With both eyes closed and one hand gently caressing the face of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump leans in for a passionate kiss with the object of his obsessive affections. It’s a hilarious image, right? Two men who imperil the lives of queer people on a daily basis would hate to be seen as gay. It’s their biggest fear, so it’s funny to pretend they are gay to annoy them. Genius. It can’t be homophobic to imply that Putin and Trump are “gay for each other”, we’re told, because the people making the “joke” are woke lefties who simply adore us queers. Heck, they even have some of us round for tapas in the summer. This is an ally action – we’ve got your back, Jack.
Can I just say: if this is how you’re going to go about it, it’s better that you didn’t.
Whichever way you spin it, the result is the same: homophobia. The “joke” only works if being a member of the queer community is regarded as “inferior” or “less than” – even if that’s supposed to reflect the view of the butt of said joke. If you don’t make that assumption, it’s pretty pointless. Like depicting them as brothers.
Epic stuff, guys. A lot of you do have an unexamined bigotry about you.
Sure I'll indulge you. I think it started with the Putin/Trump mural in 2016. This was a Russian street artist making political commentary. As a response, people made fake images of Trump and Putin kissing.
Soon other fake images showed up of world leaders whith unlikely partners which set the kissing theme as a household meme.
Shortly after the 2020 elections in the USA, LLM's were dropped into the world and with them AI image generation. So this joke took a run.
Now nobody's safe from this joke. It's not just Trump, but it's happening all over the world. These kissing images and others like it are kind of funny, but many images are nearly indistinguishable from reality and are actively weaponised to cause political havoc. Which is a whole other problem, of course.
I know you weren't asking me, but I think the humour lies in how Elon would hate this on account of him being bigoted.
It's not "haha he's gay" but rather rather that he's a fool who is too much of a snow flake and anti anything not straight, to not be offended by this. Also to add something about how Melania's perceived to be treated by Trump, well that's Elon now.
That’s certainly one opinion - which you’re more than entitled to hold. Personally I don’t get the connotations that you do. I see it as a subversion of Musk’s overt sycophancy vis a vis Trump’s (completely unwarranted) strong man persona clothed in a parody of a TradCon nuclear family. It’s art - there’s often more than one interpretation. Sometimes deliberately so.