![well thats gay meme well thats gay meme](https://occupydemocrats.com/wp-content/uploads/MoscowMitchTrumpAngry-1110x553.jpg)
In 2020, many queers were wishing a specific breed of gay cringe would disappear: COVID Corey, Puerto Vallarta Gays, Vaccinated Tops, and other well-off, mostly white avatars of striking privilege during crisis.
#Well thats gay meme archive#
For Crimp, this representational violence demands more complex and political representations, an active media practice that understands that, “AIDS does not exist apart from the practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it.” 2 With this focus on the significance of decentralized activist practice to marginalized people, Crimp anticipates the social media archive that we focus on in this piece: tweets, memes, TikToks, and other digital ephemera that now largely drive mainstream media representations:īut we must also recognize that every image of a PWA is a representation, and formulate our activist demands not in relation to the “truth” of the image, but in relation to the conditions of its construction and to its social effects. In his iconic piece “Portraits of People with AIDS,” Crimp highlights the propensity of the news media and mainstream artists of the time to frame the AIDS victim as either monster or mirror, as otherness incarnate or as otherness erased. In highlighting the playful stretching of Baldwin’s tweet back and forward in time, we look to foreground a shift in queer representation as marked for death to one bored to death.įor Douglas Crimp, the disappearance of gay representation during the advent of the HIV/AIDS pandemic was paradoxically achieved through new forms of overdetermined personal portraiture, eliding the murderous government negligence of the state with the personal, private, and family-forward tragic victim. Instead, queers, in replies and quote tweets, affirmed the at times self-deprecating idea that “gay people,” primarily signifying cis white homosexuals, had overstayed their welcome, becoming cringeworthy, and really ought to disappear. 1 Baldwin suggested that if one really opposed such a move, especially on religious grounds, then they should perform an incantation, and “all the gay people will disappear.” In late 2020 and early 2021, Baldwin’s tweet began recirculating out of context, divorced from the original discussion around gay marriage.
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The original context of the above tweet, which preceded Twitter’s introduction of threads, was part of a longer ironic statement in support of the legalization of gay marriage in the state of New York.