After "GaysOverCovid"

“The shitstorm is not a form of accountability.”

Richard Seymour, author of The Twittering Machine, continues, “Nor is it a form of political pedagogy, regardless of the high-minded intentions, or sadism, of the participants. No one is learning anything, except how to remain connected to the machine. It is a punishment beating, its ecstasies sanctioned by virtue. [Social media] has, as part of its addictive repertoire, democratized punishment” (74, emphases added). Government response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in general, has left much to be desired. The privileging of profits over people (an alliteration for our times) has all but ensured the string of disasters Covid-19 has left behind and continues to leave behind.

Simply put, Covid-19 has never been ‘dealt with’ from the very beginning. The result has been global tragedy, especially on US soil where the lack of response, let alone care, has claimed upwards of 456,000 lives. Lockdowns and curfews dot major European nations, coming over a year too late, and sparking outrage that resulted in riots in Spain, Denmark, and most notably, the Netherlands. And all of these discontents, as has been demonstrated in the US, merge dangerously and seamlessly with the rising tide of right-wing populism throughout the West.

It’s very much like Seymour has said, “No one is learning anything.” And how can anyone begin to learn if there is no teacher? This is a flimsy metaphor—a “teacher” cannot “teach” accountability to the willing, let alone to those who refuse to be accountable. The teacher metaphor does, however, point to the glaringly obvious lack of any kind of system of accountability keeping individuals who violate pandemic regulations in check. One viral attempt at this was made by the Instagram account “GaysOverCovid”. Hailing themselves as “Covid vigilantes”, GaysOverCovid ‘exposed’ the widespread irresponsibility of members of the gay community who were spending their holiday traveling to areas where ‘circuit parties’ (think: bad house remixes of Top 20 hits, short shorts, harnesses, glow sticks) were still being hosted.

These gays, though, were not just any run-of-the-mill gay. Almost entirely white with tanned chiseled bodies, these ‘circuit queens’ were gays whose entire online image (read: Instagram presence) was built off of posting thirst traps—pictures featuring their barely clothed bodies, perfectly tailored to a community whose tastes have remain largely unevolved from the 1950s beefcake idealized by photographers like Bob Mizer. These were influencers, some actual, some only under the impression they were, that commanded the attention of the online ‘instagay’ community, and rode the algorithm all the way into the explore page of any gay male. GaysOverCovid saw their opportunity and seized upon it. The ‘circuit queen’, already a figure widely lampooned by the gay community, became under fire for rampant pandemic negligence. A new era of online justice appeared to have begun.

And it was a hit! GaysOverCovid revealed that these circuit queens were not just circuit queens. Many worked in healthcare, an alarming amount worked in Covid units. One of the partygoers was a nurse who had gotten attention for his near-death experience with Covid. Circulating images of his once muscular body reduced to a skeletal frame because of the illness became replaced by images of him re-muscled and on a beach in Puerto Vallarta. The kicker was that GaysOverCovid’s exposure campaign required almost no effort. Videos from parties abounded. GaysOverCovid discovered tickets to a “secret” party in Los Angeles (one of the cities to take the biggest hit from Covid) on Eventbrite, the location was almost next to a hospital and intel provided by GaysOverCovid led to LAPD shutting the party down. Bird’s eye view photos of the party getting shut down were posted. To top it all off, the New Year was rang in with news of the PV Delice, a party boat hosting several circuit queens, sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

The PV Delice’s capsizing was GaysOverCovid’s propulsion into stardom. Memes of the boat sinking to Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” proliferated. GaysOverCovid struck up a working relationship with circuit queen satire account “the_la_basics” to double the bond between traveling during a pandemic and “basic bitch” behavior. For a fiery moment in time, muscular men in matching Speedos wearing “Good Vibes” muscle tanks were plastered on News TV screens. Americans became privy to the gay subculture known as the “circuit party”. One party organizer, calling GaysOverCovid “Covid Karens”, offered a $500 award for whoever discovered the identity of the individual running the profile.

Gay influencers, like Sam Cushing, went private while prominent gay tik-tokers lampooned them. These were good times, the plastic, toxic underbelly of the gay community was finally getting theirs—and all they could do in return was call their naysayers “ugly”, “jealous”, “poor”, or “fat”. It was, to speak, a moment of disarmament, accountability was having its day. And “Covid vigilantism” looked like the future for dealing with pandemic poltergeists our governments failed to provide their own accountability systems for (not to at all suggest this was ever a priority for them in the first place).

This, of course, did not work. The last post made by GaysOverCovid was on January 23rd, featuring a gay tik-toker’s spoof of a “last-man-standing” horror movie that ends in a tight knit circuit queen group all reporting each other to the self-styled “Rona Rangers”. Since then, there has been near radio silence, and almost no notable acts of “Covid vigilantism”. There was a failure of an apology video, also lampooned, made by aforementioned influencer Sam Cushing, in which he centered himself and affectively deflected responsibility for his actions. There was a burst of rogue profiles who seized upon this moment to out people’s HIV status. There was an attempt at a counter-account called "GaysOverGaysOverCovid". There were a few pithy videos on “how to spot a narcissist” and there were several others who were turned off by GaysOverCovid’s affinity for police—especially since a lot of the first people to be attracted to GaysOverCovid were Leftists who saw a potential alternative to policing.

Alas, they were disappointed. GaysOverCovid was never really an “accountability” project, only an extension of the smae “moral rift” between Liberals and Conservatives transposed upon stay-at-home gays and circuit queens. It was, despite their videos from Dr. Greg Cason (who’s content, on appearance, looks very similar to the toxic positivity circuit gays who were the supposed ‘enemies’), an act of the very narcissism GaysOverCovid was (not wrongfully), accusing the circuit queens for. Justice was not served, but there was drama, schadenfreude, and “tea for days”—and for those who were not attuned to otherwise, this was just as good as justice.

I admit that, at the start, I was a supporter of the GaysOverCovid effort. As a stay-at-home gay myself, it was frustrating to observe so many others from my community behaving recklessly during the pandemic. It was equally as frightening hearing their excuses parrot much of what has been said by the political right during this pandemic. But slowly, the veil began to lift. The odd sore thumb of police support was just the beginning, but it became wildly apparent that GaysOverCovid was using the very same techniques their ‘opponents’ were for increasing their social presence. GaysOverCovid was building an influencer platform, and doing it remarkably well. Several problems endemic to the LGBTQ+ community were unveiled, but GaysOverCovid was not interested in them.

For example, one critique leveled against the circuit gays was the way their behavior was haunted by colonialism and imperialism. Puerto Vallarta and the surrounding area rely on tourism for the majority of their income, without tourists, the people of Puerto Vallarta have no income. To shut down would imperil them whilst they were already being battered by Covid-19. Nonetheless, hordes of white gay men, some of whom had been vaccinated, most of whom had a strong medical infrastructure to return to, descended upon the citizens of Puerto Vallarta who had no say in the matter otherwise.

GaysOverCovid was not interested in such discourse. Theory is bad for business. GaysOverCovid was interested in the “tea”, in providing a front row seat to the unmasking of maskless hordes of muscle queens that looked like the men who scowled at them in the gay bar or rejected them on Grindr for being fat, femme, or a POC (excepting, of course, the equally as memed token POC). ‘Accountability’ offered a solid cover for the Covid tabloid to operate under, and quickly disappeared only to come back up again the moment someone dared to critique the work GaysOverCovid was doing—even if the critique came from an individual who decried the actions of the circuit queens. GaysOverCovid was causing a shitstorm to expose a shitstorm, and to echo Richard Seymour once again, “The shitstorm is not a form of accountability”.

Less a lesson in how to hold people accountable, GaysOverCovid provides an apt example of the social industry at work. Especially how the social industry has rendered our current language to describe certain internet phenomenon in an accurate manner. GaysOverCovid might have begun with the intention to be a form of accountability in a situation where accountability isn’t to be found.

The social industry does not care about intentions. GaysOverCovid provided food for the algorithm and all of us ate. Whether they were aware of it, or doing it purposely, once the algorithm picked up on GaysOverCovid, the algorithm threw intention to the wind. The operator(s) of the page and its supporters might have been under the genuine impression they were doing something good. The wool over our eyes is both our fault and not our fault. The social industry has blurred that zone while also rendering our way of trying to unblur it relatively useless and hiding that fact in order to continue we misunderstand for the sake of the algorithm.

GaysOverCovid was trolling. As Seymour tells us “Trolls are the anti-celebrities. They are propogandists of human failure. Far from extolling awesomeness, they ruthlessly exploit and show up weakness…They always remind you that there’s always a point of view from which you don’t matter, and from which your pain is hilarious” (107). Of course, the image of a 4chan user assailing someone’s suffering is immediately evoked by the word “troll” and most reading at this point are probably cringing at the supposition that any of us are behaving like the chan legion—especially those that care. However, sequestering trolling to this internet subgroup only obscures Seymour’s that “We Are All Trolls”, and we can plug into the above several examples to demonstrate that point. It additionally obscures the way in which "care" is not a simple or uni-directional concept not subject to outside inflluence.

GaysOverCovid branded (an influencer term) an anti-circuit-queen-influencer #block and #unfollow campaign. The message was to “disconnect” from those whose gain does not benefit us, and maybe successfully demonetize/de-platform them in the process. For the most part, the opposite occurred. For example, any backlash Sam Cushing received for his aforementioned ‘apology’ only resulted in him blocking his naysayers. His following barely took a hit, if not grew. Cushing remains a sponsored voice of Greenpeace and true to his bio is “living [HIS] truth” relatively unscathed by GaysOverCovid and their supporters. A common accusation leveled against trolls was also leveled against Cushing. Cushing was amoral and a narcissist, only interested in capitalizing off all the attention he was getting. Cushing didn’t care. His pain and the pain of his ilk was hilarious. And GaysOverCovid and company ensured that they knew that, laughing all the way home while “owning” them and claiming the moral high ground the entire time.

Seymour makes an additional important point, “The ways in which trolling and vigilantism resemble one another are not incidental” (117). Their victims are more or less subject to the same kinds of fate, and in the realm of the internet, the removal of their social media presence is the apex of “justice” and provides a “void” ripe for excitement at the removal. Declarations of “Finally!” and “Justice is served!” proliferated around an action whose net accomplishment is zero change to the system and big bucks for the social industry.

GaysOverCovid sparked outrage amongst a networked collective of individuals under the conviction that they had a moral commitment—all they really accomplished was the deepening of the network, a flurry of likes and comments attracting more likes and comments, slapping down decisively all attempts at steering the conversation otherwise as “not caring about the lives of others.” GaysOverCovid prided itself on “shaming to save lives”, it really accomplished neither.

On the other side of gay Instagram, another anonymous user called “neoliberalgayfriend” was becoming viral for an entirely different reason. Neoliberalgayfriend focused on producing satire targeted on the very same ‘instagays’ GaysOverCovid was, but for very different reasons. NLGF’s brand of satire operated on the level of language. By co-opting the vocabulary of mostly liberal gays, NLGF masterfully demonstrated just how accommodating the language of liberalism is to conservatism.

NLGF created infographics that told us why we shouldn’t shame health workers for attending circuit parties during a pandemic, they shared faked “PragerU” infographics decrying discriminatory language used against the rich, they ran a fake election campaign with the slogan “This. Together. Forward.” where they promised to “end satire” and “end climate change by talking about it.” NLGF shared posts made by neoliberal gay “activist” influencers with tongue-in-cheek supportive captions, ensnaring the performativity of being shirtless and woke. They hacked the geotag of the neoliberal gay paradise of Hell’s Kitchen and replaced the monotony of selfies featuring groomed men in overpriced apartments with their memes. And like clockwork, prominent gay influencers descended upon NLGF in hopes to provoke and disarm them.

One of these influencers, Barrett Pall, had a think piece where he had asserted gay men have to act more like their straight counterparts if they ever want to be taken seriously posted on NLGF’s profile. NLGF went straight to work “supporting” Pall’s message in more than obvious sarcasm and Pall was outraged, citing his “years” of activism as making him better and more important than any of his dissenters. In another example, influencer Seth Maynard posted a photo of himself holding scissors and a mostly cut piece of paper that had "2021" on one side and "RACISM" on the other.

NLGF reposted the photo and commenters resounded (sarcastically) that Maynard had “ended racism!” Maynard took to the post with what seemed like openness to criticism, which many followers responded to even-handedly. But upon such criticism, Maynard centered himself in his activism, saying the post was inspired by his family “disowning” him for his “anti-racism” and was better than doing nothing. This caused followers to revert to their method of sarcastic false support. Later, he reported the post to Instagram for theft of copywritten material prompting Instagram to remove the post and shortly after remove NLGF’s account. NLGF resorted to a backup account whose life was short-lived, and has since been once again removed.

NLGF was a popular account, but not a viral cash cow. It was a form of guerilla warfare against liberal Instagram, specifically gay liberal Instagram, and liberalism at large. By co-opting their language, NLGF operated within what GaysOverCovid revealed but could not acknowledge mostly because it benefited from this realization—the social industry reduces language to its effects and really nothing more. And it was NLGF’s actual subversion (instead of just subversion in name) of these effects that led to its ultimate downfall at the behest of gay influencers who were in actual service to Instagram and on whom Instagram partially relied on for profit.

NLGF never really extended beyond the use of language at the effectual level, and it operated at that level fantastically. Several people found themselves mistaking their posts for “reality”, as actual made things, some of them were, some of them weren’t, but there is irony in the people who mistook the posts as “authentic” or “real” and then believed otherwise. These posts were very much real, and they revealed the flawed nature of the “authenticity” politics of the internet that have so skillfully blurred the lines on what constitutes as actual, non-volatile, action. NLGF was an attempt at a Neo-Luddite practice of escaping the network through the network.

It would seem then that problems with accountability stem from problems on how to articulate what is accountability, a problem itself that stems from the social industry’s (and media at large) boiling down of language to pure emotional response and making schadenfreude the bottom line of justice. Using the tools we have at our disposal, like social networks, is an instinctive move, but the compulsion to imitate the network in the process is a nigh inescapable one lest the language of the network is able to somehow be sent back into itself so it can be recognized for what is— profitizeable affect and effect.

We need a way of networking against the network, against the commodification of our language, emotion, and attention into flows of big data. Such a project, however, is dauntingly abstract. Richard Seymour suggests a willful ignorance, a networked ‘stupidity’, a concerted effort to not be in the know, to not fall into traps the machine makes us set ourselves up for in order to provide content for it (with no recompense for the free labor we give it) (215-6). NLGF provided a picture of what such 'stupidity' might look like.

NLGF had something GaysOverCovid also had, repetition. Except this repetition acknowledge the alternative to what it actually stated. When an NLGF follower commented something like “Anti-Racist King!” underneath the above mentioned Sam Maynard post, the co-opting of liberal praise pointed exactly to the opposite. Maynard was not an anti-racist king.

NLGF was tackling all the issues that plague the gay community, including the liberalism that accepts members of the LGBTQ community that streamline the best with them and tokenizes select outliers that don’t for keeping up the appearance of being “diverse”. Even more remarkably, the political right was rarely ever brought up, and when it was it was brought up by critics who said NLGF was wasting their time focusing on the wrong “problem”. Nothing in the LGBTQ community could be as foul as “Drumpf”.

NLGF, however, was not a profitable enterprise and was easily removable from Instagram for that very reason alone, regardless whatever “copyright infringement” it had apparently committed. However, it offers a valuable study on how to network out of the network.

Obviously, Instagram provides a limit to this technique, increasingly stringent algorithms and “community standards” (one of the biggest faux paus of the social industry) now punish people who work against the algorithm with heavy and purposefully unnavigable shadowbans, restricting the visibility and therefore spread of potentially unprofitable content. It is intuitive to suggest an alternate platform for this kind of action, but the odds of its surviving the commodifying power of the social industry aren’t promising unless this “un-network” is able to turn its use of language into an effective “blind spot”, a “stupidity” like Seymour suggests. And if there was ever a criticism levied against NLGF—it was stupidity.

Works Cited

Seymour, Richard. "The Twitter Machine". Verso, 2020.