Disco’s top mixer, Tom Moulton, considered “Dancing Queen” perfect as is, so he turned down the chance to remix it. Back when Donna Summer reigned as indisputable dancing queen, ABBA didn’t get much gay club play, not even you-know-what. While even icons like Madonna polarize opinion, nearly every color of the gay rainbow agrees on ABBA. This week releasing “Voyage,” its first new LP since 1981 and a teaser for next year’s London concerts featuring 3D avatars, ABBA is to many gay fans what the Rolling Stones are to straights - archetypes whose appeal transcends time, place and age.
Ostensibly cheerful but packed with drama and peppered with Scandinavian melancholy, the Stockholm mixed-gender quartet’s pop has blueprinted the glitz of countless gay and gay-friendly acts from Kylie Minogue to Lady Gaga, Adam Lambert to Lil Nas X - a singular achievement for a band that hadn’t completed an album in 40 years. Thanks to multiple stage and screen incarnations of “Mamma Mia!,” fabulously garish costumes from gay designer Owe Sandström and consummately crafted songs more retroactively popular than in their ’70s and early ’80s heyday, ABBA has for decades been the bull’s-eye of the LGBTQ musical universe. Donald Trump and his followers may have for a time claimed the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” and “Macho Man” for themselves, but there’s no way they’ll take this one from us. It’s our variation on what fans do at ballgames when their team is winning, but with a camp exuberance ignited by the song’s brassy harmonies and handy references to feminine royalty. Gay revelers (and their lucky straight friends) are waving their arms, striking ingenue poses and shamelessly singing along to the sugary 45-year-old pop standard that’s become synonymous with queer nightlife. “The limp wrist feels like a throwback in some ways I remember it felt like a ubiquitous homophobic mocking gesture from my time as a closeted kid in the late 90s and early 00s,” said Philip Ellis, a journalist who wrote a piece for GQ magazine in 2019 about gay men adopting the word “faggot” as a term of pride.Įllis pointed out that the LGBTQ community has for several years used images of limp wrists as memes.Somewhere, right now, ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” is playing at an LGBTQ club, bar or house party. Most recently, this has involved many people choosing to identify as “queer” or using that word as a shorthand to describe the broader community - although some still find this offensive. The LGBTQ community has a long history of reclaiming things that were once used as derogatory slurs against them. (According to a 2012 Slate piece, limp wrists have been deemed “unmanly” since ancient Rome). The 18-year-old said he thought the action would be instantly “relatable” to others in the LGBTQ community, even though he also recognized it had offensive roots.
BuzzFeed News can’t 100% confirm if Hallows came up with the limp wrist meme, but he was the earliest we could find and recalled devising it as something different from what he had seen trending. By this time, “Kiss Me More” had been a viral hit on TikTok for months, but that point of the song was mainly used for clips featuring sudden transitions.