DIVA FALLS INTO THE PIT
When is an apology not an apology? When it comes from homophobic Georgian opera singer Tamar Iveri.
Verushka Darling lets rip at that homophobic opera queen!
DRAMA AND OPERA are synonymous; a mixture of high art, high melodrama, big costumes, big hair and big divas have made it a draw card for queens for centuries. Opera is The Real Housewives in aria format. Although no stranger to hatred directed at minorities (Wagner was a rampant anti-Semite, after all), operatic drama was recently ramped up to fever pitch when it was revealed that Georgian soprano, Tamar Iveri, contracted by Opera Australia to star in Otello and Tosca, had penned a particularly poisonous post on Facebook against a gay rights rally in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi.
On May 17, 2013, dozens of participants in a government-sanctioned march commemorating the International Day Against Homophobia were violently set upon by more than 10,000 counter-protesters, led by Orthodox priests. The resulting clash left many of the gay rights activists (and a journalist or two) hospitalised with serious injuries. Tamar Iveri was incensed and took to her Facebook page to write an open letter expressing her outrage to the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. Shockingly (given her career in an art form with such heavy gay patronage and participation) her outrage was not directed at the perpetrators of the violence, but rather at the marchers themselves.
In the letter, she refers to gays as the West’s “fecal masses” and as a metastasising cancer that needs “to be removed in the beginning of the process… tomorrow they will demand same-sex marriage.” In relation to the violence, she wrote, “I was quite proud of the fact that Georgian society spat at the parade” and that “often in certain cases, it is necessary to break the jaws in order to be appreciated as a nation in the future.”
Needless to say, once revealed, her screed struck a sour note with the Australian operagoing public who took to social media to criticise the singer and to put pressure on Opera Australia to remove Iveri from her scheduled performances*. Community icon Pauline Pantsdown was instrumental in providing social media with information from Georgian sources to assist in this campaign.
When Opera Australia raised the matter with Iveri, her tune radically changed and she released a statement saying she was shocked and saddened by reports of her alleged homophobia, that some of her “very dear friends” were gay (oh no she didn’t!) She blamed her “very religious” husband “with a tough attitude towards gay people”, stating he had been on her Facebook
She wrote, “I was quite proud of the fact that Georgian society spat at the parade… it is necessary to break the jaws in order to be appreciated as a nation in the future.”
account and altered a post she’d written expressing concern about the inappropriateness of a gay rights parade taking place on the same day and location as a commemoration of Georgian soldiers who’d lost their lives fighting in Afghanistan. She went on to say that she’d apologised to Georgia’s gay community, and that they’d accepted it. In other words, the dog ate her Facebook page and what can you do?
The problems with this explanation are manifold; not least of which is the deliberate attempt to muddy the emotional waters by juxtaposing the solemnity of a military commemoration with the presumed scandal of a gay rights parade as some sort of moral provocation behind the writing of the letter. I find the presumption that gay rights are implicitly offensive to the memory of those soldiers particularly odious, as if somehow one fight for liberation is the diametric opposite of another. It fails to even conceive of the presence of GLBT soldiers serving in the Georgian military who may thus be among the dead being commemorated. Her whole argument falls apart, however, upon the discovery that the events did not take place on the same day, but on successive ones… and that they may not have even happened in the same location.
In her statement to Opera Australia, Iveri seems to imply that the apology letter to gay group Identoba was written soon after taking down her vicious post. This is not the case. According to Identoba, a translation of Iveri’s letter was sent to The Paris Opera with whom she was performing; and it was only after the subsequent cancellation of that contract (she claims she withdrew due to “indisposition”) that her apology was sent to the group.
Iveri’s so-called apology was viewed as disingenuous by Identoba when, in subsequent interviews, she confirmed her distaste for overt homosexuality, gay “propaganda”, and claimed homosexuality was not only the cause of falling birth rates, but that it could sometimes be cured. “We should not get bad, defective, immoral parades,” she opined. “I want to believe that something like this does not happen in Georgia.”
These comments would also seem to undermine her claim, through Opera Australia, that her husband had authored the original post. Indeed,
one of the interviews in relation to this matter was titled, Why I Wrote The Letter. Had it been her husband, as she now states, one imagines she would have seized these opportunities to correct the public record. Perhaps following the abrupt cancellation of her contract with Brussels’ La Monnaie Opera, an imminent career collapse prompted a revision of her PR approach?
What stands out most is that in spite of reports of unreserved apologies, none have been forthcoming. Blame has always been apportioned elsewhere. Even in his post-factum mea culpa, Iveri’s husband only expressed regret for damage done to his wife’s career, not for the defamation and violence advocated against the marchers. His words, “I believe that Georgian society still is not ready for sharing some European daily life in the culture”, read more like an excuse.
If Iveri were truly sorry, then she could have taken the advice of Irakli Vacharadze, Executive Director of Identoba, when he wrote, “You could have offered to visit and talk to the victims of the homophobic violence. That would have been an apology worth listening to. That would be a sign that you really found an inner-strength to overcome hate and fear; that you started to see the human beneath that thick layer of stereotypes Georgia’s homophobic culture has applied onto our community.”
Therein lies the key to the successful celebrity apology and resultant career rehabilitation. Full disclosure, owning up to mistakes and then reaching out to the communities you’ve offended. Buck passing, handballing and making excuses only compound the drama and its backlash. And in a fully connected online environment, consistency is paramount. You can’t make an appeasing statement in one language and then say something totally different in another country where your abhorrent views might be endorsed and the language a little more obscure. Where there are Google Translate-type apps, nothing you say remains regional.
Where, it might be asked, is Iveri’s publicist to clarify things? If we were in America, the well-trod path to celebrity absolution would consist of a confessional with Barbara Walters or Oprah (replete with interludes of calculated crying for optimum emotional manipulation) and after a suitable period of contrition and a token community consultation or two, all would be forgiven (if not forgotten). Pretty soon the incidents would fade into the background, their memory only kept alive by Joan Rivers in the form of pert jokes at choice moments. Iveri has not chosen to take this route, however, and as the contracts dry-up, she might well wish she had. More: Australian drag icon Verushka Darling can be seen on stage and screen around the world. Find her on Facebook. *Tamar Iveri’s performances were cancelled by Opera Australia.