Preheating My Oven
A Dip into the Cool, Refreshing Waters of Gay Twitter
I spend much too much of my life on twitter.
I understand this will come as a shock to many of you, as I am famously a very private, offline type of person, but I am fully and deeply addicted to the bird app. I know this because sometimes I will be doom-scrolling on my laptop, and finally declare to my empty apartment: “No. I am done with twitter for today.” Then I will go sit down on my couch, look down at my phone and see my twitter feed open anew before me, my fingers having subconsciously made the pilgrimage to their ancestral home.
As with most social media, the more time you put into it, the more the algorithm gets to know you, and the more you find your community (slash echo chamber). I could expound on the pros and cons of online and parasocial relationships until the sun goes down (or until twitter is formally renamed “DogeCorp” or something), but god knows I don’t want to write that, and god knows you don’t want to read that, at least not by me.
No, today I would like to tell you about the sphere of twitter I most frequently inhabit. Gather ‘round, children, and I shall tell you of this magical land.
Gay twitter is a place on the internet permeated with Grindr conversation screenshots. It is a place where – if you did not know anything about culture going into it – you would guess that Tár was the highest-grossing film ever made. A place you might go to, hoping to discern what the phrase “twink death” means, but might instead find yourself happening upon a photo of your good friend’s entire penis. A place where you will see discourse, and then discourse about that discourse, and then discourse about the discourse about the discourse, and then after all of that, another photo of your good friend’s entire penis (from a different angle).
It is the wild west, if the tumbleweeds were pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow and Kirsten Dunst looking bored; if the horses were jokes about the cancelled NBC show Smash; if the saloons were the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race; and the hot shirtless cowboys were… well, hot shirtless cowboys. It’s paradise for some, hell for others, and, as aforementioned, a deeply addictive blend of the two for yours truly.
If I were a sociologist, I would consider writing my thesis on a relatively novel strain of humor arising from this subculture: the pairing of a tweet with a seemingly completely random image.
In a typical tweet format, the photo clearly aligns with the text, and adds context to it; be it further information, visuals to support a claim, or the punchline to a joke. In the genre of tweet I’m describing, the content creators supplement their text with an image that attempts to capture an incredibly specific emotion – usually some kind of niche, cultural ennui – but to people unfamiliar with the creator’s opinions or the format of the humor itself, it can be completely baffling.
This phenomenon was crystallized in this viral tweet from January:
As you might imagine, this prompted a huge wave of “preheating my oven” tweets in response, which continue to this day.
At any rate, for those of you not privy to this world, I would like to extend a cordial invitation into it, and I thought the most enjoyable format would be a quiz. I’d also like to apologize preemptively that it’s a Buzzfeed quiz - there is truly nothing more gauche these days, but I tried several other platforms and ol’ BF was the best combination of user-friendly, aesthetic, and shareable. Sorry!
Lastly, a huge thank you to the twitter accounts that supplied the content for this quiz – I know it may seem like I’m poking fun at them, but I truly believe the creators who comprise this quiz are brilliant minds redefining humor in the modern age. I very often understand exactly the emotion that they’re trying to get across, and feel very lucky to call some of them my friends.
Without further ado, enjoy the quiz, and let me know how you do.
Click the image to take the quiz!
Happy Drag Race Finale Day,
Johnny