Tender, Loving Gay
Notes on @ghosthoney and My Favorite Shapes
In case you think this is an academic essay about the ethereal TikTok’r Tyler Gaca, whom 1.8 million of us have come to know as @ghosthoney, you are sadly misinformed. I don’t do academic essays anymore, because they’re an affront to the splendor of everything beautiful. And by everything beautiful, I mean all 356 one-minute videos on Tyler Gaca’s TikTok page. If you think about it, it would only take you in the ballpark range of five and a half hours to watch them all. Now don’t think—I’ve already done it. I testify that it’s wholly worthwhile.
If you don’t already know, @ghosthoney is an immortal spirit who lives in the crevice of the internet and makes a living by tenderly haunting school-aged children aged 15 and above. You may have seen his Guide to Dressing Like a Love Stricken Victorian Dandy, which went viral in the middle of last year. Built like a Victorian dandy with Wildean quirkiness, @ghosthoney is the only white gay man I will ever love, probably. In the last week, I’ve lost myself over and over again in the scintillating diary of his inner life.
Is it creepy that I’m writing what is essentially a love letter to my favorite microblogger? No, because this not a love letter, but a careful study of the way we watch tender, gay men, who in turn watch us. As queer people know, the detail’s in the devil, and nobody knows the devil like his favorite angel @ghosthoney. Tyler’s TikTok feed opens a tender loving world of object fantasies and interspecies connections that are, in his own trademark words, full of “gentle chaos.” I’m tempted to say that watching @ghosthoney is like sucking on a delicious scoop of honey lavender ice cream, but it’s actually more profound than that; one, because I wouldn’t know what to name the ice cream, and two, you don’t consume the videos, the videos consume you.
If Youtube is a minor videographic platform (coming in far second to the high-art platform of art house cinema), then TikTok would be a minor of the minor arts. As a general principle, TikTok celebrities usually experience something of a medium-constraint. TikTok stars with million-plus subscribers rarely rack in as many views on sister-platforms such as Instagram and Youtube. This is probably due to TikTok’rs’ atomized function as bite-sized appetizers in TikTok’s endless algorithmic video feed. Few get the same degree of commitment as artists who make longer, feature pieces. Plus, it’s hard to master the smorgasbord of videographic forms: those who do well in TikTok’s one-minute feature form usually struggle with the longer format of vlogs, or the 15-second Instagram video.
If it were up to me, though, Tyler Gaca would be a star period, not “just” a TikTok star.
The fact remains that @ghosthoney is a star of the minor minor arts—a shooting star in a comet shower world, you could say. Yet his talent is anything but minor, quivering at quixotic altitudes and shimmering with what I can only describe as gossamer-like precision. Others have classified his style as “left-field comedy” but I prefer to think of him more as a performance artist than a comedian, as one of the many playful ghost who animate the cosmos rather than a “social media celebrity.” It feels weird to call @ghosthoney a “celebrity” because in our late capitalist celebrity culture, icons emerge only to be worshipped as metonyms of commodifiable sexual, racial, and gendered ideals. But Tyler’s inimitable charm seems directed as much as to himself as to us. You get the feeling that you’re living out his queer dramas, the kinds of private fantasies that all of us outcasts have learned to narrate when the outside world got too hostile for our habitation.
Maybe it’s just that @ghosthoney’s internal monologue—a videographic self representation equally novelistic and cinematic—feels intensely personable. Personability is the hallmark of the “social media star,” who speaks into her phone camera and addresses opaque masses with the singularly personal “you.” Personability is about the appearance of personality and the performance of intimacy. But @ghosthoney’s different, I want to say, he’s not just a “representation” of gay aestheticism, more than just a “mainstream example” of an extremely sophisticated house husband. He doesn’t so much “perform” intimacy as allow you access into the endless dominion of his fantasies. Watching all three hundred and fifty-six of his TikTok videos, you get the sense that you’re existing at the cozy intersection of his interior fantasies and his real life.
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A “fan favorite” on @ghosthoney’s TikTok page is Tyler’s husband, JiaHao, a Chinese photographer whose chaotic vers energy, as one viewer put it, matches Tyler’s spooky gentleness kinda perfectly. I’ve watched JiaHao rescue plants from suburban garbage cans, apply eyeshadow to Tyler’s face with an electric screwdriver, and work on his fire pit (he is a sumptuous parody of heterosexual masculinity and we love him for it). I’ve watched footage of the couple driving to West Virginia, loitering in cemeteries, and riding the high speed rail in China. Really, I love JiaHao almost as much as I love Tyler, for he’s an indispensable character in the elaborate diegesis of @ghosthoney.
This brings me to my second point, which is that at the same time that I’m totally, completely absorbed by @ghosthoney’s charm, I also feel intensely embarrassed about my dedication, self-conscious of the way it feels like voyeuristic affection. I love @ghosthoney so much it feels like a violation of Tyler’s privacy. I don’t mean I have any desire to violate Tyler’s privacy, but that the intimacy Tyler and his characters share with the viewer feels illegal, feels so far out of the left field of what’s normally allowed.
You see, my adoration isn’t just for Tyler the person, but the entire diegetic setting of @ghosthoney. Celebrating Tyler, his alter egos, and all of his non-human friends, the phantasmatic splendor of a @ghosthoney drama moves the viewer from foreground to background. Rather than Tyler, it’s the concept of his fantasies that endear us; rather than Tyler himself, it’s his supporting cast of petty ghosts and gay vampires who are the real stars of the show. Watching @ghosthoney feels like you’ve finally come home to all your imaginary friends, and the anxieties of real people no longer bind you.
Perhaps my real point is this: @ghosthoney’s minor celebrityhood extols the rich tapestry of his imagination—his alter egos and supporting characters, destination quirks and non-human companions—rather than cultivating a cult of personality, or indulging in the large-scale glitz and glamor of major celebrityhood. What may be big and brash on the big screen in @ghosthoney appears daintily DIY, though no less sparkly. Reality TV, meet domestic novel, meet postmodern performance video: and you get @ghosthoney’s vibe, a surreal interior drama that underscores queerness’ secret sociality—because as far as you’re concerned, you’re deliciously impersonal, an anonymous spectator to the glorious drama that will always go on. It’s really, truly something out of this world.
And it’s a rarity, too—@ghosthoney’s only contemporary might be former-SNL writer Julio Torres, whose HBO special My Favorite Shapes ripples with a similar secret sociality that embraces the inner lives of lovers, objects, plants, and animals with equal seriousness.
My Favorite Shapes, Torres’ one hour standup special, covers exactly what its title promises. Seated at a conveyor belt in a shimmery silver suit, Torres directs a drama of all of his favorite shapes and textures, narrating the inner lives of inanimate objects thrumming with the vitality of their own absurdity: a lacquered high-heel shoe-stand that displays miniature shoes, an orange glob of plastic with painted-lashes named Krisha, a cactus in a tiny glass pot who feels that “[his] skin is not [his] own.”
Amidst his live audience’s smattering guffaws, Torres allows one confession: “I don’t know if you can tell, but as a child I really loved playing with toys. . . . My happiest moments were really just me by myself in my room playing. . . . I’m just a little alien, playing with my toys, but this time to a captive audience.” If there were a way to describe the magic that Torres unleashes upon you, it would be that it’s like entering an elaborate theater where the figurative hardens into the real, nothing is what it “seems” and everything is a matter of possibility. What something “is” is but a second away from something else which it could be—the lucid logic of play.
To describe Torres’ comedic style would be to follow the endlessly-falling domino path of metaphoric language. In a bit about curtains, he riffs: “The most utterly psychotic of all the curtains of the world,” he pauses to pull out a miniature diorama, “are the curtains that are hung in a basement [so] as to give the illusion of a window.” With one hand, he scoops up the curtain to reveal a solid green wall. “Curtains that tell you, ‘Well, we don’t know, there might be a window.’ But it’s like, ‘No, we know. What are you doing?’ That is religion right there.”
If @ghosthoney is a celebrity of the minor minor arts, then Torres’ comedy celebrates the minor minor subject—in his mobile drama, it’s also the diorama and the non-human object, inanimate delights usually confined to the background, who arise to dazzling stardom, the subject of intense fascination, disgust, adoration, or plain obsession. A shared sensibility for minor stardom binds Torres and @ghosthoney’s essentially tender, gay diegeses.
There’s a moment on @ghosthoney’s profile, a few weeks back when he discovered "Chansey donut.” The video begins with rapture (you really just have to watch it): “I’ve found my muse,” he murmurs. “Who is she? Chansey donut… I couldn’t sleep. I had to tell people but my friends didn’t get it so I told Twitter but that wasn’t enough. I spent the past two days trying to replicate Chansey donut’s likeness in paint. I had a lot of questions burning in my mind but the biggest was… Why???” In the last quarter of My Favorite Shapes, Torres reveals the “true star” of his show. “The second I saw her, I thought, game over. The start power is palpable, and it fills up the room. Allow me to introduce… Krisha.”
It’s not enough to point out that both Gaca and Torres elevate inanimate objects to stardom. Rather, both Chansey donut and Krisha epitomize the minor celebrityhood at the heart of @ghosthoney and My Favorite Shapes' tender, loving queerness. What I’m trying to describe is the aesthetic sensibility of an extremely affective care—one that celebrates the divine feminine in all her inanimate forms. If femininity speaks in the minor tongue, then feminine objecthood is a minor minor speech, a tantalizingly queer goddess of secret pleasures and perfect mutuality. Tyler Gaca and Julio Torres, Chansey donut and Krisha, in each of their respective theaters, pay tender, humble homage to the divine feminine, a minor minor showstopper in a sense-giving drama.
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In the opening to her immortal “Notes on Camp,” Sontag notes that
No one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.
I don’t know if I’ve been successful in naming the sensibility of tender, loving gay, but I’d be damned if I weren’t wholly, head-over-heels sympathetic to it, sunken in my delight without an ounce of revulsion. Without getting too deep into my own psychanalytic drama, perhaps my delight is possible because I identify something familiar in the objecthood of the feminine divine, something that reminds me giddily of myself. In her recent monograph Ornamentalism, Anne Anlin Cheng argues that yellow femininity is a matter of objectness, of aesthetic supplementation. It is a style and an “abstraction that materializes” the yellow woman as an abject, slippery thing (“ornament”) altogether eclipsed by the vectors of life and death. “Parsing the transformative magic of ornamentalism,” Cheng writes
will allow us to address those bodies that, even as they are being deprived of it, do not seek humanity; to acknowledge those bodies that repel rather than instantiate the attempts to equip them with psychic or corporeal interiority. (19)
Existing as aesthetic supplements, the divine feminine objects at the heart of @ghosthoney and My Favorite Shapes are one powerful instantiation of ornamentality. But while they do not seek humanity, it would be a conceit to suggest that they repel psychic interiority, or that they exist in abject margins of humanity. On the contrary, psychic interiority is all they have, and it is this utterly glorious interior excess that “fills up the room” as aesthetic value. Rather than sad, dehumanized little things, Chansey donut and Krisha are ethereal beings who have transcended the vertical hierarchy of mere human subjecthood. Watching their quixotic, darling little tromps, I feel effervescent, existing in both the center and periphery of worship as an ornament in opposition to Cheng’s debasing theory.
True, the yellow woman might be a minor minor goddess with only two fans. But that, in my humble opinion, would be more than enough. Because ladies, if there is a heaven, it would be in the arms of these tender, loving kings.