In retrospect, maybe I should have known who I was the first time I went looking for a quiz called “Am I gay?” But I didn’t. The older I got, the less confident I felt in how well I knew myself, and the more I looked outward for anything that might provide clues. (extremely popular) and he was nice about it, but it was humiliating for us both.Ĭollege graduation is the natural end of most people’s association with the multiple-choice quiz, but I couldn’t stop taking them. My habit started in middle school, in the backs of magazines like CosmoGirl and Seventeen and Teen Vogue, where short quizzes promised girls guidance on issues ranging from “Does he like you?” to “How much does he like you?” Each Valentine’s Day in high school, our first-period teachers would pass out Scantron forms for a service called CompuDate, which promised to match each hormonal teenager with her most compatible classmate of the opposite sex, without regard for the social consequences. When they weren’t available or got sick of me, I turned to another lifelong source of support and comfort: the multiple-choice quiz. I knew I was doing something wrong but didn’t know what.
I’d never had a boyfriend or even slept with a man, and I didn’t particularly like going on dates with men or hanging out with them, but I thought that was normal - all of my friends constantly complained about the guys they were dating. Until then, I had assumed I was straight I was just really, really bad at it. I was excited to meet her, but it was all happening so fast (if you don’t include the 28 confused years preceding it). I had sent Lydia the first message, asking to read the gay Harry Potter fanfic she had mentioned in her profile. It would be my first-ever date with a woman, made approximately 10 days after I came out to friends as “not straight, but I’ll get back to you on exactly how much” at the age of 28. Our first date was for drinks on a Monday night after a workday I had spent trying not to throw up from anxiety. “The limp wrist feels like a throwback in some ways I remember it felt like a ubiquitous homophobic mocking gesture from my time as a closeted kid in the late 90s and early 00s,” said Philip Ellis, a journalist who wrote a piece for GQ magazine in 2019 about gay men adopting the word “faggot” as a term of pride.Įllis pointed out that the LGBTQ community has for several years used images of limp wrists as memes.Lydia and I met thanks to a quiz, the multiple-choice OkCupid personality assessment, which asks for your thoughts on matters like “Would a nuclear Holocaust be exciting?” (that’s a “no” from me) and then matches you with those you’re least likely to hate.
Most recently, this has involved many people choosing to identify as “queer” or using that word as a shorthand to describe the broader community - although some still find this offensive. The LGBTQ community has a long history of reclaiming things that were once used as derogatory slurs against them. (According to a 2012 Slate piece, limp wrists have been deemed “unmanly” since ancient Rome). The 18-year-old said he thought the action would be instantly “relatable” to others in the LGBTQ community, even though he also recognized it had offensive roots. BuzzFeed News can’t 100% confirm if Hallows came up with the limp wrist meme, but he was the earliest we could find and recalled devising it as something different from what he had seen trending. By this time, “Kiss Me More” had been a viral hit on TikTok for months, but that point of the song was mainly used for clips featuring sudden transitions.