Out of all the TV shows that have debuted in the last 25 years, boy’s family is the last person you think gay people will associate themselves with. Since its debut in 1999, Fox’s irreverent animated series has carried a history fraught with depictions of the strange. Consider, for example, Father of the Swamp is coming out as a transgender woman and Brian vomited a ridiculous amount after sleeping with her, or Peter Griffin participated in a “gay gene” experiment and then he turned into a flamboyant gay stereotype.
But over the past two years or so, boy’s family has experienced some online cultural resurgence—especially in gay internet communities. Various scenes from the show went viral on Twitter and TikTok, often used as reaction photos and GIFs to comment on current cultural trends. Just a few months ago, a clip by Lois Griffin shouting husband’s name from the Season 21 episode “The Munchurian Candidate” has gone viral throughout the gay social networking spaces.
The clip and its subsequent reaction illustrate how boy’s family still manages to maintain such commanding traction on the internet — and what percentage of the internet is dominated by exotic spaces.
In the episode, a sex therapist hypnotizes Peter to sexually satisfy Lois (or anyone near him) when he hears a jingle from the entertainment news program. More. During a dinner with Lois’s parents, Peter heard the trigger of a gun while delivering a plate of food to his ailing mother-in-law, and… well… you can fill in the blanks. Cut to the scene where Lois realizes what’s going on and rushes up the stairs; when she discovered this semi-incestuous horror, she let out a long, long, blood-clogged blow, “PeeeeeTAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!”
Immediately after the episode premiered, Lois’s shrill screams were heard. memorize advertisement nausea (and praised for Alex Bornstein special voice job). But it also became the background music for lip voiceover on TikTok and remixed to turn into pop songs like “My Army” by Björk And “Disturbia” by Rihanna.
While they may seem elusive on the surface, the reason behind that clip’s sudden popularity, especially among chronic online gays, is actually quite simple. The absolutely over-the-top stage of the scene is something many gay people love to watch: heterosexual family love silly, messy. That’s actually what boy’s family is: a satirical, defiant portrait of a dysfunctional American family and its many ludicrously lofty antics.
Almost every boy’s family Characters have been mesmerized by the online gay world, their mannerisms and outfit choices re-contextualized as reaction images or shitposts and filtered through an apparently eerie lens. Stewie, the most coded person boy’s family character since the start of the show, there have been mostly gay memes about him, what’s with him much appear IN draguse a pink tip like emergency flaresand drunk vibes to One diversity belong to bop.
And though Peter represents an outspoken American father figure, pictures and clips of a feminization Peter is regularly recast via the Twitter gay meme machine. Internet grabs anytime when he’s dressed in scissorswear long acrylic nailslament how he wished he was Beyoncéor show us the great-grandmother who looks like him Griffin’s Moving Feet.
And somehow, these moments abound in boy’s family. For a show with so many jokes that poke fun at the weird and involve manipulative, it’s a bit ironic that those jokes simultaneously rely on the characters’ latent pomp, to the point where the internet spends for gay men to begin to care and flatter.
When a boy’s family characters act outside of their usual selves or change gender expectations, it’s easy, easily, to transform from a throwaway peculiar to inspirational gay meme material. For example, the extremely manly cop Joe Swanson dressed up for his Fiona Apple tribute video can be retooled to convey insecurity or longing. Meg is socially outcast prank your peers in the school cafeteria can be redefined for illustration What it feels like to be a Taylor Swift fan in 2012. Peter’s performance Music man“Shipoopi” of can be score for SOPHIE’s “Immaterial”and him and his Drunken Clam gang performing synchronized choreography at a dance floor could be transformed into “CUFF IT” by Beyoncé. Really anything is possible on Twitter. Where else can Peter meet Iconic gay pop stars Charli XCX, Arca and Ethel Cain?
But above all, Lois considers the cake to be a model of boy’s family memes, queer or otherwise. Proof how viral of M3GAN’s recent meme, gay people love the image of a resilient, sometimes carefree mother, and Lois encapsulates exactly that. She is a bored housewifewho got off the bus? theftwear provocative skin, staring blankly at the potion in her kitchen, and experience a some cases of psychological clarification. She is a medium through which gay Twitter can convey a wide range of emotions: adrenaline excitement And exhilarating joy, vague discomfort And deep disappointment, lonely and horny. One of her lines in Season 19 episode “Customer of the Week”—“Good! You win with your gay stuff!— reads caustic in context, but it conveys a completely distinctive means when it became a popular sound on TikTok last year.
However, despite all these memes, it’s hard to ignore that boy’s family often filled with homophobic humour. And I say this even as a weirdo who dresses like Lois fresh wax for Halloween last year and enjoyed watching this series and other Seth MacFarlane adventures like American Father And cleveland program grow up.
This is a program that trades in racist jokes, homophobic caricaturesAnd exploits demeaning transgender identities. Just go to YouTube, type “annoying family humor,” and you’ll find loads of 10+ minute compilations of that stuff (some even have a generous “Not For Snowflakes” subtitle warning). Isn’t it counter-intuitive, even contradictory, for disadvantaged people to find humor in boy’s familyour borderline jokes, when so many of them target our identities? Even with all boy’s familyThe film’s theme revolves around gay men, knowingly or unknowingly, how can we ignore the film’s more subtle elements?
Despite its offensive humor, especially in the older Bush-era seasons, there’s something so enthralling about it. boy’s familyshamelessly brazen humor. Perhaps it was because its steadfast resistance against “socially acceptable humor” was in fact so odd in itself. Queerness as an identity and ideology is like an innate opposition to what is socially accepted by standards; it tracks attracted homosexuals boy’s familysomething undaunted by social norms.
boy’s familyIts politically incorrect vulgarity also touches on a very common, often unspoken human experience: laughing at things we shouldn’t laugh at. That impulse applies especially to homosexuals. We love to be entertained by extremely stupid, gross pop culture just as we love to reuse characters and scenes from that particular pop culture stream for our own entertainment.
You can apply a similar logic to, for example, the virality of the meme of Vice President Kamala Harris, whose rambling from the salad incoherent, enthusiasm danceAnd giggle non-stop In nothing particularly funny—“Sister General,” anyone?—is the catnip for gays on Twitter, all in spite of her sketchy achievements related to LGBTQ+ issues. We know Kamala doesn’t always have the weirdos’ best interests in mind, but somehow, we’re still captivated by her contagious goofiness despite it.
Same for Real housewivesa franchise filled with the worst, most reprehensible guys on planet Earth, yet reality function as one gay man photo manipulation factory. There’s an uncanny sensitivity to how ridiculous these women are, whether it’s because we find their creepy behavior so strongly against the norm (Kamala) or judgmental (Kamala). high that they deliberately ignore the good things in society (every housewife). Naturally, gays want to remember these women, who are too hilariously averse to the status quo.
This strange meme phenomenon can be seen as an act of defining or renovating, a fundamental appeal to a part of media that feels “different” from the rest of mainstream entertainment. system or desire take a piece of media ostensibly made for a straight audience and edited it to evoke a more eerie meaning. Whether intentionally or not, boy’s family has a remarkable ability to create such strange moments, like the Lois scream, that even gay people can recognize And reclaim to handle their own creation. (Who among us doesn’t want to let out an occasional, long gasp of astonishment in our throats?)
Well, the show’s executive producers Alec Sulkin and Rich Appel have managed to adapt with the times, with their recent admirable intention to eliminate “gay jokes”. But boy’s family There’s enough underage antics and unique characters to sustain the gay community online for years to come.
