The gay frog and its reception underline the need for environmentalists, the media, and popular science communicators to exercise care in the stories we tell about pollution. As such, examining alt-right perceptions of the gay frog remains instructive for interpreting past, present, and future far-right anxieties, and their routes into the mainstream. 7 Nevertheless, the resentments that motivated the alt-right persist in American culture.
6 Other far-right movements have risen in prominence, including the QAnon conspiracy theory and its followers, fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic. The alt-right has also fragmented, notably since the violent 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The gay frog and Jones have fallen from mainstream attention since the height of their popularity in 2017–18. Finally, I ask what environmentalists might learn from the gay frog, drawing on the work of Nicole Seymour to argue for the value of humor as an ecopolitical strategy and the frog as a queer and antinaturalist symbol.
I examine the role of humor in representations of the gay frog, showing how liberal mockery of Jones has inadvertently mainstreamed far-right beliefs and consolidated alt-right notions of victimhood. I argue that the potency of the gay frog as alt-right symbol derives from the capacity of the frog to instantiate racialized and sexualized anxieties about border crossings. This article outlines a genealogy of the gay frog, situating Jones’s rant in the longer histories of environmental health, sexuality, and cultural panic described by queer ecologists. The appeal of the frog also merits further consideration. 4 Existing scholarship neglects the central theme of humor. 3 However, there has been little academic discussion of the recent resurgence of interest in the gay frog in alt-right and mainstream environmental politics and culture. 2 There is also a growing industry of scholarship on another alt-right frog, Pepe. Queer ecologists have documented prior “sex panics” over the impacts of EDCs on species from the alligators of Florida’s Lake Apopka to the bass of the Potomac River to the frogs of the American Midwest. Still, his remarks echoed longstanding mainstream fears about the potential for endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in the environment and, crucially, water to alter human and nonhuman sex organs and sexual behavior.
It’s not funny!” 1 Jones was, until recently, a major figure in contemporary American right-wing online media, associated with the alt-right movement and known for promoting conspiracy theories via his multimedia enterprise Infowars. “Tap water,” Jones roared, was a “gay bomb, baby.” “I don’t like ’em putting chemicals in the water that turn the freakin’ frogs gay!” he continued. In October 2015 US shock jock and self-declared “most paranoid man in America” Alex Jones uploaded a YouTube clip that would launch a thousand memes. In spite of this, it argues that the comic potential of the gay frog holds promise for queer ecologists seeking to think differently about sex and nature.įar-right politics, hormones, humor, memes, pollution, queer ecology, popular culture
By examining the role of humor in gay frog clips and memes, this article shows how liberal mockery of Jones has inadvertently mainstreamed far-right beliefs and served to consolidate alt-right notions of victimhood. It argues that the potency of the gay frog as alt-right symbol derives from the capacity of the frog to instantiate racialized and sexualized anxieties about border crossings. This article offers a genealogy of the gay frog, situating this recent moment in the longer history of “sex panics” over gay animals described by queer ecologists, and in the context of an ongoing backlash against feminism and trans liberation. Primarily associated with American shock jock Alex Jones and the so-called alt-right, fears of frogs being turned gay by hormones in water have nevertheless entered the mainstream, while gay frog memes are shared online by users from across the political spectrum. The gay frog has taken on a surprisingly prominent role in contemporary environmental culture.
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