Dean Browning's "I'm A Black Gay Guy" Tweet

Overview

Dean Browning's "I'm A Black Gay Guy" Tweet refers to a tweet from Pennsylvania Republican congressional candidate Dean Browning that proclaims "I'm a black gay guy" and goes on to criticize Barack Obama and Democrats. Browning insisted he was copying a message from a follower, but most onlookers believed he had accidentally tweeted from his main account and meant to tweet from an alternative account he'd created to criticize Democrats as a black gay man. Twitter users suspect that the alternate account is @DanPurdy322, a user whose account was created shortly before the incident and often replies to Browning's tweets clarifying "I'm a black gay guy."

Background

On November 10th, 2020, Dean Browning,^[1] a white, former Republican congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, tweeted, "I’m a black gay guy and I can personally say that Obama did nothing for me, my life only changed a little bit and it was for the worse. Everything is so much better under Trump though. I feel respected – which I never do when democrats are involved."

Developments

Shortly after the tweet was discovered, it began spreading widely on Twitter as users suspected that Browning had meant to tweet from an alternative account in which he poses as a gay black republican. Twitter user @JacobRubashkin^[5] pointed out that Browning was relatively close to winning his primary, gaining over 6,600 retweets and 15,000 likes (shown below, left). User @AwexWane^[6] declared Browning was Twitter's Main Character for the day, gaining over 120 retweets and 500 likes (shown below, right).

Browning^[2] defended himself by saying he was quoting a message he'd gotten from a follower (shown below).

The existence of a suspected alternative, "sock puppet" account appeared to be confirmed when Twitter users discovered the account "@DanPurdy322," whose account was created in October of 2020 and often responds to Browning's tweets supporting him.^[3] User @fart^[4] noted that it appeared the @DanPurdy322 account used to belong to a user named "soulcookie322" who was a white guy with the aliases "Pat Riarchy" and "White Goodman."

That day, a video was uploaded by @DanPurdy322^[7] in which a man claims to be "a gay black man" and that he sent the message to Dean Browning. That evening, Twitter suspended the @DanPurdy322 account. Twitter user Karin Sung reuploaded the video (shown below).

Meanwhile, some speculated that the person in the video was Patti LaBelle's son Byl Holte (shown below).

Search Interest

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External References