As drag legend Dorian Corey once put it:
"Shade is I don't tell you you're ugly but I don't have to tell you because you know you're ugly ... and that's shade."
So it should come as no surprise that when the queer folx of Twitter recently launched a round of insults in Donald Trump's direction, they kept it as wickedly subtle and to-the-point as possible.
In a recent tweet, our glorious leader referenced the Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris, and in typical fashion, said something hilarious and stupid without even realizing it:
"Paris is burning and China way down," the President wrote, the latter half of which doesn't even make syntactical or grammatical sense, but that's nothing new. And the former half isn't even true: the Paris Gilets Jaunes protests have taken place on one street, the Champs Elysées, each Saturday, after which the street reopens to traffic and business continues as usual.
But it wasn't the veracity of the Paris comment that caught Olympic skier Gus Kenworthy's eye.
Kenworthy, who won a silver medal in the 2014 Olympics, came out as gay shortly thereafter and is the first openly gay action-sports star. Since then, he has become an outspoken advocate for gay rights both within the Olympics and in general.
And he was not about to let Trump's (likely unwitting) reference to arguably the most iconic queer film of all time: the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, which introduced the world to drag culture and blazed a trail for everything from slang to RuPaul's Drag Race and everything in between.
As the queens in Paris Is Burning and Drag Race alike always tell us: "Reading is fundamental!" And as soon as Kenworthy's tweet hit the internet airwaves, honey, "the library was open" as people lined up to join Kenworthy in reading President Trump--many doing so with iconic Paris Is Burning references!
(Who knew Paris Is Burning blazed even THIS trail?!)
While others had to heap praise on Kenworthy for his epic read... also in the form of iconic Paris Is Burning gifs and references:
Along with other iconic moments in the history of shade:
Anyway, let's all take a moment to thank Gus for putting Trump in his place, because...
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
@simuliu/X
@realDonaldTrump/Truth Social
@Tim_Walz/X
