Why the Gay Community (and World) Needed GaysOverCovid

There’s a lesson to be learned that excusing reckless behavior makes you complicit in it.

Even Ru can’t help but judge. (Image Source)

For those not in the know: GaysOverCovid is an Instagram account that has very recently exploded in popularity due to its posts and stories tagging gays (and sometimes their employers, if they are medical workers) directly for meeting in large groups during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although it has existed for months, its popularity soared after it chronicled the gigantic parties and their attendees in Puerto Vallarta, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities during New Years Eve. It has divided the gay community’s opinions on whether publicly shaming people is ethical, earned a bounty for identification of its admin, and has even been featured on mainstream news.

I’m writing this mainly as a response to Why Shaming Those Puerto Vallarta Circuit Gays Isn’t Going to Work by Phillip Henry — an article that frustrated me (and over a hundred others, judging from the angry replies it has earned in less than 8 hours) as I read it because it reeked of excusing reckless behavior, ignoring our grim reality even after 300,000 virus-related deaths, and basically giving up.

TL;DR: GaysOverCovid has divided the gay community’s opinions because it is, at its simplest point, an anonymous exposé on people’s selfishness. It is publicizing who lacks enough compassion that they prioritize partying over other people’s health (and possibly lives). To hear people like Phillip trying to say this public shaming is morally wrong, despite the moral wrongness of the actual acts being shamed, reminds of the 2017 headline “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People.”

I’ll now go over point-by-point why Phillip’s think piece isn’t just lazy writing, it’s also misguided and potentially harmful:

Phillip first summarizes GaysOverCovid and vaguely discusses a need for controlling risk on a personal level. He then mentions that an abstinence-only approach will not work, but this is irrelevant in the context of GaysOverCovid: the page does not shame people for breaking isolation to meet in small groups, it shames them for going to large parties with dozens of people; the page does not shame people for driving to the next neighborhood over to hang out, it shames them for flying internationally to party. Those people are outright breaking CDC guidelines, the same guidelines Phillip quotes in his article. He says “there has to be room for discussion about harm reduction in these scenarios” when the discussion has already been had — several times, for months now.

Next, we see a very, very tired take: that gays disobey authority because they have been conditioned to do so by society. This viewpoint is weirdly pathologizing and has no place in attempting to explain why gays are going to circuit parties because it’s irrelevant. Even if these parties are “fixtures of our community […] born out of a rejection of shame,” they have no justification in a pandemic that thrives on large groups breathing in close proximity. They are risks taken entirely by choice. His opinion of going to these parties — that “perhaps it is worth considering a different course of action” — is so feeble and unconvincing that it may as well be approving.

From a psychological standpoint, shutting down these parties and reminding people that their actions are endangering others can lessen the feelings of FOMO that hosts often reap to make a profit, especially now, when cases are at their highest.

His next point discusses the overwhelmingly privileged gays traveling right now and chalks up their selfishness to hubris. “There’s no evidence to suggest that their individual good behavior will be rewarded” Phillip writes, “or that deciding not to partake is going to materially improve the overall nightmare that is this pandemic for themselves or anyone else.” Yes, Phillip, you’re so right! 9 months into this global pandemic, where there are regular headlines about how weddings, parties, and even funerals have led to upticks in cases, where less-privileged workers are vocal about their risk-filled working conditions, and where epidemiologists correctly predicted that there would be a massive uptick in cases in November and December due to widespread travel and family gatherings, who would ever think that cancelling travel and party plans might help others? (I’ll stop being sarcastic now.)

At 9 months into this absolute failure to contain the virus, anyone who is still insisting their actions take place in a void is naïve at best and sadistically selfish at worst.

Nurse Mike Schultz barely survived COVID-19 after being infected most likely at a huge Palm Springs party in March. After using GoFundMe funds to pay his medical bills, he’s co-signing that it’s “survival of the fittest” and partying again. (Source)

Phillip next asks some rhetorical questions about GaysOverCovid’s public shaming tactics that I can’t help but answer:

• But who are these negligent gays being made accountable to? Their community; the people who they are most likely to infect; the people who have already lost a family member or friend to COVID, like I and hundreds of thousands more have.
• Why do these party goers need to experience a form of punishment, much less one executed by our own community? Because they are behaving recklessly in a pandemic that has already claimed over 300,000 people’s lives. Some featured partiers have co-signed the sentiments “at this point it’s survival of the fittest” (yes, that’s a direct quote) and the constantly-touted 99% survival rate (which ignores long-term complications of the virus). The community is complicit in this behavior by not only allowing these parties, but hosting them.
• In a community that operates as a social safety net for white gay men to quickly recover from being “canceled” for other wrongdoings simply because of how they look, what lasting effect or change will this “accountability” actually have? I interpret this question with a tone of giving up, as if these “white gay men” are immune to any criticism and therefore we might as well not criticize. It also frustrates me to read the assertion that the gay community is a “social safety net for white gay men.” Regardless, GaysOverCovid in this instance shows that these people are not immune to criticism or consequence, and that the handsome medical workers (who of all people should know better) and others ought to think twice about their actions.

It shocked me to read that Phillip considered it a “grim, dystopian nightmare” for people to call the cops on big gatherings (which I will discuss later), but said nothing similar of people partying it up while major cities like LA have 0 ICU beds available (and many cities that do have beds available are haphazardly putting multiple beds in the same room or in hallways). It was also frustrating for Phillip to assert, via whataboutism, that “this infighting allows our government to obfuscate responsibility for its failure,” as if our community policing itself suddenly lets our government off the hook. This is not even mentioning that we can walk and chew gum at the same time, demanding better policy from the state while policing ourselves.

One could argue that the sudden fame of GaysOverCovid actually highlights our government’s inept prevention policies: people are happy to travel and party because the only restriction they face is possibly getting “canceled” on Instagram.

Finally, Phillip concludes his thought piece with a frankly mind-blowing suggestion: We need to be nice to each other. Yes, Phillip has cracked the code to ending this pandemic, and it’s to kill the virus with kindness. (OK, I’ll really stop being sarcastic now.) He offers no suggestions for what that may even look like, and it reads as a cheap cop-out for having literally any impact with his article other than to make people feel safer posting their parties online.

Unfortunately for him and all the rest of us, this virus infects with impunity. It lives dormant in people who may show nothing more than a dry cough. It kills some with no preexisting conditions. It leaves others with hair falling out, constant joint pains, absent senses of smell, and medical bills they did not expect and cannot afford, thanks to the United States’ 1–2 punch of piss-poor safety measures and charging to keep you alive once you’re at the hospital.

One 33-year-old woman’s hospital stay led to a bill of over $75,000 dollars — even with insurance and relief from the government’s relief bill. (Source)

With this in mind, his article’s final words — “we’re going to have to show that we are capable of self-preservation in the face of a state that doesn’t seem to care whether we live or die. Many lives will depend on it,” — reads as painfully ironic as he criticizes a page that shames party-goers for risking others’ health… and possibly their lives.

I will admit Phillip makes points that are correct, although they’re only tangentially related to GaysOverCovid itself:

• Using police to patrol COVID echoes the problems of policing. We have already seen that involving police to do this work leads to the same patterns of disproportionate persecution of marginalized people. GaysOverCovid was wrong in celebrating LAPD for cracking down on an underground party. (It makes one wonder, however, how things would be different if we actually enacted police reform to have specialists for health-related non-emergencies.)
• We can’t assume everything about how people behave. Some travel via car (arguably safer than going through a crowded airport), some socialize but only in outdoor spaces, some may only take off a mask for a selfie. While there’s a lot of uncertainty in spectating people’s lives, I have seen almost every post/story from GaysOverCovid clearly show how those shamed are actively endangering others.
• The account’s heightened status means it needs to be a careful leader. Splinter groups have formed by other users and one account has already outed someone for their HIV status. This is a gross use of a platform due to how sexual health has been used in the past to dehumanize and criminalize people, especially people living with HIV, and one could argue that the main account ought to speak out against those practices.
• Encouraging safe alternatives works better than shame. Phillip shared a very thought-provoking, evidence-based article about how punishments and policing funnel infection records into the underground, and I agree that it could be impactful to show how our community stays strong in the face of this pandemic. But again, we see this partygoing is based on FOMO and a selfish desire for fun at all costs — it deserves to be shamed.

With that last point in mind, I’ve created two accounts on Instagram to begin showcasing how our community has gotten through COVID: gaysslayingcovid and slaysovercovid (I’m not sure which I’ll use yet). Maybe it can give us some hope for these next months.

Edited Jan 6 2021 for grammatical clarity and to add TL;DR to the top.