Gay Culture Is refers to a series of humorous and thoughtful definitions for "gay culture." The meme is based in the homosexual experience and uses specifics to that community to define the culutre.

While the phrase "gay culture is" has existed both before the internet and in different areas online before gaining traction, the meme in its current form came into being in August 2017. Among the earliest tweets to use the phase as a joke comes from Twitter^[1] user @ndress666. On December 29th, 2016, they tweeted (shown below), "Gay culture is going to lunch with someone and then going on Grindr and seeing that u are both online."

Over the next few months, the catchphrase continued to appear on Twitter in this form with users posting "definitions" of gay culture. The meme gained more steam in August 2017 (examples below).

On August 29th, Tumblr ^[3] user aljofares posted, "Gay culture is reblogging Gay Culture Is posts knowing full well that’s not gay culture but rather mental illness and social alienation." The post (shown below) received more than 40,000 notes.

On September 1st, Twitter^[2] user @introvertgay tweeted, "Gay culture is being a teenager when you're 30 because your teenage years were not yours to live." The post (shown below) received more than 15,000 retweets and 67,000 likes in less than three weeks. The post was featured on the website Queerty.^[4]

Several media outlets covered the popularity of the catchphrase, including Elite Daily,^[5] BuzzFeed ^[6] and more. On September 18th, Twitter published a Moments page to archive some of the most popular tweets.