Sometimes the Side Chick Ain't Even a Chick

Submission 42,746

Part of a series on Thugposting / Gay Black Men Memes. [View Related Entries]

About

Sometimes the Side Chick Ain't Even a Chick refers to a series of memes based on a photograph of two men kissing each other, usually with one of the men edited out and replaced with a person or object. Memes following the format are usually captioned "Sometimes the Side Chick Ain't Even a Chick, It's an X."

Origin

Prior to September 28th, 2012, Tumblr user odetosaintme posted a photograph of Tumblr user thecelestialchild kissing with another man (original post no longer available).^[1] On September 28th, 2012, Lipstickalley forum user English_Muffin posted the earliest copy of the photograph currently available online (shown below).^[2]

Spread

On January 26th, 2015, Tumblr user morethanmysexuality posted the earliest known edit of the photograph, with caption "Some of us are Black" added in. The post received over 8,600 likes and reblogs in five years (shown below).^[3] On July 12th, 2015, Tumblr user thesociologicalcinema posted morethanmysexuality's edit as a part of a collection, receiving over 322,600 likes and reblogs in five years.^[4]

Prior to August 13th, 2015, an unknown Instagram user posted the image captioned "Sometimes the Side Chick Isn't a Chick" (image shown below, left). On August 13th, Twitter user @IAintNevaFakin made the first mention of the snowclone.^[5] Starting in mid-August 2015, the image and the caption were reposted to Twitter multiple times, with Twitter users utilizing the caption as a snowclone (examples shown below, center and right).^[5]^[6]^[7]

On December 23rd, 2015, Twitter user @knives56k made the earliest viral post utilizing the photograph as an exploitable. The tweet received over 1,200 retweets and 1,300 likes in four years (shown below).^[8]

On January 25th, 2016, Tumblr user morethanmysexuality reblogged their January 2015 post, mentioning the photograph's spread as a meme and crediting Tumblr user odetosaintme as the photographer and thecelestialchild as one of the men in the photo.^[9]

In the following years, the format maintained moderate popularity online, seeing use on Twitter, Instagram, iFunny, Facebook and Reddit.