I mean, coupled with the recent racism, doing performative white saviour behaviour that will hurt local queer communities, hurt the local music scene that was struggling to recover from Covid, has hurt another musician in particular who was going to do a come back performance dedicated to her mother's memory (link goes to Twitter), but the entire music fest was called off... I think it's time for The 1975 to just get in the bin.
(And yeah, I mean the entire band and not just Matty Healy, because it might be Healy's shitty attitudes and loud mouth getting the limelight in particular, but do the rest of them actually disagree with him, or what? Or what, I would guess, because they don't seem to be doing anything about the shit he does while fronting the band.)
If they were sincere about LGBTQ+ rights in Malaysia they could have talked to local LGBTQ+ orgs in advance and asked how to best lend support. Or they could have quietly donated the proceeds from the show to one of those organisations as well, if they were so irate about actually doing the performance in the first place. There would have been better ways to go about it that weren't about loudly centering themselves.
Anyway, here's a good thread on Twitter listing LGBTQ+ orgs in Malaysia in case anyone is interested, or wants to donate.
There's a good look in the article at the history of the region, including the lasting impact of colonial Christianity on existing cultures that had historically included gender variant and non-conforming people. The article also discusses some of the local groups that support LGBTQ+ folks. (I also read the Thatchell article that was mentioned. It's a white person deigning to whitesplain to POC what is or isn't white saviourism. Look, just remember intersectionality is a whole thing, and listen to POC for a change? 🙄 Anyway.) There are also suggestions for what could have been done differently instead.
Basically, this is a good read in several ways.
