Where Did 'Be Gay Do Crime' Originate And Spread?

I found it recently online under the title ‘be gay do crime’, a little rebellious phrase that, similar to other terms, has quickly spread over the web. In a first glance it looks like the beginning of a punk song on a zine, but there is more to it than that. As it has been online for several years, it must have originated from two different sources: The first one could be from the queer and punk scenes that have been declaring war against mainstream culture for decades, using inimitable and provocative slogans in order to create an identity of their own. The second source, and perhaps more relevant for our study, are the new social media platforms of the 2010s that have been enabling the spread of extremely short online messages.

The phrase originated on Tumblr, a perfect breeding ground for this type of slogan, as the platform is already dense with queer communities, reblog-heavy, and accustomed to the in-joke that can simultaneously function as a political statement. Twitter and Instagram followers of activists, fannish communities, and jokesters would then add their own layer of interpretation to the slogan, often layering abolitionist or anti-carceral politics on top of queer identity and an irreverent sense of humor. Thus, “be gay do crime” can appear on a sticker for your laptop as mere meme-irony, but also on a bumper sticker on a pickup truck or on a handmade patch worn to a small Pride picnic – the phrase functions on a spectrum and indicates that the wearer is queer and skeptical of mainstream laws and law enforcement.

What I find sort of compelling and weird about this slogan is that it traces a sort of unique lifecycle of modern protest language. It originated in sort of a site of resistance, then made its way through sorts of fandoms and joke cultures, got commodified and then re-entered into sorts of activist discourse. There are a lot of ways that people sort of resent that sort of commodification of sorts of resistance, but at the same time it creates a space for queer communities to find each other. I saw it on a bumper sticker on a pickup truck a number of days ago, and then I saw it on a hand-made patch that a person was selling at a small sort of Pride celebration a number of days later. For better or worse, it’s sort of a really defiant and sort of campy and sort of politically-charged slogan, and it makes me sort of smile whenever I see it around town.

So I’m a bit older and a bit more of a geek when it comes to tracing cultural influences, so I’ve been thinking of ‘be gay do crime’ as a meme. It originated from historical instances of queer resistance that have been accelerated by the internet. So the queero-punk scene that existed in the 1990s in the form of analog distributions of provocative and controversial language in the form of zines, and words and actions that challenged the mainstream culture in queer performance and in pubic in scenes and shows.

After it spread online for a while, it got incorporated into merchandise (pins, shirts, stickers, etc.) and image-based content (like TikTok videos). The phrase itself had already been subject to a number of interpretations (it was often used as a cheeky identity badge by some, while others took it more literally as a call to civil disobedience or even abolitionist action). Many scholars and commentators have described the Internet-facilitated spread of ‘be gay do crime’ and likened it to stickiness because it is simple, transgressive and highly interpretable. It has been used in protest art and as the subject of late-night TV sketches (each of which conveys a different message). To me, phrases like this reveal how online communities repurpose elements of humor and defiance to create and hold space for explorations of identity and critique.

From a design perspective, the phrase "is a dream" is ideal as it is very short (3 words and a verb phrase) and will fit on anything. I run a small sticker shop and demand for this phrase goes up and down like the tide. The large commercial spread of this phrase was a big part of the phrase's popularity. As with many independent artists selling on sites like Etsy, Redbubble, and Teepublic, the phrase was translated into physical merchandise such as t-shirts, hats, and water bottles that could be bought by and worn by fans of the phrase. People would see a sticker of the phrase in a window, search for the phrase online, find memes related to the phrase, and then become a part of the larger culture and community surrounding the phrase. The phrase originated online, but as merchandise it has a tangible life in the world and is able to have a life in the world of social media beyond the short attention span of most online feeds. The physical artifact of the phrase has a longer half-life of cultural relevance than a single tweet.