#HeterosexualPrideDay

Submission 34,499

Part of a series on LGBTQ+. [View Related Entries]

Overview

#HeterosexualPrideDay is a hashtag campaign calling for the designation of a holiday in honor of heterosexuality during the observance of LGBT Pride Month in June. In late June 2016, the hashtag began trending worldwide on Twitter after it was met with a surge of tweets expressing outrage and mocking the proposed holiday for being insensitive.

Background

On February 12th, 2014, Twitter user @MrsFreedomFirst^[3] posted a graphic promoting February 14th as "Hetero Pride Day" (shown below, left). On June 29th, 2015, Twitter user @MyTweetsRealAF^[5] posted the hashtag "#HeterosexualPrideDay"^[1] (shown below, right).

That day, the hashtag was shared on the social networking site upwards of 400 times, with many people expressing distaste for the campaign and comparing it to efforts to launch a "White History Month" (shown below).

Developments

2016 Resurgence

On June 15th, 2016, Twitter user @_JackNForTweets^[2] replied to a tweet asking why "straight" men and women attend gay pride parades, to which he encouraged homosexuals to join the "#HeterosexualPrideDay" celebration on June 29th (shown below).

On June 29th, several Twitter users revived the hashtag from 2015, with some tweets directed at enraging "social justice warriors" (shown below, left) while others appeared to earnestly promote heterosexuality as what "nature intended" (shown below, right).

Immediately after, other Twitter users began posting the hashtag with criticisms and jokes mocking the proposed holiday. Virginia-based news anchor Blaine Stewart posted an image macro about the origin of gay pride, noting that it was created to celebrate homosexuals "right to exist without prosecution" (shown below, left). That same morning, Lady Gaga tweeted a blank map of the world with the caption "in red are all the countries where it is illegal to be heterosexual" (shown below, right).^[7] Within 24 hours, the tweets gained over 1,600 and 6,000 retweets respectively.

That evening, Twitter user @_JackNForTweets^[6] tweeted that he created the hashtag as "satire," and urged those who disapproved of the holiday to contact him (shown below).

News Media Coverage

In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the trending hashtag, including USA Today,^[8] The Daily Caller,^[9] The Huffington Post,^[10] Salon,^[11] NY Daily News^[12] and BuzzFeed.^[13]