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They just wanted to silence her.”įor him, this behaviour typifies gay stan culture: female artists must obey the rules or suffer the consequences. Within hours, stan Twitter had unearthed and circulated incriminating tweets by Kiyoko from nine years ago (when she was 18) in an attempt to “cancel” her – excluding a person entirely from online discourse, except as the target of hate memes – for daring to critique a song they liked.įor Adam Byrne, a 23-year-old gay stan, this was a prime example of gay misogyny: “They didn’t care what she had to say. Earlier this year, pop singer Hayley Kiyoko criticised Rita Ora, Cardi B, Bebe Rexha, and Charli XCX for their single Girls, a song about bisexuality that she, as a lesbian, thought was appropriative.
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What is so perplexing is why this pseudo-religious devotion has always been laced with spite. It is hard to overestimate how meaningful the fan-diva relationship is for gay men. RuPaul’s Drag Race’s 2017 finalists, from left: Sasha Velour, Shea Coulee, Trinity Taylor and Peppermint. “These same people became my friends, my support network.” “As I learned more about pop culture and references, that’s when I found people with the same interest,” says Baker. As I grew up, the process of connecting my love for them with a wider culture of fandom enhanced my realisation that I was not alone as a queer person. To my teenage self, women like Lady Gaga were the only light in a world where my queerness left me feeling like an outsider.
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That statement reeks of camp melodrama, but it’s true. The language used within this culture is taken from the same place that Drag Race gets its lexicon, namely the underground subculture where LGBT people compete in various drag and performance categories, documented in the film Paris is Burning, and an inspiration for Madonna and Beyoncé.įor many gay men, Baker and myself included, gay pop stan culture is the distillation of everything meaningful in life. He explains that the culture reaches further than many beyond the community might realise, citing the example of the recent avalanche of memes of reality star Gemma Collins. Sami Baker is 21 and a self-professed gay stan – his favourites are Grande, Beyoncé and Charli XCX. This online community relies on a dense matrix of references and neologisms informed by everything from drag culture to reality TV. Anyone who fails to meet those standards? “Fat”, “flop”, “failure”. “She outsold” describes both someone’s commercial successes and a general sense of their superiority. Heckling in smoky nightclubs has been replaced by “hate memes”, when stans circulate unflattering edited pictures or examples of a star’s least-becoming behaviour, while the cheering has morphed into a lexicon of superlatives and put-downs that may seem impenetrable to the uninitiated: “we stan” favoured female pop stars, they’re “iconic”, a “kween”, an “unproblematic fave”. The love-hate dynamic of gay stan culture that Bronski describes is now largely mediated through social media. But the dynamic remains in western culture.”
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The women have changed – it’s no longer Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland. Queens would come to a Judy Garland concert and then scream at her when she was too drunk to finish it. These actions have a distinct edge of mockery, the air of a joke that their subject is not in on.ĭr Michael Bronski, a Harvard University professor and the author of books on queer history and gay culture says “There is a long history of gay male fan culture latching onto famous women and then turning on them. Perhaps in that model, the Spears T-shirt could be read as a show of solidarity, a knowing acknowledgment of her pain and our understanding? But there was nothing knowing in the way another gay fan photoshopped an umbrella into his meet and greet photo with the unwitting star and later circulated it online. One theory of the gay fan-diva link is that of shared oppression – gay men and women are both ground under the wheel of hetero-patriarchy. Scratch lightly at the surface and what flakes off is, yes, reciprocity and genuine affection, but also callous misogyny. Photograph: Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Imagesīut “unconditional” is often precisely what this love is not. Propped up by her gay fan base? Britney Spears.