Sometimes the contest can highlight Europe’s broad social divisions, regardless of who wins. This year’s Austrian entry, Conchita Wurst, a drag artist with flowing black locks and a luxuriant matching beard, sparked demands in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia for her to be banned or, at the very least, for local state broadcasters not to transmit her song. “The popular international competition that our children will be watching has become a hotbed of sodomy at the initiation of the European liberals,” read the Russian petition. Meanwhile gays across the continent’s more liberal East planned parties to celebrate the kitsch aesthetic of what PinkNews, a Europe-wide news website, has taken to calling the “gay World Cup”
