Fake and Gay

About

“Fake and Gay” is an expression that is commonly used as a stock comment in response to various online media or stories of highly dubious nature or questionable authenticity, in a similar vein to the use of other expressions of skepticism like “this looks shopped”, “seems legit” and “that happened.”

Origin

While it is difficult to pinpoint the precise origin of the phrase due to the common nature of the words, its usage in the context of online media most likely dates back to sometime in the early 2000s when the term “gay” was commonly used as a synonym for “lame,” a once-popular colloquialism that has since become stigmatized due to its homophobic connotation. On June 14th, 2008, Urban Dictionary user MonkSEALPup submitted the earliest known entry^[1] for the phrase, which attributes its coinage to commenters on the Internet humor site Break.

Something that is both fake and gay. Popularized by Break.com.

In late February 2010, Break uploaded a comedy skit as a tribute to the community’s long-running comment joke.

Spread

However, the popularity of the phrase skyrocketed in early 2010 shortly after YouTube celebrity vlogger Ray William Johnson began using the expression in his web series =3 on a regular basis to describe various viral videos and stories of questionable authenticity. Throughout 2010, the phrase became widely adopted as a catchphrase by the fans of Ray William Johnson, which soon rise to a noticeable influx of “fake and gay” spam comments on YouTube videos.

On November 22nd, 2011, SoundCloud artist d74g0n uploaded a track titled “Fake and Gay Song,”^[3] garnering nearly 30,000 plays over the course of the next four years.

Australian Intelligence Report Leak

In 2012, Michael Scerba, a former Australian intelligence officer at Department of Defence, anonymously leaked a highly sensitive document that he had obtained from the spy agency in a 4chan thread. According to the court documents^[5]^[6] released in August that year, Scerba’s thread was largely met with skeptical responses from the imageboard community, with many users dismissing the files as “fake and gay,” and subsequently buried after failing to gain any substantial attention.

“To my dismay, I just got a bunch of ‘fake and gay’ remarks and the secret documents went 404 [website not found] about 4 comments and 1 hour later.”

Derivatives

Since being adopted as a popular practice of comment spamming and trolling on YouTube, a number of derivative expressions have emerged from “fake and gay” comments, including the spoonerist phrase “Gake and Fay,” the antonym “Real and Heterosexual” and the backronym “F.A.G.”