with the Danish, Faroese, pride and rainbow flags in her Instagram message to fans before her semi-final. (Sissal’s broadcaster, DR, happens to be the one which broke the news of the new policy on 25 April.)
Flags Need To Be Seen
Because of the inclusive and progressive image that Eurovision has let fans and artists create and has then traded on in its own brand narrative, Eurovision feels like it should make space for these possibilities.
After meeting the LGBTQ+ NGO COC, the Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS officially appealed to the EBU to allow pride flags back in the flag parade, but was told it was too short notice to change the policy for Basel. (Some delegations had already arrived by then and would not have brought extra flags; but this is why there are courier firms.)
Martin Green, the mega-events producer and chief executive of Eurovision 2023 whose appointment as Eurovision Song Contest director was among the EBU’s post-Malmö reforms, has given several interviews since late April explaining that the new flag policy does not change the contest’s stance on LGBTQ+ inclusion. The Dutch Eurovision podcast Ding-A-Dong, for instance, headlined its interview ‘Eurovision doesn’t need a flag to show it’s inclusive’ – which Green, for his part, passionately believes.
Green’s experience across sporting and cultural mega-events, including the London 2012 Olympics opening/closing ceremonies, creative development for the 2022 Birmingham Commonwealth Games, and Hull’s year as UK City of Culture in 2017, makes him the first senior figure in the Eurovision chain of command to come from the event management sector rather than professional broadcasting – after a year where a contest led solely by broadcasters had not been up to managing the geopolitical challenges of 2024 or their impacts on artists’ wellbeing.
One consequence of Green’s perspective from outside the TV industry has been the much greater limitation of media access to rehearsals and artists in 2025 compared to 2024. This has left a sour taste for some media covering the event, but according to Green’s podcast interviews is part of bringing Eurovision in line with other world mega-events. As he told Ding-A-Dong, participants, volunteers and even dress rehearsal spectators for the famous London 2012 opening ceremony were sworn to complete secrecy until the broadcast began, while performers could rehearse ‘in safety and comfort’ so that they could ‘face the world at their best’, creating better artist welfare and a higher quality show.
(There have been all too many cases where hostile online reactions to rehearsal footage have left Eurovision performers less able to do that, with often younger and/or minoritised female performers bearing a disproportionate brunt; even this year, without artist press conferences, Ukraine’s Ziferblat had their rehearsal period marred by an insensitive question about Russia’s war on their country from a podcaster and hostile comments about their reduced-budget staging online.)
It’s unsurprising to see other mega-event governing bodies’ solutions to political and logistical challenges being translated further across to Eurovision under this watch. From a leadership perspective, the new flag policy also follows this rationale.
Limiting artists to national flags in official spaces follows long-established Olympic practice which allows only the flags of participating countries and the Olympic movement, outsourcing flag decisions to the global diplomatic system and removing potential causes of dispute between Olympic committees whose countries have tense political relations. Olympic committees, and Eurovision broadcasters, need a baseline of mutual trust between each other and the event organiser for the event to happen at all: on a cultural relations level, minimalist flag policies help smooth that baseline out.
Flags And Policy
Certainly, the EBU has defended the new artist flag policy as providing ‘clarity’ and ‘balance’. Its statement after Sissal’s broadcaster DR revealed the new policy said that it and Basel’s host broadcaster SRG SSR had developed the policy to both ‘ensure that our audiences and artists can express their enthusiasm and identities’ and ‘provide more clarity for the delegations when it comes to official spaces’, directly referring to bringing the policy ‘in line with other international competitive events’.
For those most affected by the uprooting of trans rights in the UK, ‘clarity’ is an unfortunate echo of the language in which politicians including the Labour prime minister had welcomed the anti-trans Supreme Court ruling a few days earlier – and, since local elections on 1 May, the artist flag policy itself has since become an unfortunate echo of the far-right Reform party’s orders for councils newly under its control to remove pride flags and flags expressing solidarity with Ukraine.
Artists are still free to display any flags permitted under host country law in other spaces, as a good number have done in content shared with their social media followers: but the hundreds of millions more viewers of the Eurovision broadcast still won’t see that. Pride flags, diasporic flags, subnational flags, and flags of solidarity are still banned from the very space where artists with multiple identities will embody their nations most visibly.
Won’t somebody think of the children?
Fans who have seen queer and trans freedoms under growing attack in their own countries and elsewhere, even more so since the Trump administration’s barrage of neoreactionary executive orders have given confidence and language to anti-LGBTQ+ parties beyond the USA, have reason to be suspicious of any organisation that rolls back support and visibility for communities it used to promote. Some may have suspected the policy was groundwork for welcoming back broadcasters that had reportedly left the contest because of the amount of LGBTQ+ content they now had to show, though Turkey’s and Hungary’s EBU members are still not broadcasting Eurovision 2025.
Green and the EBU do not see the flag policy as rolling anything back for Eurovision’s relationship with LGBTQ+ artists and fans. Green has directly told The New York Times ‘that Eurovision did not consider featuring gay or trans performers as a political act’ and that the event was somewhere for all performers to celebrate their identities on stage. He has spoken about his own gay identity and love of Eurovision as extra reassurance.
To Ding-A-Dong, he was adamant that Eurovision’s ‘love and the celebration of the LGBTQI community will continue, and it’s absolutely evident if you just walk out into the street now’. Indeed, with two of the three live shows down, SRG SSR has shown substantially more of the atmosphere in the street during event week than most host broadcasters, including the BBC in Liverpool.
Green’s own creative career has often involved events which have made active, sometimes surprising demonstrations of LGBTQ+ inclusion. A kiss between two women on the soap opera Brookside, famous in UK television history but little-known abroad, featured in a montage of famous screen kisses during the London 2012 opening ceremony; Tom Daley and six LGBTQ+ activists from Commonwealth countries in the Global South entered the Birmingham Commonwealth Games arena carrying a progress pride flag; Hull’s City of Culture programme featured a strand commemorating 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of sex between men in England and Wales. The London and Birmingham ceremonies were both broadcast around the world, whatever countries’ legal regimes and broadcasters’ usual stances on LGBTQ+ content might be.
How each event told stories about international LGBTQ+ human rights and the UK’s place in the world would deserve its own critical discussion. Yet as Patrick Vernon has written in their own critical look at the Birmingham opening ceremony, the fact that organisers directly featured LGBTQ+ themes still created a starting point for that critical discussion about each event that would not have existed before.
Flags And National Broadcasters
Eurovision strategic policy, nevertheless, is not decided by a single event director but by member broadcasters, the contest Reference Group, and on highest-level matters the EBU structures which sit above it. The event cycle leading up to Basel has been scattered with references to ensuring the contest keeps ‘appealing to a broad prime-time audience of all ages’, in the words of the EBU’s post-Malmö review. How far reservations about sexualised or homoerotic elements in performances from Malmö led to the recommendations is impossible to know from outside – though the thought that broadcasters under anti-LGBTQ+ governments might be under pressure to express concerns about those elements is never far away—In Italy, there are already signs that the Meloni government’s pressure on RAI might be extending to Sanremo, where selected songs were noticeably less political than in 2024.
Did any broadcaster complain about Bambie Thug’s witchcraft, Olly Alexander’s dirty dancing, or Windows95man’s thighs – or simply any of Malmö’s queer and trans artists being themselves? And what, if anything, happened as a result? Those who have heard family-friendliness used as a reason to suppress queer expression before will always be braced to hear it again, even if that is not the story this particular time.
A Eurovision without flags?
Fitting Eurovision flag parades and green rooms into the shape of an Olympic flags policy feels like a betrayal for so many queer fans because – as Nemo themselves has said – the contest has allowed itself to be defined so much as a space for celebrating queer and trans identities alongside nationhood, under a European umbrella. Fans and artists created these meanings, but the event has incorporated them into its own brand narrative of values, admittedly through symbols and allusions rather than directly in words.
These identities are political in the sense that the communities behind them have had and still have to struggle for social recognition and equal rights – but the promise of liberal reforms and progress was supposed to be that, once they were settled, there was no going back. As imaginary as that promise was, it still hurts when its breakdown happens to you.
A new book by sociologist Jörg Krieger calls for the Olympics themselves to reinvent themselves without national flags – as the IOC came dramatically close to doing in 1968. Krieger suggests that an ‘Olympics without flags’ would put more focus on individual athletes, better express the Olympic Charter’s point that the Games are competitions between athletes and not countries, and give more room for artists to express multiple identities through creating more personal celebrations. All these objectives resonate with themes the EBU has emphasised more since the post-Malmö review – not least the argument that Eurovision is a contest between broadcasters not countries or governments, which the EBU sees as pertinent to why KAN still takes part.
In other international settings like rock festivals, bands from numerous countries might participate but their countries of origin are rarely in the foreground. While national identity is impossible to conceal through music without twisting the event into Masked Singer-style contortions, Eurovision could certainly downplay nations’ names, flags and symbols much more than its customs currently do.
Yet that too would be unjust to the event’s history as a rare opportunity for nations which are often unfairly pushed on to the periphery of Western European consciousness to represent themselves to European audiences in their own broadcasters’ and creative teams’ terms, as Ukraine has done most successfully of all since debuting in 2003.
It would also be out of keeping with the EBU’s traditional approach to international cooperation, which affirms separate public broadcasters and, by extension, their individual sovereign states, rather than dissolving national borders into a supranational Europe like the most integrationist visions for the EU.
The Flags Of All Nations (EBU/eurovision.tv)
Beyond 2025’s Flag Parade
Writing between the semi-finals and grand final, viewers have not yet seen this year’s flag parade, but images from the green rooms certainly present a uniformity of flags – at the cost of personality, some will say. Earlier this season, reflecting on the future of ‘United By Music’ as a slogan, Erik Nelson wrote on this site that ‘there is a massive difference between countries being collected in the same space and being truly together’. To be truly together, we as viewers need to see what is special to artists and their teams, to the extent they wish to share that with us. For some artists, that will include the fact that their queerness or transness and their national identity are indivisible.
Among the numerous creative and logistical matters that broadcasters must agree with the EBU in the weeks between choosing each entry and the contest taking place, one of them could surely be to agree artists’ flag preferences for the green room and parade. This would avoid the risk of unexpected protest that organisers responsible to 30-40 broadcasters are compelled to manage, and still allow the symbolic moments that have been so special to Eurovision’s LGBTQ+ fan base to take place.
The most common flags that artists might wish to display alongside national ones are already widely understood. In the more unusual cases, two months is more than enough to verify that the flag of someone’s grandmother’s municipality, or whatever it might be, isn’t a front for a little-known extremist cell.
And even the effort needed to verify less familiar flags is trivial next to the amount of time already spent on negotiating prop sizes, costing pyro curtains, or reviewing lyrics that accidentally or otherwise sound like offensive English words.
The EBU has already indicated it will review this and other new policies next year in response to broadcasters’ feedback. AVROTROS, DR and perhaps other broadcasters will be hoping it does so.
In the meantime, we will just have to see what other ways artists find to creatively express their identities and solidarities when the flag parade comes around.