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Harris’s online image redefined by queer fans on social media

Contours of 2024 race being shaped by the internet in unusual ways

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10 months ago

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(Illustration via @equalityVAYD on X)

Earlier this month, as speculation grew over whether President Joe Biden would withdraw from the 2024 race, a video featuring a supercut of footage of Kamala Harris alongside audio and visuals from Charli XCX’s new album, Brat, went viral on social media.

The post was neither the first nor the last of its kind. Hours after Biden’s announcement on July 21 that he would step aside to back his vice president’s historic bid for the nomination, a photo was circulated on X of men wearing matching cropped tees in Brat green (hex code: #89CC04) that were emblazoned with Kamala’s name in the album’s Arial Narrow typeface.

Minutes after the photo was shared with the caption, “BRAT Kamala shirts already on Fire Island. The gays move SO FAST,” the artist herself weighed in, posting “kamala IS brat.” The vice president then followed Charli XCX on social media and a Brat-themed banner image was uploaded to Kamala HQ, the campaign’s official, newly rebranded rapid response page on X.

Over the next week, as they covered the convergence of support for Harris among Democratic Party officials, delegates, donors, and elected officials, news organizations directed their attention, too, to the groundswell of online support for her candidacy, which inevitably meant confronting questions like what exactly was meant by proclamations that Kamala is Brat.

The album, which dropped on June 7, was an instant hit among Charli XCX’s LGBTQ fans. By this point, the “young girl from Essex” had become, as Pink News wrote, “synonymous with queer pop-music lovers,” particularly since her second EP “Vroom Vroom” was released in 2016 and “critics didn’t get it, but the gays did.”

Likewise, many of the pro-Harris social media posts seen recently, including those referencing music and themes from Brat, are inscrutable, though not for the predominantly young and LGBTQ online audiences by and for whom the content was created in the first place for purposes of giving voice to the post-July 21 vibe shift in the election and the jolt of enthusiasm they feel for the vice president’s candidacy.

“One of the things that I’m loving about this election cycle so much is the meme-ification of politics — brat summer, you know, I’m learning things about the internet that I didn’t know,” Human Rights Campaign National Press Secretary Brandon Wolf said during the organization’s Out for Harris LGBTQ+ Unity Call on Friday.

After the 2.5-hour virtual event wrapped, with remarks from a slate of LGBTQ elected leaders and celebrities, Wolf joined colleagues including HRC President Kelley Robinson for a dance party set to Beyoncé’s “Freedom.”

The rousing anthem was played by Harris in her first public appearances following Biden’s exit from the race and in her campaign’s first ad, which was released Thursday morning.

“There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate,” the vice president says in the video, over footage of Donald Trump and his running mate U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. “But us, we choose something different.” A crowd chants, “Kamala! Kamala! Kamala!” and Harris proclaims “we choose freedom,” as the booming chorus to “Freedom” begins.

The use of Beyoncé’s music and this song in particular is suffused with layers of meaning, from the contrast Harris’s campaign is drawing between her and her opponents’ visions for the future of America to her position as the country’s first Black woman poised to win a major party’s nomination for president.

The decision might also signal Harris’s embrace of her LGBTQ supporters, just as her campaign did by celebrating the queer online fandom she has enjoyed in recent weeks. After all, Beyoncé’s work has often celebrated Black queer culture, love that has been reciprocated by the community throughout the singer’s career.

LGBTQ fans helped to redefine Harris’s image online

The source material for recent viral online content about Harris is largely comprised of clips taken from audio and video footage of the vice president’s public remarks that were originally shared in many cases by critics and political opponents for purposes of presenting her as unserious (or mocking her words, laugh, and mannerisms).

Most were excerpted from a speech last year at the swearing-in ceremony for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics, where Harris relayed an anecdote about how her mother “would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people.  You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?'” (Laughs.)

“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” the vice president said.

By the end of June into early July, in the wake of the president’s poor performance against Trump in the televised CNN debate that spurred calls for him to step out of the race, clips from and references to Harris’s speech once again cropped up across social media platforms.

This time, however, they tended to signal support for the vice president, even before it became clear, starting with Biden’s endorsement, that she was favored to lead the Democratic Party ticket in 2024.

For instance, the “coconut tree” clip was used to kick off the viral supercut featuring imagery and music from Brat (the track “Von Dutch”).

In another post, shared on X by the Virginia Young Democrats LGBTQIA+ Caucus, emojis of coconuts and coconut trees were used to supplant the letters “o” and “t” to spell out “Hot To Go” a song by the queer artist Chappell Roan.

Many users shared videos with footage of the song “Coconuts” by trans singer Kim Petras (or from the lip sync battle featuring the song during Season 8 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” with queens Jessica Wild and Ra’Jah O’Hara).

Sometimes, these were cut with footage from the vice president’s speech or used in posts urging her to feature the song in her campaign.

Coconuts aside, another through-line connecting much of the pro-Harris social media content seen over the past few weeks was their inclusion of years-old clips of the vice president dancing.

Especially popular were videos in which she was grooving on stage in the rain while holding an umbrella during a campaign rally in 2020 and showing off her moves at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Liberty and Justice celebration in 2019.

For example, both were included in this viral July 21 supercut featuring RuPaul’s “Call Me Mother.”

Eventually, the playful and enthusiastic posts from young, queer corners of the internet seemed to inspire the Democratic Party establishment and its elected leaders.

Hours after Biden’s endorsement of Harris, U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) posted a photo of himself climbing a coconut tree with the caption, “Madam Vice President, we are ready to help.” 

Once again, the Harris campaign leaned in, updating the bio of the Kamala HQ page on X to read: “Providing context,” another nod to her famous 2023 speech.

An election defined by personalities and ‘vibes’

Looking ahead to November, it is hardly clear whether and to what extent the online enthusiasm for Harris and her campaign will be sustained.

Of course, a political candidate’s “memeability” is hardly an an exact proxy for public opinion. And online narratives can change over time, as demonstrated by the ways in which content featuring the vice president, like the footage of her “coconut tree” remarks, was co-opted by supporters who transformed them into pro-Harris memes and videos.

Also worth noting is the extent to which these have celebrated attributes like the candidate’s laugh and her dance moves rather than, for instance, her record of public service over several decades in public life or her campaign’s policy agenda.

Additionally, messaging from Trump and his allies and supporters suggests their strategy of going after Harris’s personality was not blunted by the evolution of online discourse seen on social media platforms. “I call her Laughing Kamala. You ever watch her laugh?… She’s crazy. She’s nuts,” the former president said at a recent rally in Michigan.

Meanwhile, beginning with a July 23 appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota debuted a similar line of attack against Trump and his running mate U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio: “they’re weird.”

During a rally in St. Paul, he said, “The fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”

The remarks made headlines, amplifying calls for Harris to choose Walz as her 2024 running mate while prompting other high-profile Democrats, including other top contenders for the party’s vice presidential nomination, to follow suit.

Among them was out Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki on Sunday that the characterization of the Republican ticket as “weird” is not just name-calling, but rather a legitimate response to the policies they have proposed and positions they hold.

He pointed to Vance’s statement that the Democratic Party is led by “childless cat ladies,” as well as the vice presidential nominee’s stance that Americans who have children should wield more political power than those who do not.

With respect to Trump, Buttigieg noted the former president’s “talk about terminating the Constitution,” his odd remarks during campaign rallies about subjects like the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, and “the dark and twisted things that were kind of shoved in our face all of the time during the Trump presidency and ever since by the Trump campaign.”

For her part, Harris used the epithet on Saturday, though not in direct reference to Trump and Vance. Rather, the vice president characterized her opponents’ swipes against her as “just plain weird.”

Speaking of weird…

Shortly after Vance’s nomination was announced on July 15, a user on X wrote, “can’t say for sure but he might be the first vp pick to have admitted in a ny times bestseller to fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions (vance, hillbilly elegy, pp. 179-181).”

The claim was totally bogus, but the post nevertheless went viral along with a deluge of memes and videos poking fun at Vance that flooded social media platforms alongside the viral pro-Harris content over the past few weeks.

And just as news organizations had brought offline attention to the “Kamala is brat” memes and “coconut pilled” supercuts, the social media posts about Vance reached even wider audiences when, for instance, John Oliver, host of the late-night program “Last Week Tonight,” called Republican campaign officials on Sunday with an inquiry about whether their vice presidential candidate ever had intercourse with a sofa.

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Congress

House passes reconciliation with gender-affirming care funding ban

‘Big Beautiful Bill’ now heads to the Senate

Published

3 hours ago

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May 22, 2025

By

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) (Washington Blade photo by Michael. Key)

The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday voted 215-214 for passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” reconciliation package, which includes provisions that would prohibit the use of federal funds to support gender-affirming care.

But for an 11th hour revision of the bill late Wednesday night by conservative lawmakers, Medicaid and CHIP would have been restricted only from covering treatments and interventions administered to patients younger than 18.

The legislation would also drop requirements that some health insurers must cover gender-affirming care as an “essential health benefit” and force states that currently mandate such coverage to find it independently. Plans could still offer coverage for transgender care but without the EHB classification patients will likely pay higher out of pocket costs.

To offset the cost of extending tax cuts from 2017 that disproportionately benefited the wealthiest Americans, the reconciliation bill contains significant cuts to spending for federal programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

The Human Rights Campaign criticized House Republicans in a press release and statement by the group’s president, Kelley Robinson:

“People in this country want policies and solutions that make life better and expand access to the American Dream. Instead, anti-equality lawmakers voted to give  handouts to billionaires built on the backs of hardworking people — with devastating consequences for the LGBTQ+ community.

“If the cuts to programs like Medicaid and SNAP or resources like Planned Parenthood clinics weren’t devastating enough, House Republicans added a last minute provision that expands its attacks on access to best practice health care to transgender adults.

“This cruel addition shows their priorities have never been about lowering costs or expanding health care access–but in targeting people simply for who they are. These lawmakers have abandoned their constituents, and as they head back to their districts, know this: they will hear from us.”

Senate Republicans are expected to pass the bill with the budget reconciliation process, which would allow them to bypass the filibuster and clear the spending package with a simple majority vote.

Changes are expected as the bill will be reviewed and amended by committees, particularly the Finance Committee, and then brought to the floor for debate — though modifications are expected to focus on Medicaid reductions and debate over state and local tax deductions.

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Congress

Gerry Connolly dies at 75 after battle with esophageal cancer

Va. congressman fought for LGBTQ rights

Published

8 hours ago

on

May 22, 2025

By

U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) speaks at a Barack Obama rally on Oct. 19, 2012. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

Democratic U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia died on Wednesday, according to a statement from his family.

The 75-year-old lawmaker, who served in Congress since 2009, announced last month that he will not seek reelection and would step down from his role as the top Democrat on the powerful U.S. House Oversight Committee because his esophageal cancer had returned.

“We were fortunate to share Gerry with Northern Virginia for nearly 40 years because that was his joy, his purpose, and his passion,” his family said in their statement. “His absence will leave a hole in our hearts, but we are proud that his life’s work will endure for future generations.”

“He looked out for the disadvantaged and voiceless. He always stood up for what is right and just,” they said.

Connolly was memorialized in statements from colleagues and friends including House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), former President Joe Biden, and U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.).

Several highlighted Connolly’s fierce advocacy on behalf of federal workers, who are well represented in his northern Virginia congressional district.

The congressman also supported LGBTQ rights throughout his life and career.

When running for the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors in 1994, he fought the removal of Washington Blade newspapers from libraries. When running in 2008 for the U.S. house seat vacated by Tom Davis, a Republican, Connolly campaigned against the amendment to Virginia’s constitution banning same-sex marriage and civil unions in the state.

In Congress, he supported the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality, the Biden-Harris administration’s rescission of the anti-trans military ban, and the designation within the State Department of a special LGBTQ rights envoy. The congressman also was an original cosponsor of the Equality Act and co-sponsored legislation to repeal parts of the Defense of Marriage Act.


 

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Congress

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s bill to criminalize gender affirming care advances

Judiciary Committee markup slated for Wednesday morning

Published

2 days ago

on

May 20, 2025

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U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)’s “Protect Children’s Innocence Act,” which would criminalize guideline-directed gender affirming health care for minors, will advance to markup in the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning.

Doctors and providers who administer medical treatments for gender dysphoria to patients younger than 18, including hormones and puberty blockers, would be subject to Class 3 felony charges punishable by up to 10 years in prison if the legislation is enacted.

LGBTQ advocates warn conservative lawmakers want to go after families who travel out of state to obtain medical care for their transgender kids that is banned or restricted in the places where they reside, using legislation like Greene’s to expand federal jurisdiction over these decisions. They also point to the medically inaccurate way in which the bill characterizes evidence-based interventions delineated in standards of care for trans and gender diverse youth as “mutilation” or “chemical castration.”

Days into his second term, President Donald Trump signed “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,” an executive order declaring that the U.S. would not “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit” medical treatments and interventions intended for this purpose.

Greene, who has introduced the bill in years past, noted the president’s endorsement of her bill during his address to the joint session of Congress in March when he said “I want Congress to pass a bill permanently banning and criminalizing sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body.”

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