“Fellas, is it gay to make money?? I mean you’re just collecting pictures of other men,” Twitter personality Childish Sadbino recently tweeted, one of many “fellas” memes to recently pop up online, skewering how obsessed a lot of guys are with not “seeming” gay.
https://twitter.com/datassque/status/900218980618702850
Sadbino’s hilariously anti-capitalist take is hard to beat, but other favorites include:
FELLAS: is it gay to drink almond milk? I mean u drinking nut ?????
— jenny (@horchatagrrl) August 16, 2017
Fellas tell me is it gay to brush your teeth? You're literally thrusting something around in your MOUTH
— ned (@comptonassned) August 20, 2017
And while the “fellas” joke format seems to have originated on Twitter, it’s taken on a new format as more visual meme-makers are beginning to experiment.
Polo Cutty, a 27-year-old Los Angeles native and local meme legend, says he likes the way the “fellas” memes “challenge a dude’s outlook on masculinity and sexuality by making it a joke.”
At least amongst these guys online, the “gay” part is no longer the brunt of their macho jokes — the compulsive desire to assert one’s straightness is. Polo Cutty puts it like this:
“I got into memes at the end of 2014. Before that, I was into photoshopping photos into jokes and making videos criticizing different aspects of graffiti culture, including masculinity. I feel like memes definitely make people feel more comfortable when discussing both toxic and fragile masculinity. I was already into those topics, but I realized that when I put them into a meme format, more guys were willing to be like ‘Yeah, that’s true’ or ‘Yeah, that’s relatable.’ The fellas meme reinforces the idea that, these days, dudes are worrying less about seeming effeminate.”
And with that, here are his two original contributions to this trend, a lovely tribute to how roastable toxic masculinity really is:
Tierney Finster
Tierney Finster is a journalist, screenwriter, actor and model from Los Angeles, California. She is a contributing writer at MEL, specializing in love, sex, mental health, drugs, queer culture and the cannabis industry. She has written for publications such as Playboy, Purple, Dazed and Confused, Jezebel and Broadly and was the key researcher behind Sex On, HBO’s revival of its iconoclastic docu-series Real Sex.
