GQ vtigat the reasons why a simple iced ffee—a drk for all seasons, when you thk about —is so gay.
Contents:
WHY IS ICED COFFEE SO GAY?
* ice tea your gay *
It’s obv, people rpond: He’s gay. But none of that matters, after all; what was clear to the rner of the Inter known as Gay Twter, and to the se Gay Star News, was that this man was jt exercisg his rights—nay, his duty—as a gay man to drk iced ffee. Iced ffee, you see, is gay culture [ed.
Note: n nfirm] a piece published last October on the LGBTQ webse New Now Next, was noted that for the past two years on social media there’s been a steady flow of jok and mem about the gay muny’s affy for iced ffee. Acrdg to NNN, iced ffee is gay bee: portabily (cute cups), easy nsumptn (’s ld) and ctomizatn (you n pump full of sugar, or sugar-ee syp that is fely not givg you diabet). The se pared to the stereotype of suburban moms and their nsumptn of pot grig; iced ffee is a gay ctch.
WHY IS ICED COFFEE SO GAY?
While ’s hard the days to tly unrstand why anythg be a meme (this is wavg at the Babadook), there are a lot of portable, easily ctomizable thgs that e cute packagg that aren’t so closely aligned wh the gay muny.
(Although lookg back, actually, that was pretty gay. )One of the earlit exampl of the gay muny’s ep relatnship wh iced ffee om a 2001 episo of Will & Grace. Hijks, while havg a csh has certaly lead to gay people dog ridiculo thgs the past, the episo don’t que properly draw the le between iced ffee and gay culture at large.
But there uld be somethg the way that Jack signaled himself out as a gay man to his csh by his repeated orrs of Frappuccos.
GAY TEA
Ined, acrdg to former BuzzFeed wrer Sam Stryker, who once wrote a post for the se tled “This Post Will Only Make Sense If You're Gay And Love Iced Coffee, ” there’s a untercultural element to iced ffee’s populary wh the gays.
“I thk the joke sort of origated as gays drkg iced ffee the wter, ” Stryker explas. “Like, gays will do ridiculo thgs and there’s somethg so unterculture about drkg an iced ffee durg the wter. ” It’s also, he says, a sign of ristg homogenizatn.
Essentially, iced ffee has bee a queer avatar, and a way for gay people to signpost themselv agast the uniformy of you’re straight, that might sound ridiculo, pecially an age which—while thgs are far om universally perfect—gay people n live their liv wh a fair amount of tonomy. But signpostg queerns is a gay tradn that dat back to the 19th Century acrdg to Dr.
PRI GAY
That might be d to signpost which on—to e our language—are nsired ‘gay. And rather than necsarily beg a sign of sexual difference, acrdg to Bengry, ’s “about challengg the opprsivens of genr norms and genr prentatn”’s not to say that any sort of gay dg no longer happens, jt that an aspect of —shieldg onelf om persecutn at a time where beg homosexual was illegal—is no longer as heavy a necsy untri like the Uned Stat.