How The Babadook Became A Gay Icon For Pride Month
This has been six months in the making.
It’s Pride Month, which means it’s time to boost the voices of LGBTIQ people and celebrate the history of the community and all its icons. This includes the most recent addition, the Babadook. Yes, you read correctly.
Why? How? Well, It all started with a little glitch from Netflix which listed The Babadook as an LGBT film.
Tumblr users took hold of the happy accident in late 2016 and ran with it.
Ever since then, many people have celebrated the Babadook’s brave commitment to the queer rights movement unflinchingly. After all, how could you not see the accurate and in-depth LGBTIQ representation in a horror film about a nightmarish monster in a creepy children’s book? Sounds like someone wasn’t really paying attention.
The story of the Babadook’s coming out journey has been growing and growing with Tumblr users, but it took some time to escape the platform’s bubble. It wasn’t too long before the fan art starting coming as well.
And now we’ve reached Pride Month. The Babadook (as a meme) is in his prime and the mainstream media have now been forced to explain to the unaware masses what the Gay Babadook is and why millennials are like this.
Fairfax have explained critical fan theories about the Babadook’s tendency to invade heteronormative spaces. Huffpo have pinned the Babadook’s pop-up book down as evidence as his flair for the dramatic. LGBT publication NewNowNext has heralded the Babadook as the (un)official mascot of Pride Month 2017.
normies: this is the birth of the babadook is gay meme
me: this is the tragic death of the longstanding babadook is gay meme— j a c k s o n (@headfallsoff) June 8, 2017
For those playing serious catch-up, The Babadook was released in 2014 as an indie horror film starring Australian actress Essie Davis. After working with a $2 million budget, the film raked in a $7.5 million at the box office. It was labelled a success for its screenplay and direction. It was… much later that anyone was talking about LGBT representation.
Why we as a people decided to label a terrifying creature which torments families as a true icon for gay rights, I simply do not know.
Great thing about being gay: we've survived so much bullshit that we now effortlessly turn terrifying monsters into gay icons for fun: pic.twitter.com/dOrF0N12fy
— Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) June 7, 2017
im hoarding gay babadook memes pic.twitter.com/hFSeiRnUXK
— mel (@turfburned) June 7, 2017
The gays have done it again and I feel reluctantly obliged to welcome our new LGBT overlord. Happy Pride Month!
— This is horrible (@melongifts) June 4, 2017
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Feature image: Jacob Bullards/Twitter.