This week, TV screens in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development building in Washington, D.C., were hacked and overtaken by an AI-generated video of President Donald Trump kissing Elon Musk’s feet.
The prank, which came alongside text reading “Long live the real king,” was an obvious attempt to troll the president and his supporters while nodding to the increasingly powerful role the world’s richest man plays in the U.S. government.
And it accomplished that, going viral across social media platforms and generating plenty of media chatter. Reactions on my social media feeds ranged from delighted shock at the hackers’ ability to do such a thing, to others straight up saying “ROFL 😂” at the concept of a man kissing another man’s feet.
It was also a bit of a lazy gay joke. Allow me to make a clear ask to my fellow internet dwellers and all of the anti-Trump hackers and trolls out there: c’mon, we can do better. Gay people—and yes, that includes gay people who like to engage in a little bit of foot play—deserve better!
In the current political moment, where figures like Trump and Musk are ripping away the rights of queer and trans people daily, let’s hold ourselves to a higher standard of comedy when it comes to our internet trolling and not engage in the sort of passive homophobia and transphobia that fuels movements like Trump’s.
Frankly, I thought we’d already worked through this discourse. This is far from the first time that right-wing figures like Trump and Musk have been depicted as gay by the progressive left in an attempt to troll, and it’s never been particularly funny. That these depictions often come aided by AI image generation tools—which burn through litres of water for each prompt—further darkens the context around what should just be smart online resistance posting.
The history of Trump slash memes
This type of online posting suggesting Trump is gay for another (usually also awful) man dates back to Trump’s first term in office. In 2017, a BBC show did a whole fake wedding sketch between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. And in 2018, New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz came under fire for resharing images depicting Trump and Fox News’ Sean Hannity engaging in gay sex. That same year, the New York Times published a satirical animation depicting a fantasy romance between Trump and a shirtless Vladamir Putin that was appropriately and rightfully slammed by many people online, including queer comedian Guy Branum.
Ahead of and during his first term in office, Trump and Putin frequently got the gay treatment that we’re now seeing the president get with Musk. But with AI image generation much less prominent back in 2018, users often resorted to good ol’ fashioned human-generated art to accomplish their meme dreams.
One mural featuring Trump and Putin locked in a kiss by Lithuanian graphic artists Mindaugas Bonanu and Dominykas Čečkauskas went viral in 2016, mimicking the famous “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love” painting on the Berlin Wall. As did a similar image in the U.K. of Trump and then-prime minister Boris Johnson locked in a smooch.
However, these spinoffs miss much of the context of the original Berlin Wall image, painted by Dmitri Vrubel, inspired by a real-life 1979 photograph of Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker engaged in a socialist fraternal kiss. Vrubel has said the intent behind his original piece was to contrast the love at the core of the founding of the German Democratic Republic with the division created by the Berlin Wall. That kiss, while not homosexual in itself, actually happened. The Lithuanian and British murals, on the other hand, were pure fantasy.
And while Bonanu has said he and Čečkauskas’s mural was not meant as a homophobic dig at Trump, but a reflection of Eastern Europe’s changing attitudes toward homosexuality, its imagery was still picked up and used for lolz by liberal anti-Trump voices online.
In a 2018 piece in The Guardian, writer Lee Hurley slammed the Lithuanian Trump kissing mural for validating queer shame.
“Trump and Putin, like so many others, may fear being gay but every time you joke that they are, you reinforce the validity of that fear, not only to them, but to the rest of society,” Hurley wrote. “Yes, you say, being gay is something to be ashamed of. If it wasn’t, why would so many use it to make fun of people they hate so much?”
Similarly, writer German Lopez argued in a 2017 Vox article that these images reflect how deeply casual homophobia is entrenched in North America.
“In situations in which liberals are deliberately trying to find ways to insult Trump, it’s telling that they resort to suggesting Trump is engaging in sexual acts with another man,” Lopez writes. “The suggestion is that the worst thing that could happen for these men is if they engaged in homosexual acts together, as if that devalues them as men, makes them submissive, or emasculates them.”
The era of TFM (Trump for Musk)
I think it’s worth echoing these sentiments in our current era of Trump/Musk gay-posting. And I don’t say this with any intent of engaging in so-called cancel culture, or ruining people’s fun. I just think we can do better than perpetuating gay shame with our silly little memes and bits.
I felt the same way last year when those AI-generated images of “RuPublicans” went viral online, depicting various Republican political figures as drag queens. I also feel this way when those graphics mocking how Musk got “gender-affirming care” for his hairline circulate online.
Trump’s administration is actively suppressing the existence of queer and trans people in research, policy and legislation. They’re working overtime to make us feel ashamed of who we are—we don’t need to help them along with our online memes. If the idea of Trump deep-throating Musk’s toes is so abhorrent to you, you should pause and consider why, and how you might feel about the actual queer people you claim to be in allyship with doing the same.
If we want to drag far-right figures, they give us plenty of cannon fodder besides casual homophobia (or fatphobia or anti-autism or the other easy traps online liberals seem to love falling into). There are the ill-fitting suits, the insistence on wearing ties that dangle past their belt buckles and the terrible dancing. There was Melania Trump’s horror-fuelled Christmas decor. I’d even venture to say the JD Vance couch-fucking thing, while not based on real events, was perfectly fine and pretty funny.
There’s a 2008 anti-bullying PSA that’s found a viral renaissance online in recent years, featuring Hilary Duff of Lizzie McGuire fame. Duff is seen in a clothing store with two other girls, when one of the girls claims that the shirt the other is trying on looks “so gay.”
“You really shouldn’t say that.” Our noble ally Duff steps in.
“Say what?” one of the girls asks.
“Say that something’s gay when you mean that it’s bad. It’s insulting.”
Duff then gets in an actually top-tier burn: “What if every time someone thought something was bad they said, ‘Oh that’s so girl, wearing a skirt as a top.’” The girl, of course in the process of trying on what is obviously a skirt as a top, looks embarrassed.
It’s ironic that this is an anti-bullying ad, because if you ask me, Duff just read that girl to filth and shamed her in a way that’ll probably replay in her head for weeks. But that is how you take down bullies. That is how you drag people. You do it with perfectly timed barbs not grounded in systemic oppression, but just the absurdity of what’s in front of you.
Let’s not engage in casual homophobia in our attempts to bring down the big guys. There are plenty of other ways for us to punch up at these awful men—let’s get better jokes to do so.
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