About

Gay Monkey refers to a viral video of a young gorilla with effeminate mannerisms that was popularized in September 2022. The video features a baby ape looking melancholy as he checks his nails, places his hand on his shoulder and trails it down his leg to his toe. The video was first posted to Twitter before migrating to TikTok where people mimicked the ape's mannerisms with the Lana Del Ray song "Ride" playing in the background or used the clip in Duets and Stitches.

Origin

On August 30th, 2022, Twitter^[1] user @esquizopoc originally posted the video of the young gorilla set to jazz music, with a caption that read, "todos os trejeitos," which translates to "all kind of mannerisms." The music overlayed on the video is a jazz cover of Tayler Swift's song "Daylight."^[5] The tweet gathered over 90,000 likes and 11 million views on the video in nearly 12 days (seen below).

todos os trejeitos pic.twitter.com/YNMhEwRZC1

— Esquizy 🍂 (@esquizopoc) August 31, 2022

Spread

On September 2nd, 2022, Twitter^[2] user @literally_joker reposted the video with the caption, "Gay little monkey." The post gathered over 90,000 likes and over 7,000 retweets in nearly 10 days (seen below).

Gay little monkey pic.twitter.com/tdDaVr8khv

— aloe (@literally_joker) September 2, 2022

On September 7th, the clip then spread to TikTok when TikToker^[3] @blueboytoy posted the video, this time set to Lana Del Ray's song "Ride." The post gathered over 700,000 plays and over 160,000 likes in nearly five days (seen below).

On September 10th, TikToker^[4] @sophiastrawberita posted a video Dueting @blueboytoy's upload and mimicking the monkey's mannerisms. The post gathered over 1.1 million views and over 200,000 likes in nearly two days (seen below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References