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Is Todrick Hall’s New Spoof “Mean Boyz” Offensive To Feminine Gays?

Out YouTube sensation Todrick Hall is known for his creative and clever viral video parodies, and his newest one may just be the gayest yet.

In Mean Boyz based on, duh, the 2004 Lindsay Lohan classic Mean Girls (yes, it’s a classic), the gender roles are flipped, with the “plastics” becoming the bitchy, swishy “Ken dolls.”

And, yes, we also know that this was previously covered here at Queerty.

However, Slate magazine writer J. Bryan Lowder finds Mean Boyz well, a little bit mean to our less traditionally masculine gays, and his thoughts are intriguing. On the parody, he writes:

“Mean Boyz” feels cold. As far as I can tell, all of the humor in the video is predicated on how queeny the popular gay trio is, as compared to the corn-fed, relatively butch stand-in for Lindsay Lohan. Add that to the fact that the only real changes to the Mean Girls script are the substitution of a “Shade Book” for that film’s “Burn Book” and the introduction of “bottom,” and it seems like this “parody” hardly qualifies for that title. “Subversive” is out of the question.

Indeed, what’s accomplished, comically or otherwise, by replacing prissy straight girls with prissy gay dudes? The former are perhaps annoying but generally tolerated, while the latter are consistently maligned and attacked, often as much within the LGBTQ community as outside it.

We were fully prepared to hate it before watching (and loving) it, but it’s definitely fair to say that a lot of the humor does derive from feminine gay stereotypes.

But, seriously, who hasn’t met a Ken doll?

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