Do or Don't

Prince, 'Queer', and the week that was

You can watch all sorts of movies on planes now. There used to be one option, and you were stuck. I think the first Rated R I saw was an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie called Eraser on a long-haul flight. I was anxious that I would be somehow reprimanded for watching it but I was a small child and couldn’t look away.

Queer is a very odd movie to watch on a plane but I just finished it. It’s based on William S Burroughs’ novel, and is set in 1950s Mexico City. Daniel Craig plays an ex pat Lee who becomes obsessed with a younger man, Eugene. It’s not unrequited love that plays out. It’s more ill-timed, star-crossed, misaligned love. The two of them root around their own identity crises while one remains completely devoted in both presence and absence of the other; and Eugene is consistent only in years of emotional detachment. When pressed, he admits feeling. When requested, he offers tenderness. But it must be prised from him, like blood from a stone. Lee, on the other hand, is starving for affection, craving just to stroke his lover’s face.

Despite the title, and the gay romance, it’s not just a movie about being gay. It’s a movie about emotional states that are inherent to queerness; that are also inherently queer. Isolation, solitude, loneliness. Inherently queer landscapes in their most extreme because straight life is designed to avoid these harsh survival conditions. It’s so gay to be this searching; a lifetime of discovering what you’re not socialized to experience. You spend forever understanding everything a little differently. “I’m not queer,” say both the lead characters at different points, “I’m disembodied.” As if severed from reality.

When Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch are not providing the score, there are some inspired song choices including the industrial romance of ‘Leave Me Alone’ by New Order, and the intimate soul-baring of ‘17 Days’ by Prince (Piano And A Microphone 1983 Version). The latter repeats a few times as a motif for Lee in the early scenes in the movie, when he’s searching for love in all the wrong places.

Called you yesterday
You didn’t answer your phone
Main drag is knowing that
You probably weren’t alone

Queer is about how love is dangerous. The heart is a gun. It can be both a killer and a savior. How do you know which? It’s impossible to stop, even when it’s costing more than you can afford. ‘17 Days’ is a loose jam, imagining a lover who disappears for 17 days because they’re “holding someone else tight”. It comes in like a jazzy tearstained plea after the door slammed. Prince can’t call because he knows it’s useless, despite how much he wants to. The piano is trying every note to reach them. Hearts are beyond logic; both his heart, and his or hers (it is Prince, after all). The suffering in his falsetto is as fresh as the first mistake; a misspoken word, a wrong glance, a premature confession.

In Queer, Lee an Eugene are not on time for the love they share. They are not ready for one another, so they experience irrational pain, engage in nonsensical behavior, and either suffocate from or numb the hurt. Addiction is Lee’s treacherous salve, and he walks off into the South American jungle looking for a miracle hallucinogenic to fix them both. Love that can’t work only hurts until someone decides to stop the bleeding. But only if they decide. If they see. If. Prince’s chorus is just a prayer for rain to come down, on repeat. As if rain can reset, refresh, remind. Rain can keep two people indoors for long enough to figure it out.

Let the rain come down, rain come down, let the rain come down, down.

Lee is the one who hangs on, Eugene is the one who leaves.

To leave is to break something so intense it can’t be replaced. In Queer, the young man has a female beard. There’s no connection. That’s the point. “Safe”. He foregoes landing safely, for literally anything else. (Prince: Oh it’s a drag baby and I know, holding another ni*** tight). The less it can compete or compare the better. Meanwhile it keeps him from a love so precious it should be protected. He’s so wired for danger he can’t see the calamity of breaking it. Why would he walk away from a wide open door to the portal he’s always wanted? “Door’s already open, there’s no going back now,” says the jungle plant medicine doctor to Eugene after Lee and Eugene’s night of hallucinatory soul revelations. “All you can do is look away. But why would you?” He looks away. He rejects security, complexity and something worth keeping. He opts for keeping up appearances and the illusion of control instead of having the keys to a home that will protect his investment. Nobody is in control. But we are all prone to being controlled. By a person. By a system. By ideas. By a fear that keeps us lying awake at 4.15am.

And what of the one who stays. For how long will they hold on? Lee waits till old age. He appears to be nearing death as the film flashes into the future towards the end. The only way for them both to survive the pain is for one of them to die. Which one has to go? The one who always stays, or the one who always leaves? Well it seems to be clear which has to die, no? In a fever dream finale, Lee murders the man who has paralyzed his heart for a lifetime, but instantly regrets it. He killed Eugene, the love of his life. Breaking Lee’s heart proved fatal. It may be figurative but it’s the most realistic part of the whole story.

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To me there are parallels between the queer experience and being Jewish. Isolation and the search for a place is currently feverish.

The end of this week was horrifying, wasn’t it? I can’t in clear conscience use this space to merely talk about songs and films and how they make me feel, while we are being terrorized by images of a real Holocaust in the tunnels beneath Gaza, where our hostages are being starved to the brink of death, and one - the skeletal 24-year-old Evytar David, kidnapped from the Nova music festival - has been forced to dig his own grave. The Nazis forced Jews to dig their own graves before executing them after starving them in concentration camps for months at a time. It is happening again today in the summer of 2025, and once more the witnesses choose the cowardice of looking away, of walking away from us while we scream at them to stay and fight.

Do they for a second believe that victims of a “genocide” would have the capacity to keep hostages for 667 days? They must be dumber than they look. Jews are collateral to weak Westerners who will lie about Israel as a colonialist enterprise to get ahead while letting our people starve in captivity. They promised they’d never do this again, but it’s too easy to capitalize on the image boost on social media isn’t it, by siding with the perpetrators Hamas.

Deranged doesn’t cover it.

Today is Tisha B’Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. A day in which religious Jews fast to commemorate the destruction of the temple. Hamas chose today intentionally to release this nauseating footage because they exist to taunt Jews and abuse their own people. They are monstrous perps. They have captured the hearts of the Western world and its media, who are too busy discussing whether Sydney Sweeney wearing jeans is Nazism. The New York Times is too busy trying to cover up the warnings they ignored that the images they shared of “starved children” last week were not in fact images of starved children. The New York Times did not put Evytar David on the front page today.

This is what the New York Times should be doing:

Hamas cruelly issued pictures of themselves stuffing their fat bellies with copious amounts of food along with this video. Hamas chose the moment after a week’s propaganda success to release this because they are sending the West a message: You are in their pocket. They got you. You were fooled. They set you up. They laugh at you. Not only the herd of amateur morons online, but the leaders. The leaders of France, of Canada, of the UK. Keir Starmer capitulated to Hamas and has agreed to their terms for Palestinian statehood.

Keir, when you decree that you want to recognize a state of Palestine if Israel does not cease fire, what does your Palestine look like? What are its borders? Who will govern it? Minor details that don’t matter to you while you use and abuse the Jewish state to try to save your historically disastrous and short career as Prime Minister. All these leaders are doing is aiding and abetting Hamas; shifting blame to focus on the Jews and our state, instead of dealing with their own failures and taking responsibility for the damage that has generated unstable Western societies, many of which are dealing with growing, potentially unruly civil unrest. Plus ca fucking change, Macron.

Hamas knows that beyond Trump, the West is too weak to do anything other than bow down to its regime. That should terrify everyone.

It’s the Nazi playbook. It is DARVO. The hostages are being forced to die by starvation in Gaza, while the mainstream press posts lies by Hamas that it’s Israel doing the forced starvation, issuing a narrative that only serves terror. All Hamas intended since October 7 was to maximize human suffering for Gazans and Israelis. They kidnapped the hostages to prolong the war, to weaponize their civilians. They have stolen the aid since the aid began entering Gaza. They built Gaza’s infrastructure to assist their story that Israel targets hospitals, mosques and schools, which are nothing beyond fronts for terrorist tunnels and weapons storage. The elites and the hipsters have the nerve to demonize Zionism while supporting a terror group who have colonized their minds far beyond Gaza. History will judge them. It will.

But back to Queer.

There has been no shortage in the last 22 months of my discussing the issue of collective abandonment by the societies surrounding us. It’s easier for people to avert their gaze than it is for them to pick up the phone. They leave. We stay. They are drunk on the delusion that Hamas and their fanboys will save them. We are their true safe hands. We are their eventual escape hatch. They have made a poor investment for their future security. Instead, they are now owned by Hamas, and the Jihad mindset, the operatives of which are all over the world, including Europe.

What to do? Call for the release of the 50 hostages and for Hamas to lay down its weapons. If you ever asked yourself what you would during the 1930s, this is your moment. Stop making excuses for your cowardice. Use your voice. In private. In public. I don’t care. Decide if you want to secure your future or abandon yourself to a group suicide pact. If you go, you might not come back.