That’s where the dirty joke culture comes from, is we want to say the gross thing that we have to deal with that comes from being gay that straight people don’t have to ever think about. “And obsessive need to share,” O’Brien said. Really, the thread is gay Twitter at its best: Pointless, (mostly) self-aware, hilarious and with a way-higher-than-necessary level of participation, but ultimately in service of everyone wanting to feel like they’re in on whatever the joke of the moment is. “Hell of a wrist, Ben,” he said to someone else.
The responses go on like this - painfully banal but ultimately harmless and well-meaning. “That’s a wrist you can depend on,” he said to another. It also helps that O’Brien was committed to responding to everyone who posted on the thread. Each picture offers a hyperdetailed glimpse into the poster’s physical world, not only allowing viewers to scrutinize every hair follicle on their skin, but also to imagine how the wrist’s surroundings fit into whatever its owner was doing that day. In fact, the thread as a whole is actually kind of sweet. this bad thing happened to me but I’m not scared to show it. “On a serious note, someone else posted a picture of their wrist with a self-harm scar, and they were like, ‘I’m posting this because. And thus the gay Twitter wrist thread was born.Īnd, despite the goofy premise, O’Brien said one picture in the thread was unexpectedly poignant. All of it was potentially far too useful. O’Brien toyed with the idea of toothbrushes, sneakers and just about any body part you can think of. “So then I thought, what if I went the other way and did something completely bland as a joke? What’s the dumbest thing that you could see on a person that tells you the least about that person? What part of someone contains the least information about their personality?” “I was like, well, what if I did a joke dirty sex thing - and then I realized that’s pretty much the same as doing a genuine dirty sex thing,” O’Brien said. This never-ending resurfacing of the thread led O’Brien to start thinking about what version 2.0 might look like. there are a wide range of voices that gay guys can have and I wanted to know who sounded like what.”Įventually the responses died down, but O’Brien said he continues to get an occasional burst of notifications when someone finds the thread for the first time and starts liking them. Especially - I don’t know if it’s gay culture or not - but. “I’m interacting with all these people that I’ve never met and probably will never meet, and I just didn’t know what anybody sounded like,” O’Brien told Mic. Some just rambled about whatever they were doing that day, but it was all in service of this digital approximation of a real-life hangout for people who tweet back and forth constantly. Others performed a monologue from a movie. Some people posted videos of themselves telling a funny story. Over the course of a few days, dozens and dozens of people posted videos in response to O’Brien’s original tweet. “Post a video of your voice so we can all hear each other. “Welcome to the gay Twitter voice thread,” O’Brien wrote. And that’s why, in May, John “Jack” O’Brien, a writer based in Los Angeles, decided to start the gay Twitter voice thread. It’s a community whose members interact as though they’re lifelong friends, and yet the vast majority of them will likely never meet the people with whom they spend so much time swapping Drag Race GIFs and hyperbolically geeking out over Laura Dern’s purple Star Wars hair, for example.
But when you’ve reached gay Twitter, you know it. Really, most of us spend our time straddling both worlds - with one foot in Anthony Oliveira’s feed and another snarkily responding to whatever entirely harmless thing Neil deGrasse Tyson just ruined. There’s no initiation fee and you never get an invitation or an official gay Twitter membership card. It’s hard to point to the exact moment you’ve escaped the amorphous atmosphere protecting normie Twitter and when you’ve officially begun free-floating in the cold, lawless void of gay Twitter. And, like outer space, its exact bounds aren’t really clear. Gay Twitter - a slang term describing a loose community of queer men who interact regularly on Twitter - is a messy, beautiful place.