Facebook so gay meme
For gay men, ironic homophobia can be a healthy way of indulging that impulse (healthier, certainly, than getting into 4Chan or Ricky Gervais). There's a guilty pleasure to be found in laughing at the shocking, lacerating and inappropriate. The resulting register can be deeply funny in itself. While ironic homophobia ties into an age-old gay sensibility, the way it has been combined with the nihilistic absurdity of meme culture has created something new. “While ironic homophobia ties into an age-old gay sensibility, the way it has been combined with the nihilistic absurdity of meme culture has created something new.” That's not what's going on here: it's less 'I'm proud to be a faggot – and I'm done apologising,' and more 'those faggots over there are really annoying.' Which, you know… sometimes they are. (I've referred to myself as a 'stupid fag’ before, but that isn't quite the same thing.) In this sense, it's different from 'slur reclamation' as it's typically understood, the idea that reappropriating a bad thing someone says about you and using it in a positive way is empowering.
While self-deprecation is clearly a common queer affectation, this style of ironic homophobia isn't primarily deployed against oneself. People often characterise this kind of intra-gay conflict as 'internalised homophobia', but there's often nothing internal about it. It can be a way of taking the piss out of your friends, sure, but it can also be a means of signalling disapproval towards other individuals, factions or institutions within the gay community. Other times, it involves taking innocuous footage out of context, like this clip of Tyra Banks saying, "Get the fag off the TV, I am not watching that!" (she's quoting a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, disapprovingly) or Ariana Grande shouting "Faggots, let me hear you make some noise!" (she's really saying "Vegas".)īut, before we consider why some gay men enjoy ironic homophobia, let's consider how it's actually used. One video of her laughing, "faggots! I hate you faggots, you're so annoying!" has become a gay Twitter mainstay. Sometimes, it bleeds into a larger pattern of stanning problematic women, such as the enduring popularity of Azealia Banks, despite her homophobic outbursts. The gif is now regularly posted as a way of expressing camp insouciance. It might manifest itself in the ironic veneration of homophobic public figures, such as in the popularity of this gif of former Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe, who once suggested we might produce a scientific answer (solution) to being gay, attempting to straighten her hair. Although it belonged to a particular pocket of the internet, it remains the example par excellence of a larger trend: homophobic jokes aren't regressive instead, they're actually really really funny. But, for many people, it was funny precisely because it was despicable.
A 2018 article in Them argued on the contrary, with the headline 'Painting Millie Bobby Brown as a Homophobe Isn't Funny - It's Despicable'.
That's not to say everyone agrees it's in good humour. When it comes to the creation of these homophobic memes, no one is putting in the work like gay men themselves.