![putin anti gay meme putin anti gay meme](https://64.media.tumblr.com/79acb3024eb46ef8aefc38a4a2b02b78/tumblr_mts0nvvgQ21sjedu3o1_1280.jpg)
At a pride parade!” The account, which is still active, mostly reposts popular humor photos from other sites. The Twitter account puts up a version of the photo with the RusVesna.su watermark and adds, “This is the president of Estonia. He was on his way to becoming a kind of clip art for homophobic diatribes.Ībout a week after the posting on RusVesna.su comes the earliest known instance of someone suggesting the Bumblebee is Estonian President Ilves. He appeared on a Catholic website in Uruguay railing against the spread of same-sex marriage, and was the lead image in a Mexican blogger’s post on the definition of the aforementioned Spanish-language anti-gay slur. For our Bumblebee, though, it was just one stop among others. A 1963 CIA secret memo quoted a “Latin American revolutionary” telling the American intelligence agency back in 1959 that “Raúl Castro Ruz is a known homosexual.” Eight years after the openly gay Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was expelled from Cuba during a 1965 visit, he guessed why in an interview: “The worst thing I said was that I’d heard, by rumor, that Raúl Castro was gay.” In 2006, shortly after Raúl succeeded his older brother Fidel as president, Radar Magazine reported that this had long been a source of gossip among Cuban exiles. ” The occasion was the beginning of Castro’s term as head of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, but it built on longstanding theories about the new leader’s sexuality. The Bumblebee enters the realm of geopolitics when a Cuban dissident blogger living in Miami decides to Photoshop Raúl Castro’s face onto the photo and add a headline calling the then-president of Cuba an “old. 5 November 2011 – Buenos Aires, Argentina This is the story of one photo’s journey from unremarkable news item to object of international intrigue. What ultimately happens to all of the online photos we post, or that are posted of us? Could any of us have a meme-worthy doppelgänger on another continent? How can we be sure? Russian nationalists seized on this resemblance, and with regional tensions flaring, the fake bumblebee president went viral.Īn example of pride or hatred, weakness or strength - depending on who’s looking - the photo raises other, less obvious questions.
![putin anti gay meme putin anti gay meme](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/TNc_IMsGoF8/maxresdefault.jpg)
After circulating mostly in Latin America, a Russian speaker noticed that the Bumblebee looked like Toomas Hendrik Ilves, then the president of Estonia.
![putin anti gay meme putin anti gay meme](https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/180309123914-putin.jpg)
The photo ricocheted across multiple national internets, a real-life butterfly effect that was amplified by social media. Years later, it reemerged in Russia as a homophobic meme aimed at the president of Estonia. It was taken by a wire photographer at a gay pride celebration in Buenos Aires in 2011. Is he supposed to be a butterfly? A bumblebee? Regardless, the image is ridiculous, just the kind that the internet loves. Arms bent, golden antennae cocked, he grins at the camera with unadulterated joy. He stares right at us, this bespectacled older man in his zany homemade costume.