I Know What You Are

About

I Know What You Are is a catchphrase and reaction image of Whitney Chewston captioned with the phrase. Appearing in 2022 roughly a year after the "Not Too Fond Of Gay People" meme, the reaction has since been used online to insinuate that someone is likely gay, especially if they haven't disclosed any information about their sexual orientation.

Origin

On March 20th, 2022, or prior, an unknown Tumblr^[1] user posted an image macro of Whitney Chewston (also known as the Homophobic Dog), captioned, "I know what you are." The post, though no longer available, was scrubbed by TinEye (shown below).^[2]

On March 30th, 2022, Instagram^[3] user woofs.exe posted the image, with the post gaining over 102,000 likes in one year. On March 31st, the Twitter^[4] account @reactjpg archived the reaction image.

Spread

Following the viral Tumblr post, the image macro achieved popularity on the platform, often used to insinuate that someone is likely gay. For example, on March 26th, 2022, Tumblr^[5] user posted a GIF of the Succession character Greg Hirsch paired with the image, with the post gaining over 180 likes and reblogs in one year (shown below, left). On May 30th, Tumblr^[6] user romanticbyler captioned the image with a reference to Stranger Things, writing, "robin and will when they officially meet each other," with the post gaining over 10,000 likes and reblogs in a year (shown below, right).

In the following year, the phrase saw further use both as a reaction image and as a text reaction on Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit and other sites. On July 24th, 2022, Redditor crellz1 posted a The Boys meme that gained over 6,000 upvotes in the /r/theboys^[7] subreddit in eight months. On January 29th, 2023, Tumblr^[8] user @tanijrou posted a Trigun Stampede posted a meme that gained over 4,000 retweets and 39,500 likes in one month (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References