In May 1974, the queer Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini traveled to Beirut, Lebanon to screen three of his films. At the time, the country was in the midst of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist ferment, and like many young activists today, Pasolini saw a direct correlation between gay liberation and the liberation of occupied territories from colonial oppression—especially in the Middle East.
Pasolini and his work faced hostility in some Arab countries, several of which banned his sexually explicit rendition of Arabian Nights, but the director believed that opposition to sexual freedom was not indigenous to the region. Before the dawn of Western colonialism and capitalism, he claimed, there was a “popular and traditional tolerance” of homosexual acts among the working class. Their newfound opposition to such acts was based less on their traditional religious beliefs than on their attempt to “to adopt the intolerance of the formally highly-developed masses of the bourgeois countries.”
A similar attempt to link up the queer and anti-colonial liberation struggles has been on view once again in the pro-Palestinian protest movement, in which keffiyeh-clad young people holding rainbow flags and “Queers for Palestine” are a common sight. This phenomenon has caused perplexity among the protestors’ critics. Don’t they know that Hamas harshly punishes homosexuality? Some activists counter, in similar terms to Pasolini, that heteronormativity is a colonial and capitalist imposition. For instance, the prominent left-wing British writer Owen Jones posted on X shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks: “It wasn’t actually Hamas who introduced the law banning homosexuality in Gaza. Guess who it was? The British Empire.”
Yet it is implausible for progressives to argue that the forces they decry as capitalist and colonialist are seeking to suppress homosexuality today, when all the major Western governments, not to mention Fortune 500 companies, proclaim their commitment to gay rights. Even the government of Israel, which “Queers for Palestine” protesters view as the embodiment of imperial power, regularly presents itself as pro-LGBT. Just a few weeks after Jones’s post, the Israeli government’s official X account boasted that the “first ever pride flag raised in Gaza” had been planted by an IDF soldier.
Confronted with these tendencies, activists tend to use terms like “pinkwashing” and “rainbow capitalism.” Queerness, they argue, has fallen victim to what Olufemi Taiwo calls “elite capture,” in which corporations and state institutions have domesticated it and subdued its radical potential. In his day, Pasolini also condemned the elites who were jumping on the gay-rights bandwagon. In his eyes, their top-down approach imposed a false attitude of tolerance toward homosexuality, inevitably forcing it to conform to a bourgeois heteronormative mold.
But the notion that “rainbow capitalism” is a deviation from authentic queer liberation is historically shortsighted. Homosexuality and other forms of non-procreative sex threatened the bourgeois ideal of the nuclear family during earlier stages of capitalist development, in which the domestic sphere played a key role in the inculcation of values and perpetuation of conformity to social strictures. But as capitalism has entered into a more advanced stage in which consumption takes precedence over production, bourgeois respectability has given way to expressive individualism as an ideal. In this phase, instinctive gratification is prioritized over self-sacrifice for posterity, which makes queer sexuality not just permissible but an embodiment of the ideal of self-fulfillment.
This is why many in non-Western nations today view sexual “liberation” not as opposed to Western capitalism and imperialism but as a vehicle of it. Since the dawn of the globalization of the United States’ cultural and economic influence, many in the Arab world have condemned Western decadence as a form of jahiliyyah (“godless barbarism”). Suspicion of Western sexual mores can also be found in Africa and cultures tied to its diaspora. The Guinean cleric Robert Cardinal Sarah has decried Western NGOs and corporations for spreading “free love” (gender ideology, abortion access) and free market ideals alike as forms of “neocolonialism.” And last summer, the Ghanian presidential candidate Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia campaigned on an anti-LGBT rights ticket, arguing that if Western countries can ban African practices like polygamy, African countries can ban “Western” practices like homosexuality.
Similarly, numerous reggae-dancehall artists, drawing on Rastafarian tropes, have sung about white colonizers bringing not only economic exploitation, but also practices like sodomy, which they claim are alien to African and Caribbean cultures. In his 1990 hit “Dem Bow,” Shabba Ranks compares Jamaican men who “bow down” to play the passive role in sexual encounters to black people bowing down to white colonizers. Even far-left anti-capitalist voices in some corners of the West have expressed reservations about the expansion of gay rights. While it has supported legislation to punish homophobic hate crimes, the Greek Communist Party voted against a referendum on gay marriage in 2024, as it would “circumvent the motherhood-fatherhood relation” and risk turning children into a commodity.
Sociologically speaking, the institution of the family makes individuals less vulnerable to being manipulated by distant entities of power. The philosopher Michel Foucault, who like Pasolini saw an affinity between the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist revolts of his era and the struggle for gay liberation, eventually came to recognize this possibility. As David Dudrick wrote in these pages, Foucault feared that the effort to liberate sexuality by talking about and engaging in sex more freely would result not in more freedom, but more pervasive control.
Pasolini also eventually began to realize that in their attempt to “jettison traditional values,” free-love radicals inadvertently opened the floodgates to the “imposition of the mania for consumption, fashion, information” by major global corporations, which he called “the new fascist power.” As the political philosopher Augusto Del Noce warned, in their attack on “tradition,” “instead of overthrowing bourgeois society,” sexual revolutionaries “swept away the last traditional constraints that held back its expansion and finally made everything, even the human body, ‘an object of trade.’”
The revolution, in other words, didn’t present a reversal, but instead an intensification of the individualistic bourgeois ideals they had fought against. Queerness may have challenged the dominant social order at an earlier moment, but is now vulnerable to being co-opted to churn out atomized individuals devoid of agency.
The shift in tone of Pasolini’s films—from his celebration of sexual libertinism in the “Trilogy of Life” films to the depiction of a diabolical political regime that banishes heterosexuality in Salo—reflects this change of heart. As we approach the 50th anniversary of Pasolini’s death, anti-colonial queer activists would do well to follow his example and grapple more seriously with the limitations of their position.