Motherplanes and cuntagons: why can’t gay people give a normal compliment?

Whatever happened to “you look nice”? A straightforward compliment really does go a long way, but it seems that the gays of twitter.com have forgotten what one of those looks like. On Sunday night, the homosexuals of that hellsite – one we now begrudgingly call “X” – were reacting in real time to the best looks at this year’s Golden Globes. There was Rosamund Pike, slinking onto the carpet in an elaborate lace fascinator; Hunter Schafer, whipped by the wind and radiant in Prada; Gillian Anderson, adorned with vaginas all over her Gabriela Hearst gown. Add Natasha Lyonne, Dua Lipa and Emma Stone to the mix, and there was plenty for all to sink their teeth into. But, that night, something shifted. Rather than bestow these women with the sweet compliments they so rightly deserve, things took a turn for the dramatic.

“She flew the motherplane directly into the world serve centre and cuntagon,” wrote @LionessPike at the sight of the actress in Dior couture. “She dropped a pressure cooker full of mothernails at the boston cuntathon finish line,” said @francisxwolf above a video of Taylor Swift posing in her green sequin dress. Whether stars “shitted in the mothertoilet and didn’t flush”, or “committed human rights violations at cuntanamo slay”, people on the internet were inventing increasingly creative ways to say good. And amidst this squadron of motherplanes, Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy even got caught in the fray, posting a dedication to his wife’s performance on the campaign trail. “Throat Surgeon. Mother. Future First Lady,” he wrote of his significant other. “Throat surgeon is a crazy thing to call your wife,” responded one user. “Gay people can never say ‘she looks pretty’ anymore,” added another.

While this excessive form of complimenting has reached a fever pitch this week, it’s always been pretty prevalent on the internet. For a while, gay men’s favourite pop stars have studied at the “University of Servington”, graduating in “Cuntology”, “Servology”, and obtaining their doctorates in “Motherlogical studies”. In the same vein, actresses from prestige TV dramas – think Sarah Snook in Succession, or a vape-wielding Kate Winslet in Mare of Eastown – have delivered such enthralling performances they cause “motherquakes” that measure “7.9 on the cunter scale.” It seems that, for a long time, gay men have been struggling to offer a compliment without veering into the absurd – but is there more at play amidst this explosion of cunt?

Well, sorta kinda. After the initial Golden Globes reactions came the Governors Awards two days later, the ceremony where the Academy hands out honorary Oscars. “She’s next in the line of Servecession to be the Chief Executive Mother of Slaystar Roycunt,” one user commented of Greta Lee in Bottega Veneta. “She’s running around the streets of servejero like she’s motherilo principussy and she just committed the assassislaytion of arch diva franz ferdicunt,” added a second. In only two nights, the compliments had become even more absurd, and this sudden increase is key to understanding the trend. For gay men, complimenting a woman’s appearance is actually like a drug. And – as gay men know better than anybody else – the more drugs you take, the higher the dosage needed to reach that same high. Now, when I see some paltry reference to the University of Servington, the words appear as indecipherable glyphs on the periphery of my awareness. But when I read that Margot Robbie “used a slayper rifle to shoot the mother bullet into the head of john f cuntedy” I enter a fugue state of pleasure while rubbing my feet together like a little cricket. That’s why gay men do this. Just one more hit! Please!

Despite the online reaction, gay people talking in strange tongues is of course nothing new. In 19th and 20th century Britain, queer men used Polari to communicate, a class of merchant navy line cooks and Punch & Judy operators hoping to avoid the long arm of the law. Although most modern, Western gays no longer fear the same persecution as our forefathers, some recessive part of our brains remember the fear that they endured, and we seek to ape their language in an act of solidarity. In its own beautiful way, Rosamund Pike crashing a motherplane into the cuntagon is a collective expression of our transgenerational queer trauma. To the naysayers I say no! We simply cannot just say “she looks nice”: it may be unsafe for us to do so. These might seem like jokes to the uninitiated, but gay men know what this really is. Shielding. Safeguarding. Self-preservation.

Despite this need to protect ourselves, these tweets also show that gay men are committed to covertly imparting wisdom, as are their educational properties. When @foldyrhands suggested that Gillian Anderson “lowkey wiretapped the cuntercratic party’s slayquarters at the mothergate hotel,” they were reminding us of the injustices of the Watergate scandal. When @yungchomsky proposed that she in fact “secretly facilitated the illegal sale of mother to Slayran and used the proceeds to fund the Cuntras,” he was reminding us of the Iran-Contra affair, where officials in the Raegan administration facilitated the illegal sale of arms to fund rebel groups in Nicaragua. Whether it’s references to world wars, assassinations, or 9/11, these tweets act as historical documents, passing down knowledge to the next generations of queer youth. It’s the altruistic nature of the modern gay man that makes this kind of knowledge-sharing possible. And while one could argue that making compliments of these events undermines their gravity, it is in fact the homosexual condition to take tragedy and turn it into comedy. It’s what we have done for millennia, and will continue to do, in order to survive. Fly high, motherplane. Fly high.