She was one of the sensations at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on July 26. During the event orchestrated by director Thomas Jolly, DJ Barbara Butch was enthroned above the Seine on the Debilly pedestrian bridge. Drag queens and dancers paraded around as she mixed, wearing a silver crown. The tableau, a sort of ancient bacchanal, angered many observers, who saw it as a parody of the Last Supper.
The French Bishops' Conference protested, as did a series of personalities, including US former president Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Violent cyber-harassment ensued against those involved in the tableau. Butch, targeted by sexist, fatphobic, lesbophobic and anti-Semitic insults, as well as calls for murder, filed a complaint, triggering the opening of an investigation, on July 30. Thomas Jolly and Nicky Doll, a famous French drag queen, also filed complaints.
Born in Paris in 1981 into a traditional Jewish family, she made her debut as a musician in the LGBT nightlife scene. She chose the pseudonym, Barbara Butch, in reference to former first lady Barbara Bush, and to the term "butch," which in the lesbian world defines a woman adopting codes considered masculine. After living in Montpellier (southern France), where she ran a restaurant, she moved back to Paris in the late 2000s, partying at emblematic lesbian nightclub Pulp, and mixing in queer venues: Les Souffleurs, a very underground bar in the Marais, Rosa Bonheur, in the Buttes-Chaumont park, which draws a large audience, and currently La Mutinerie, a feminist, self-managed bar near Centre Pompidou.
Butch has become one of the leading figures in the fight against fatphobia. In February 2020, she posed for the cover of French cultural weekly Télérama. It shows her topless, covering her breasts with her right arm. The magazine chose the headline, "Why do we reject fat people? The scourge of grossophobia." The image went viral; it was posted by novelist Virginie Despentes on her Facebook account and it was lauded by many activists. But not everyone liked it. Instagram's algorithm censored it, even though it does not violate the platform's rules, which forbid the presence of sexual organs and nipples (only female). There was too much flesh, no doubt... After posting the image on her own Instagram account, Butch saw it shut down for 24 hours.
On her Instagram, with over 110,000 followers, she calls for tolerance: She posts images of herself with her partner and warns against homophobic acts. On public radio France Inter, in January 2023, she defined herself as a "love activist." On July 31, in an interview with the daily Le Parisien, she emotionally said that she would not give up the fight in homage to victims of homophobia such as Lucas, a 13-year-old teenager from the Vosges (eastern France) who claimed to be a victim of harassment by students at his middle school and died by suicide in January 2023. Butch decided not to stay silent.