Gay Test (Demotivational Posters)

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About

Gay Test (Demotivational Posters) refers to an exploitable image macro format in the form of Demotivational Posters that include a suggestive image on the top with a line at the bottom indicating that if the viewer sees something else in the photo before the suggestive content, "they are gay." These memes are not used to point out if the viewer of the poster is homosexual or not and are only made for the lulz. The 2000s trend is not to be confused with the 2023 trend Gay Test Drawings.

Origin

On October 29th, 2007, the earliest-known example of a Gay Test was posted onto the picture-sharing site Evilmilk.com^[1] in the form of a suggestive demotivational poster by an unknown user. The image received over 261,000 views in roughly 13 years (seen below). It is considered as one of the site's "All-Time Most Viewed Funny Pictures."^[2]

GAY TEST If you noticed the poem on the mirror, l've got some bad news for you.

Poster Construction

The poster is usually made up of these three basic elements:

At least one girl anywhere in the picture or a reference to women
Something that's supposed to distract the viewer of the poster from the girl
A caption that reads, "GAY TEST: If you saw the distraction before the girl first, I've got some bad news for you…" or "GAY TEST: If you wouldn't, you're gay," or anything similar

Most, if not, all of these posters are made to make fun of only male people. Sometimes, Gay Test posters are made to point out that a subject in the poster has failed said test by ignoring the girl in the poster or any similar idea which could result in the guy being gay.

Spread

The meme soon started appearing all over the web after this early example above. A simple Google^[3] search for the phrase "gay test demotivational" results in about 206,000 results (as of December 21st, 2009).

On September 18th, 2018, Redditor HILrebellion posted another example of the meme to the /r/Animemes^[4] subreddit, receiving over 1,500 upvotes and 69 comments in six months (shown below, left). On May 13th, 2019, an unknown user then uploaded a variant to the site Lolcaption^[5] under "Funny Demotivational Posters" (shown below, right).