Homophobic Seal

About

Homophobic Seal (also known as "Gay Seal") is a webcomic character that is known for its catchphrase "GAAAAAAYYYY." It is often added on to the bottom of an image to dismiss everything above as naive, weak or saccharine.

Origin

On November 5th, 2010, the webcomic blog Antics Comic^[1] published a six-pane comic titled "Survival Insticts" in which two men embrace each other in an arctic blizzard in order to stay warm, causing a seal to yell "GAAAAAAYYYY."

While speculative at best, the seal's punchline bears similarities to the line "Ha, Gayyyyy" shouted by Señor Ben Chang, a recurring character in the TV sitcom series Community, in an episode that aired on September 23rd, 2010.

Spread

The "Gay Seal"^[2] single topic blog, which reblogs various Tumblr posts with the gay seal image, was created on August 10th, 2011. One of the first posts featured several screen shots of text messages followed by the seal with the caption “ULTRA GAAAAAAYYYY" (shown left). On February 4th, 2012, the FAILblog site Dating Fails^[5] posted an image of a couple holding hearts with “I stole her heart… / …so I’m stealing his last name” (shown middle) written on them followed by the seal image. On February 14th, a post titled “Soulmates and shit” (shown right) was submitted to 9gag^[4] by user phschrei. The image received over 5000 Facebook shares in 3 days. On February 16th, the same image was submitted to FunnyJunk.^[3]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search queries for both "ultra gay" and "gay seal" began rising rapidly in February of 2012, the same month the seal appeared on Reddit.

External References