Malaysia Cancels Music Festival Following Matt Healy’s Gay Kissing Stunt
The recent antics of The 1975 frontman Matt Healy at a festival in Kuala Lumpur — where he kissed a male bandmate on stage and slammed Malaysia’s homophobic laws — has angered conservatives and, with just weeks before state elections, left some LGBTQ Malaysians concerned about a governmet backlash against them.Headlining the Good Vibes Festival, the British pop-rock singer delivered a profanity-laden speech, with a wine bottle (or what at least appeared to be one) in hand.“Unfortunately, you don’t get a set of loads of uplifting songs because I’m fucking furious,” he said. “And that’s not fair on you, because you’re not representative of your government — because you’re young people, and I’m sure a lot of you are gay and progressive and cool.”While the speech was met with some cheers, some LGBTQ community members say it may worsen the oppression they face and undo the progress they’ve made.“He gets to fly out of the country and not face the consequences,” drag performer Carmen Rose told the Guardian, “while our people have to face the brunt of what just happened.”“Any foreign artist who comes here and who wants to advocate for us, they need to understand how to go about it,” she added. “What works in the West may not work here.
They may actually do more harm than good.”After making the controversial speech, Healy kissed bass player Ross MacDonald as they played the song “I Like America & America Likes Me” — in stark visual and sonic contrast with the criminalization of same-sex relations and gender-nonconformity under both Malaysia’s modern-day criminal code and its colonial-era penal code, the latter of which punishes oral and anal sex with up to 20 years in prison.The move also harkened back to an incident in which.
