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I am scrolling through Instagram and find a meme. It is a video recording from TikTok, a website that I only know about from watching videos posted on this Instagram account. TikTok appears to be a social platform where people on webcams lip sync songs together. I admit that I am generally pretty entertained by these TikTok memes— I find pleasure in their absurdity and their resonance with drag performance.
This meme is of a black guy lip-synching sweet loving lyrics to a white guy who is smiling down upon him before they begin kissing each other intimately there is no gag nor punchline the kiss is their narrative and the subtitle is “wasn’t expecting that…” where “that” is presumably the kiss but I wonder if it was also the mixed races so I read the comments and explore those below the sick and vomiting faces one person says it’s a mental illness and another disagrees saying it’s just disgusting then they use the slurs I identify with to insult those who called them homophobic…
Homosexuality was classified as a mental illness by the American Psychological Association (APA) from 1952 until 1973. It is now 2019 and homosexuality’s affective value still remains tainted by the APA’s pejorative influence whenever people use the word “homophobia” to describe behaviors that are clearly not phobic.
