“The limp wrist feels like a throwback in some ways I remember it felt like a ubiquitous homophobic mocking gesture from my time as a closeted kid in the late 90s and early 00s,” said Philip Ellis, a journalist who wrote a piece for GQ magazine in 2019 about gay men adopting the word “faggot” as a term of pride.Įllis pointed out that the LGBTQ community has for several years used images of limp wrists as memes. Most recently, this has involved many people choosing to identify as “queer” or using that word as a shorthand to describe the broader community - although some still find this offensive. The LGBTQ community has a long history of reclaiming things that were once used as derogatory slurs against them. (According to a 2012 Slate piece, limp wrists have been deemed “unmanly” since ancient Rome). The 18-year-old said he thought the action would be instantly “relatable” to others in the LGBTQ community, even though he also recognized it had offensive roots. what is in fact cultural provides an alibi for the status quo, whereas gay and.
BuzzFeed News can’t 100% confirm if Hallows came up with the limp wrist meme, but he was the earliest we could find and recalled devising it as something different from what he had seen trending. With its allusion to biology, the meme tends to naturalize cultural. By this time, “Kiss Me More” had been a viral hit on TikTok for months, but that point of the song was mainly used for clips featuring sudden transitions.
