Abstract
The gay frog has taken on a surprisingly prominent role in contemporary environmental culture. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. “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. “I’m sick of being social engineered. 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. 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. 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.2 There is also a growing industry of scholarship on another alt-right frog, Pepe.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.4 Existing scholarship neglects the central theme of humor. The appeal of the frog also merits further consideration.
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. 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. 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. 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.5
The gay frog and Jones have fallen from mainstream attention since the height of their popularity in 2017–18. The alt-right has also fragmented, notably since the violent 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.6 Other far-right movements have risen in prominence, including the QAnon conspiracy theory and its followers, fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic.7 Nevertheless, the resentments that motivated the alt-right persist in American culture. 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. 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. Similarly, the gay frog offers insights into the ambivalent uses of humor in contemporary political culture that resonate beyond an environmental context.
The Gay Frog and Other Queer Animals
The gay frog is one of a number of apparently gay nonhuman animals to have prompted media, political, and scientific alarm since concern over the impact of EDCs on animal sexual reproduction and morphology rose to mainstream attention in the mid-1990s.8 The description of these animals as gay is problematic. The use of a term derived from human social categories, experience, and identity risks anthropocentrism. What is more, animals described in headlines as gay, including the gay frog, often display sexual morphologies more accurately captured by the term intersex rather than engaging in homoerotic behavior. Nevertheless, animals do participate in what we would understand as homoerotic activity. These behaviors are regularly taken as evidence of environmental contamination, in this case by synthetic xenoestrogens, chemicals that mimic the function of the hormone estrogen in the endocrine system. This assumption is often incorrect; there are, for instance, just a lot of lesbian gulls.9 The nonhuman world displays an extraordinary diversity of sexual morphologies and practices regardless of the presence of polluting chemicals.10
Just as norms of human bodies and behaviors are often justified through reference to animal practices, gay animals are presented as a vision of humanity’s frightening future: what has happened to them may happen to us. A focal point is the cis male body, presented as “under siege, endangered, and threatened.”11 This “repro-centric” argument risks pathologizing queer, intersex, and trans bodies by portraying them as abnormal products of a contaminated environment.12 The subsequent “sex panic” or “transex panic” occludes issues of environmental justice—crucially, the greater impact of contamination on racialized and working-class communities—and other serious consequences of environmental pollution, including increased rates of cancer.13 It also promotes a false idea of sex and sexuality as fixed, when these are better understood as dynamically produced within social and environmental contexts that include toxicity and self-medication.14
The chemical alteration of nonhuman animal sexual behaviors or morphologies may cause concern at a species level. However, it is worth noting that it is not obvious that the individual animal has been harmed; the gay frog may well live a contented life.15 Similarly, while we must be alert to the differential impacts of chemical contaminants on reproduction in marginalized communities,16 many queer, trans, or intersex people are indifferent to whether our bodies and desires are natural or artificial in origin. This question is irrelevant to our entitlement to rights and freedoms. Discourse on the gay frog, then, revives older debates on environmental health, sexual normalcy, and racial justice analyzed by queer ecologists. It also emerges amid a renewed assault on trans rights and the rise of “global masculinism” that underline the importance of analyzing its meaning now.17
Intersex frogs were first brought to public attention in the late 1990s by University of California, Berkeley endocrinologist and amphibian biologist Tyrone Hayes. Other scientists have researched this topic, but Hayes has become a minor celebrity through his TED talks.18 His story has been well rehearsed. In 1998, Hayes was employed by Swiss company Syngenta to examine the effects of its herbicide atrazine on frogs. Atrazine is the second most-used herbicide in the United States after Monsanto’s Roundup (glyphosate).19 Through tests on the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), a frog commonly used in lab experiments, Hayes and his team found that male frogs exposed to atrazine had significantly reduced testosterone levels and variations in reproductive organs, including having both ovaries and testes, multiple sets of each organ, and testes that produced eggs.20 They also had smaller larynxes, rendering them less able to produce croaks to attract females.21 Hayes later found that some male frogs exposed to atrazine produced viable eggs after copulating with unaffected male frogs.22 Hayes leaked these discoveries and was subsequently harassed by Syngenta.
Frogs are often seen as “indicator species” for the health of an environment, so their transformation prompts alarm. Still, Hayes’s language reaffirms the heteronormative and pathologizing effects of gay animal discourse.23 In paper titles Hayes refers to “hermaphroditic, demasculinized frogs” that have undergone “complete feminization and chemical castration.”24 In a TED talk he describes these frogs as “NOT normal,” prompting audience laughter.25 Hayes is, as he has discussed, outside of the norm, as an African American endocrinologist who became the youngest full professor ever at UC Berkeley.26 He has worked to promote ethnic diversity in his department and make science accessible because, he says, “this environmental and public health issue is also a racial/social justice issue,” with poor and racialized communities most likely to be exposed and least likely to have access to the science.27 Yet Hayes’s public interventions have made less reference to environmental justice than an “imperiled normal” of binary gender, the heterosexual family, and broader structures of society.28 Lately he has nuanced his comments, stating that “words like top and bottom [to describe frogs’ coitus], male and female, can be isolating to individuals that we really need to be our allies outside of the scientific community.”29 These recantations, while welcome, seem unlikely to undo the influence of his earlier rhetoric on popular scientific discourse and public consciousness.
The Gay Frog and Alex Jones
The best-known example of the gay frog in popular culture is a 2015 YouTube broadcast by Alex Jones. Jones is the founder of online multimedia enterprise Infowars, a website, radio show, and YouTube channel adjacent to the American alt-right and a platform for “fake news,” including theories of “a global conspiracy orchestrated by an elite cabal.”30 His broadcasts present an assault of information in which Jones, a stocky former body builder, works himself into an agitated state, pounding his desk and shouting until red in the face. It is funny; deliberately so, as I discuss below. The Infowars business model “monetis[es] the fears created by Jones’ messages,” with the website Infowars Store selling dubious health-related products and survivalist equipment for “preppers.”31 Jones’s once-significant reach has waned in recent years following social media bans. However, the COVID-19 pandemic provided him with renewed opportunities. In April 2020 Jones participated in “Reopen America” rallies against the lockdown, and Infowars Store sold a supposedly coronavirus-curing silver toothpaste that was condemned by the US Food and Drug Administration.
Jones’s frog rant emerged from this confluence of conspiracy, profiteering, and performance. In his 2015 video he stated that “the majority of the frogs in the US are now gay,” the result of government operations that echoed earlier efforts to create a “gay bomb” (this possibility was investigated by the US military in the early 2000s).32 In September 2017 Jones uploaded a further video titled “PROOF! Gay Frogs Are Real Alex Jones Was Right,” which splices his analysis with science and news reporting, including clips of Hayes. He returned to the topic on Halloween in 2018, hopping around in a frog costume and pink tutu, drinking from a water bottle branded “ATRAZINE” while pouring it over his face and chest, and claiming to have “come out” as a gay frog.33 In this video Jones writes lines on a whiteboard and pretends to retract his claims about atrazine on behalf of Infowars, pleading in baby talk to be let back onto Twitter (from which he had recently been banned). In 2020 Jones returned to atrazine, claiming that it shrinks boys’ genitals.34
For Jones the gay frog is both conspiracy and business proposition. The 2017 broadcast was followed with an extended advertisement for water filtration products carried by Infowars Store. The site offers many options, from a $79.95 water filter jug (a non-Infowars-branded equivalent costs around $20) to a Propur Home System for $1,799. The most popular item, with over a thousand reviews (if they are genuine), is the Alexapure Pro Water Filtration System for $269.95, containing “the same water filter that Alex Jones and the Infowars crew use everyday.”35 These products and their placement show Jones’s ability to profit from the fears stoked by his broadcasts.
The Gay Frog, Memes, and the Alt-Right
Jones’s 2015 rant was widely shared. While original viewing figures are unavailable following Jones’s YouTube ban, its reach is seen in the endless remixes produced by internet users as the clip became a meme. A meme, according to Limor Shifman, is “a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance . . . that were created with awareness of each other; and . . . were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.”36 Memes involve what Shifman describes as “bizarre, weird, and unexpected juxtapositions” and spread, as Lisa Nakamura writes, “not only because they are bizarre and therefore interesting in themselves, but because they invite the use and remixing of familiar images in unusual contexts.”37 Memes are usually intended to be funny.38 Like humor more generally, memes mark an individual as a member of a group that is in on the joke and strengthen online communities. Memes have received increasing academic attention in recent years, but their humorousness has often proven a barrier to analysis of themes of race and gender.39 The limited critical attention to these topics echoes a wider invocation of comic intent as a strategy for disavowing political meaning.40 However, the astonishing reach of memes—one dance music remix of Jones’s rant has over 16 million views on YouTube—makes it crucial to analyze them in this light.41
The identities of the creators of gay frog memes are almost impossible to discover, and this is pertinent to their ambivalent political effects. The same memes circulate in alt-right and liberal-left spaces. For instance, a gay frog meme based on the Animorphs children’s book and TV series appears on the now-banned Reddit alt-right forum r/pol (“politically incorrect,” an alt-right signifier) and the popular Facebook group “Frogspotting,” which encourages LGBTQ+ content.42 The political orientation of meme creators is further obscured by what Nick Douglas terms the “Internet Ugly” aesthetic, which remains “the core aesthetic of memetic internet content.”43 This involves “freehand mouse drawing, digital puppetry, scanned drawings, poor grammar and spelling, human-made glitches, and rough photo manipulation” and celebrates “the sloppy and the amateurish.”44 Lack of obvious authorship is a common feature of memes, which are, as Shifman notes, “circulated, imitated, and/or transformed . . . by many users” by definition.45 “Anonymity,” as Patrick Davison writes, “enables a type of freedom” from regulation and punishment, particularly for “transgressive” material, while the lack of attribution encourages circulation.46 In the case of gay frog memes the lack of obvious authorship can nudge far-right ideas into the mainstream.
Expertise in creating memes is a defining feature of the otherwise disparate movement known as the alt-right.47 Gay frog memes must be understood in this context. “Alt-right” is short for “alternative right” and was coined in 2008 by alt-right figurehead and neo-Nazi Richard Spencer. While the alt-right has prominent members including Spencer, it is not a conventional organized political movement. As George Hawley notes, it “has no formal institutions or a leadership caste issuing orders to loyal followers” and no official manifesto.48 Largely existing online and associated with the participatory sites 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit, the alt-right brings together a group of predominantly young, white, educated, and internet-literate men disillusioned with mainstream conservatism. The alt-right laments the decline of “an idealized model of white masculinity,” seen as threatened by “modern, ‘degenerate’ influences,” including multiculturalism, immigration, and feminism.49 It unites white nationalists, men’s rights activists, members of the online “manosphere,” and advocates of the authoritarian philosophy of “neoreaction,” who self-consciously adopt leftist vocabulary to protest the “marginalization” of their identities by political correctness and argue for racial and gender hierarchies.50 The movement gained mainstream attention during the 2016 presidential election through provocative stunts in support of Trump, who reciprocated this interest.51 The alt-right, like Donald Trump, is often presented in liberal and conservative media as an aberration. However, many features of the alt-right are shared with traditional conservatism, including the borrowing of the tactics of the left, an investment in hierarchies of natural order and rule, and a sense of victimhood and loss.52 This proximity to the mainstream underscores the importance of analyzing the alt-right’s culture and methods.
Interpreting gay frog memes requires engaging with the wider meanings of frogs in alt-right environmental imaginaries. The notion of an alt-right environmental imaginary may seem surprising given the movement’s primarily online existence, yet the importance allocated by the alt-right to nonhuman nature is continuous with its role in nationalist and far-right thought. Nationalist environmental imaginaries serve to assert the strength, rootedness, mythic origins, and ethnic homogeneity of a national community; the organicity and distinctiveness of national character; and the need to defend the space of the nation against outsiders.53 In this context specific animals and landscapes take on symbolic meanings.54 The alt-right’s use of frogs also derives from the role of “virtual menageries” in mediating technological encounters (most famously, in online contexts, cats).55 Frog memes are part of a wider contemporary phenomenon and an older history of using animals and animal images to build “social bonds, material connectivities, and collective imaginaries.”56
The most famous alt-right frog is the anthropomorphic cartoon frog Pepe. Pepe was created in 2005 by artist Matt Furie for the comic Boy’s Club and identified by the Anti-Defamation League in 2016 as a “hate symbol.” Furie, horrified at the appropriation of his character by the alt-right, has sought to suppress it. The significance of Pepe, a frog with bulging eyes usually shown in profile from the neck up, is not obvious to the uninitiated, so the meme serves as a dog whistle. Pepe’s first appearance shows him pulling his trousers all the way down to pee and leaving the door open, during which he is accidentally seen. When another character questions Pepe’s behavior, he coins his catchphrase, “Feels good, man.” Pepe’s refusal of social expectations and symbolization of “a kind of superior nonchalance towards others” enabled his alt-right appropriation.57 By 2015, Pepe began to appear on 4chan and Reddit wearing a KKK hood, with a Hitler mustache, or standing outside gas chambers, in the alt-right strategy of garnering attention through provocation.58
Why Frogs?
The meanings of frogs in European and North American cultures are pertinent to the frog’s alt-right appeal. Neither charismatic megafauna nor “unloved other,” the frog fails to fit into the two nonhuman animal categories that dominate environmental humanities scholarship.59 Frogs, as Charlotte Sleigh notes, are “liminal creatures: animals of the in-between.” They are the “largest creatures to undergo such a dramatic metamorphosis,” from a water existence to a terrestrial one, and adults are both of water and land and of neither.60 Frogs are formed differently from other aquatic vertebrates. They are the only underwater swimmers with legs apart from their relatives, newts. Hairless, with front-facing eyes and hands, they are oddly human.61 Yet frogs are strange. Their hopping is unnerving to many, recalling the notoriously frightening spider.62 Their skin is cold and slimy (this moistness allows it to absorb oxygen), while frogs are associated with “unhealthy” environments of stagnant swamps rather than the “living water” that symbolizes health and purity.63
Frogs challenge normative models of human reproduction, associated with excessive fertility, known for mass mating rituals and for producing endless eggs. The adult male midwife toad, a frog’s batrachian relative, unseats the gendered binary in reproductive labor by acting as primary caregiver and wrapping eggs around its back legs. The Suriname toad’s habit of incubating eggs in holes in its back often elicits visceral disgust. This association recurs in Hayes’s comment that the sexual development of his test frogs is “NOT normal, even for amphibians,” evoking and reinforcing the popular understanding of frogs as sexually alien.64
Frogs resist easy classification, categorized in early modern times with snakes or insects, and as reptiles until the latter half of the nineteenth century.65 This taxonomic slipperiness and link to the paradigmatically sinful creature of the snake may have aided the association between frogs, witches, and the devil.66 Frogs and toads serve as vehicles for xenophobia, from English caricatures of French people and suspicion of the French for eating this strange and “unclean” creature, to Australia’s battles over the Cane Toad, an invasive species that stands in for other conversations about unwanted outsiders, like the American bullfrog elsewhere.67 In European mythology frogs are shapeshifters, turning into a prince when kissed; unlucky humans might be turned into a frog. Finally, but fundamentally, frogs are funny. Their squat appearance renders them the butt of the joke, with Mr. Toad, of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, cementing their reputation as “vainglorious” and “hapless.”68 Toad seems echoed in Pepe’s reputation as Trumpian underdog.69
These characteristics make the frog a vehicle for alt-right anxieties around sex, race, bodies, and borders. The gay frog manifests and feeds an alt-right preoccupation with the “erosion” of white masculinity by feminism and political correctness, partly a result of its origins in the online “manosphere.”70 It evokes fears of bodily violation, transformed by a substance that enters its body via chemical trespass.71 The gay frog is a reminder of “transcorporeality,” a term used by Stacy Alaimo to describe the intertwining of bodies and environment.72 Transcorporeality often motivates calls for solidarity on the basis of shared “exposure” to a common environmental threat.73 With frogs, transcorporeality enables “a space of intrusion”; EDCs enter the frog’s body without consent and prompt fear of the parallel process in human, particularly straight, cis, male, bodies.74 The feminizing effect of this trespass is not just the physical feminization undergone by the frogs, but the forced passivity and violation of the “hard” bodies of heterosexual, white, cis, able-bodied men. All bodies are constituted and sustained by flows of liquids and their dissolved cargo across our membranes, yet leakiness and porosity are primarily associated with feminized and queer bodies.75 Gay frogs reveal the straight, cis, male body as alarmingly permeable. Atrazine’s crossing of the frogs’ bodily borders might even evoke a further crossing in the form of receiving anal sex, often (falsely, as Leo Bersani notes) understood according to a logic that “to be penetrated is to abdicate power,” recalling in turn discourses of HIV/AIDS transmission via fluid exchanges.76 The gay frog is an analogue to the human “soy boy,” an alt-right insult leveled at liberal men seen as emasculated by feminism and by xenoestrogens in tofu and soy milk consumed because of their “feminine” abstention from animal products.77 The soy boy and gay frog evoke alt-right fears of degeneration, with the parallel fear of “white genocide” always present in anxieties over reproductive capacity. In this way alt-right fears of feminization also echo antisemitic fin-de-siècle degeneration discourse, which posited the supposed effeminacy and homosexuality of Jewish men as a risk to the white race.78
This brings us to the anxieties about race and immigration evoked by the gay frog. As discussed above, frogs are often associated with foreignness, gender nonconformity, and nonnormative sexual practices. Some of the most influential scholarship on these themes in contemporary US politics and popular culture is by Jasbir Puar. Puar has examined popular representations of the perversely racialized and sexualized Muslim terrorist and the emergence of an “aggressive heterosexual patriotism” after 9/11.79 These representations echo the role of earlier tropes of Jewish sexual and gender fluidity in positioning Jews as alien. Puar’s work also illuminates stereotypes of Mexican immigrants as “unrestrained ‘breeders’ of welfare-consuming children,” which recur in anti-immigrant discourses and render conditional the citizenship of US citizens of Mexican descent.80 These reflections on the relationship between sexuality, race, and national citizenship help us to interpret the racial meanings of the gay frog.
We might speculatively describe the gay frog as playing a dual role in alt-right discourse as both a danger and endangered. In one reading, the frog’s homosexuality merges with its reputation for excessive breeding and invasive spreading into new territories, producing a figure of sexual monstrosity that stands in for the queerly racialized immigrant who threatens to overwhelm the (white) nation. In another, the innocent frog emerges as a victim of uncontrolled movement of contaminants across bodily and national borders that violate the (racial) purity of the nation and evoke alt-right fears of white men as an “endangered species.” These are sometimes articulated explicitly in alt-right rhetoric of white “habitat loss” to “invasive” immigrants.81 This proto-environmental narrative became reincorporated into a Trumpian vision of national restoration. Indeed, one of the many forms of gay frog merchandise available online is a green and white trucker cap bearing the message “MAKE FROGS STRAIGHT AGAIN,” a riff on Trump’s 2016 election campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” worn on red and white hats by his supporters.82 The alt-right concern for uncontaminated and “pure” environments is part of a distinct antimodern, ecofascist lineage, yet its resonances with mainstream environmentalism should give environmentalists cause for concern.
The Gay Frog Is Funny
I have so far neglected a crucial issue: humor. Comedy is often understood as a strategy for dissipating anxiety, and we might see frog memes as an alt-right strategy for alleviating the above fears.83 Yet as Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai note, comedy “just as likely produces anxiety: risking transgression, flirting with displeasure, or just confusing things in a way that both intensifies and impedes the pleasure.”84 This seems apt to the mutable frog and its perverse evocation of improper pleasures, and to the “alt-right’s self-image as agents of chaos” in the service of Kek (the Egyptian frog-headed god of chaos, and part of the alt-right’s broader frog iconography).85 Comedy also defines social groups; the popularity of memes is founded on the “invisible bond” between those who get the joke.86 Equally crucial is who doesn’t get the joke or is cast in a disapproving role. Laughter is often seen as a spontaneous emanation from the body that tells us truths (good and bad) about an inner self, and its contestation is sometimes received as “interference with a core freedom.”87 Comedy would seem, then, to be of particular interest to conservatives as self-appointed defenders of freedom, and indeed conservatives often portray the right to laugh as under threat. Alt-right memes, similarly, are an assertion of pleasures seen as denied by politically correct culture, particularly by feminists.88
Humor plays practical roles in the dissemination of alt-right material. It helps ideas get noticed in the fast-moving online attention economy. It also provides a “ludic alibi” that offers plausible deniability for racism or sexism.89 Andrew Anglin, founder and editor of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, encourages humor in alt-right communication, writing that “the unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not” and favoring an ironic mode.90 Irony, as Linda Hutcheon writes, is “the making or inferring of meaning in addition to and different from what is stated, together with an attitude toward both the said and the unsaid.”91 It is “political and apolitical, both conservative and radical, both repressive and democratizing.”92 This ambiguity provides, as I discuss later, the opportunity for environmental repurposing. Crucial here is irony’s capacity to sustain an “axis of power” in which the ironist is “smiling down—with irony—upon the rest of us.”93 Jones’s performances may seem less obviously ironic given his use of physical comedy. However, he often flags a knowing awareness of his paranoid appearance through ironic strategies including, in one broadcast, fashioning a tinfoil hat on air.94 Irony allows Jones to project authenticity, presenting himself as committed to truth-telling even though he seems crazy.95 His audience, similarly, becomes part of an “elite” through being in on the joke-that-is-not-a-joke.
In mainstream liberal media the gay frog symbolizes alt-right credulity. American talk show hosts Stephen Colbert and John Oliver have invoked Jones’s gay frog rants to mock his apparent stupidity and that of his viewers.96 In 2017 Oliver dedicated a special episode of his HBO show Last Week Tonight to analyzing Jones, presenting a clip of Jones discussing frogs as ultimate evidence of his gullibility. Colbert proffers these clips to suggest a fanatical and bizarre obsession.97 These commentaries are satires, a mode distinct from irony yet to which irony is typically integral.98 They mobilize the “corrective” function of irony, using ridicule to expose the dangerous follies of far-right thinking.99 In particular, they are examples of satire’s tendency to advocate for “reform” of the butt of the joke—in this case Jones, his viewers, and the American news media—and of “satiractivism,” enacting the reform of news media through their debunking strategies.100 In spite of Jones’s obnoxiousness, these depictions feel distasteful. Colbert’s and Oliver’s mobilizations of Jones and his gay frogs resemble a phenomenon noted by Ngai, in which “Other People’s Aesthetic Pleasures” are “folded into the heart” of the pleasures of another group, in this case Colbert’s and Oliver’s liberal, metropolitan viewers.101 This group’s cohesion is increased through shared laughter at and contempt toward Jones’s assumed audience. Here irony fulfills its conservative function, bolstering an “axis of power” that reaffirms the social order.102 As contemporary critics noted, elitist laughter may have hastened the rise of Trump through consolidating his supporters’ sense of being scorned by the liberal mainstream. It also helps explain why his victory was experienced by many as a surprise.103
Liberal laughter has further dangers. As Cynthia Miller-Idriss writes, “memes have become one of the most common ways that far-right content gets shared,” including by its opponents.104 As an anonymous user of the now-banned r/pol forum put it,
And if you think about it the way Alex Jones conveyed that piece of information is brilliant because now you have an internet full of gay frog meme’s with Alex Jones sperging out [sic] on some 90’s techno beat, everyone is laughing at him but that’s okay because now the seed has been planted far and wide and next time you hear someone jokingly bringing up gay frogs you just refer them to Tyrone Haze videos on youtube and BAM you can redpill someone, suddenly a bubble will pop in their heads, something they thought ridiculous is suddenly real.105
To “redpill” is a reference to the Wachowskis’ film The Matrix (1999), in which protagonist Neo (Keanu Reeves) chooses between a red pill that will reveal the truth about the world and a blue pill that will allow him to live in ignorance. Particularly associated with online men’s rights activist communities, the phrase indicates the potential for laughter at Jones to act as a gateway into alt-right beliefs.
These effects are illustrated by a six-minute video uploaded by Jones to YouTube in September 2017 titled “PROOF! Gay Frogs Are Real Alex Jones Was Right.”106 In this video Jones tackles his critics while demonstrating the reinforcing role played by Hayes in alt-right rhetoric. The clip begins with Jones doing a vox pop (a spontaneous interview) with a woman who tells him that he is a conspiracy theorist and “not helping our country.” When challenged to name one of his conspiracies the woman responds, rolling her eyes, “that water is making the frogs gay,” underscoring this as his most absurd belief. The video switches to Hayes paddling in a murky-looking river and explaining his research as his team catches unhealthy-looking frogs. Hayes uses the language of “eco-normativity,” stating that “frankly, if you’re a genetic male it’d be nice if you developed as a genetic male” and referring to a frog “on the bottom, acting as a female.” An incongruous montage of the “’90s techno beat” remix of Jones’s rant, footage of Colbert’s and Oliver’s smug critique, and clips from Hayes’s lab invites the viewer to judge the veracity of Jones’s claims for themselves, playing into skepticism about the mainstream media. In this clip and in the wider circulation of gay frog memes, liberal mockery of Jones by “ironic spectators” and Hayes’s work inadvertently bring far-right ideas about sex, race, and gender into the mainstream and imply the truth of other alt-right conspiracies.107 What is more, parodies by Colbert, Oliver, and other internet users ensure that Jones’s material remains available long after his social media ban. These provided a major source for this article after the disappearance of many of its primary sources and prompted me to examine my irritation at their insistence on Jones’s naivete.
Reframing the Gay Frog
Finally, I want to ask what environmentalists might learn from the gay frog. In her 2018 monograph Bad Environmentalism, Nicole Seymour describes the counterproductive tendency of corrective irony to reaffirm stereotypes of the environmentalist as smug, prescriptive, and holier-than-thou.108 She asks, “Might we find some value in or affinity with postfactual conspiratorialism, or, at least, its contrarian spirit?”109 For Seymour, this invitation forms part of a recuperation of aspects of queer theory largely absent from queer ecology, notably, its “trademark sensibilities: its playfulness, its irreverence, its interest in perversity, and its delight in irony.”110 Bad environmentalism promises a revitalization of environmental thought by looking for alternative environmental affects in unlikely places.111
Jones’s frog rants reinforce gendered and sexual stigmas and promote racist ideologies. Still, they also seem decidedly queer, from Jones’s perverse fascination with frog sex to his camp cross-species cross-dressing. The queer possibility in frog clips and memes is heightened when considered alongside the earnest reproductive futurism of traditional antitoxics activism, in which the viewer is hailed by images of human pregnancy and fetuses as current or future “parental protector.”112 The gay frog reminds us that the frog already conjures a different range of affects to those that environmental culture typically tries to induce. Bizarre, disgusting, numerous, the archetype of ugliness, the frog’s traits are the opposite of those expected to prompt environmental care, including nobility, bravery, beauty, and singularity. Yet as Seymour notes, for many the revolting, perverse, and funny traits of nonhumans are precisely their appeal.113 These traits help to explain the popularity of frogs on the social video-sharing app TikTok, with frogs celebrated by young queer users because of their strange and stigmatized reputation after Jones’s videos.
A further source of the gay frog’s appeal is its capacity to challenge well-meaning but homonormative accounts of homosexuality that invoke nature as a source of legitimacy. The gay penguin has long been the icon of “born this way” naturalizations of homosexuality that lead linearly to the raising of progeny. This narrative is shaped by its origins as a response to the elevation of penguins by the Christian Right as examples of the virtues of heterosexual, monogamous, nuclear families following the 2005 film March of the Penguins.114 The gay frog is the opposite of the gay penguin. It represents an antinaturalist account of queerness that acknowledges our immersion in chemical atmospheres while still allowing the potential to advocate for all forms of queer life. The gay frog might be understood as a creature of what Michelle Murphy calls “alterlife,” or a world already changed through the deliberate and inadvertent practices of technoscience.115 Alterlife is not simply a negative concept: “the openness to alteration may also describe the potential to become something else.”116 The gay frog offers what Helen Hester calls an aspirational “toxic queerness” through which we might “undermine things-as-they-are in favor of different and more emancipatory futures.”117 It invites alternative ways of thinking with chemicals and kin, pointing to the promise of reclaiming this creature and its strange, gross, and funny affects for progressive environmental politics and culture.118
The gay frog—and the panics it has provoked—are part of a longer history of fears over chemical transformations of animal sexuality and morphology. Still, the gay frog emerged at a moment at which the global far right is emboldened and the rights and safety of gender, racial, and sexual minorities are under intensified threat. Distinctive features of the frog enabled its emergence as a focus for alt-right anxieties about gender, sex, and race in Jones’s original broadcast and subsequent memes. A strange, sticky, seemingly sexually perverse amphibian, the frog refuses classification in disturbing ways even before being exposed to EDCs. At the same time, the small, innocent frog is an ideal victim in an alt-right narrative of the extinction of native species by outsiders, giving claims of “white genocide” an environmental sheen. Humor is a key aspect of contemporary representations of the gay frog, distinguishing this moment from earlier sex panics over gay animals. The funny figure of the gay frog brings far-right messages and imagery into the mainstream, including inadvertently, through liberal satire. The gay frog is a figure for bad environmentalists to think with. This creature may be an unlikely ally in the project of finding new, compelling ways to narrate environmental crisis and of imagining more liberatory—and even fun—ways of understanding sex and nature.
Acknowledgments
I presented earlier versions of this material at Sex and Nature at the University of Exeter and at the University of Worcester department seminar in 2019. Thanks to Charlotte Jones, Tom O’Shea, Ina Linge, Sarah Bezan, two anonymous reviewers, and audience members at the above events for invaluable comments. Special thanks to Gabby Patterson for introducing me to gay frogs. This research was supported by the Leverhulme Trust.
Notes
In August 2018, Jones was banned by YouTube and most major social media sites for promoting violence and hate speech. At the time of revising, the clip was available here: Scandinavian Clean Television, “Alex Jones ‘Turning the Freaking Frogs Gay,’” YouTube, April 19, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tVrntKgdN0 (accessed January 14, 2022); the full episode was here: Count Dooku, “Alex Jones Gay Bomb Rant (Full Video),” YouTube, May 8, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THFoayEgsV8 (accessed January 14, 2022).
Ah-King and Hayward, “Perverting Pollution”; di Chiro, “Polluted Politics?”; Kier, “Interdependent Ecological Transsex.”
One of the best commentaries is Woods and Hahner, Make America Meme Again, chap. 2. See also Jones, Feels Good Man.
O’Laughlin, “Troubling Figures,” and Perret, “‘Chemical Castration.’”
QAnon is a bizarre combination of antisemitic conspiracy theories that assert that former US president Donald Trump is battling a cabal of Satanic pedophiles, including Democratic politicians and celebrities, who control the world. It emerged in 2017 following cryptic posts on the 4chan imageboard by an anonymous user named Q. The core QAnon narrative echoes the 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory: that Hillary Clinton and high-level Democratic officials were part of a pedophile ring centered in the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, DC.
Di Chiro dates the emergence of mainstream panic over EDCs to the 1996 publication of the mass-market paperback Our Stolen Future, by Dianne Dumanoski, John Peterson Myers and Theo Colborn (Di Chiro, “Polluted Politics?,” 205).
Elizabeth Wilson, cited in Hird, “Animal Transex,” 45. See Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance, and Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow.
I draw here on Pollock, “Queering Endocrine Disruption,” 191.
Hayes et al., “Atrazine Induces Complete Feminization.” On the difficulties of sexing African clawed frogs, see O’Laughlin, “Troubling Figures,” 10–15.
Hayes’s language resembles medicalized discourse on intersex humans, positioning certain human and nonhuman bodies as in need of “fixing” and legitimizing a wider surveillance of human and nonhuman sex characteristics. Thanks to Charlotte Jones for this point.
Hayes et al., “Hermaphroditic, Demasculinized Frogs”; Hayes et al., “Atrazine Induces Complete Feminization.”
Cited in O’Laughlin, “Troubling Figures,” 22.
Williamson and Steel, 2018, cited in Van den Bulck and Hyzen, “Of Lizards,” 52.
The original has been removed but remains available in a parody video. Science Enthusiast, “Alex Jones ‘Comes Out’ as a Gay Frog,” YouTube, November 3, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qQ9lbL0VZc (accessed January 14, 2022).
The original has been removed but can be viewed here: Alex Jones Channel, “Report: ‘Gay Frog’ Chemical Atrazine Will Shrink Your Son’s Genitals,” Lbry.TV, January 23, 2020, https://odysee.com/@AlexJonesChannel:c/Report-Gay-Frog-Chemical-Atrazine-Will-Shrink-Your-Sons-Genitals:2?&sunset=lbrytv (accessed May 18, 2022).
Infowars Store, “Water and Air Filtration,” https://www.infowarsstore.com/preparedness/water-filtration (accessed January 14, 2022).
Shifman, cited in Nakamura, “‘I WILL DO EVERYthing,’” 269; Nakamura, “‘I WILL DO EVERYthing,’” 269.
placeboing, “Gay Frogs (Alex Jones REMIX),” YouTube, June 22, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JRLCBb7qK8 (accessed 14 January 2022). For further examples, see Tequila Sunset, “Alex Jones’ Gay Frogs Rant,” Know Your Meme, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/alex-jones-gay-frogs-rant (accessed January 14, 2022).
Available on Tequila Sunset, “Alex Jones’ Gay Frogs Rant,” Know Your Meme, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/alex-jones-gay-frogs-rant (accessed January 14, 2022).
These ideas have a longer history, dating to the work of eighteenth-century German philosophers Herder and Fichte, and to nineteenth-century romantic nationalism. See also Forchtner, “Far-Right Articulations,” 1; Taylor, “Alt-Right Ecology”; Boggs, “Rhetorical Landscapes.”
Gambert and Linné, “From Rice Eaters to Soy Boys”; Gleeson, “Anatomy of the Soy Boy”; Stănescu, “‘White Power Milk.’” On meat, milk, and masculinity, see Adams, Sexual Politics, 62; Gaard, “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies.” See also Robert McKay, “Vegan Form of Life.”
Taylor, “Alt-Right Ecology,” 277–78. For a related argument, see Perret, “‘Chemical Castration.’”
Memes for America, “Make Frogs Straight Again (Mesh Back),” https://web.archive.org/web/20210723211237/https://memesforamerica.com/products/make-frogs-straight-again-mesh-back (accessed July 26, 2022).
Cited in May and Feldman, “Understanding the Alt-Right,” 27.
Cited in Greene, “‘Deplorable’ Satire,” 34.
Available at the time of revising at Neckbeardia TTS Archive, “ALEX JONES TIN FOIL HAT SPECIAL,” YouTube, January 24, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej1trfAouIQ (accessed January 14, 2022).
Excerpts from Colbert and Oliver were included by Jones in his 2017 YouTube video, “PROOF! Gay Frogs Are Real Alex Jones Was Right,” which is no longer available online.
Colbert goes further with his character “Tuck Buckford,” who presents a program called Brain Fight, an allusion to Jones and Infowars.
Greene, “‘Deplorable Satire,’” 34–35.
Caron, “Quantum Paradox,” 156; McClennen and Maisel, cited in Caron, “Quantum Paradox,” 163.
Cited in Cheng, “Taking Back the Laugh,” 542.
Miller-Idriss, Extreme Gone Mainstream. See also May and Feldman, “Understanding the Alt-Right.”
Reddit, “Thread #198262637,” /pol/—Politically Incorrect, December 31, 2018 [Archived Copy], https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/198262637/#198282461 (accessed January 14, 2022).
The original video has been deleted and at the time of revising was no longer available online.
See also Bosworth, “Bad Environmentalism.”
