Shame Arbitrage

In 2018, the New York Times Opinion section published a series of three animated shorts under the title "Trump and Putin: A Love Story." The shorts include scenes of Trump and Putin locked in a kiss while riding a unicorn. The joke was that Trump and Putin were gay. The Times defended this as satire. LGBTQ advocates called it homophobic. Weirdly enough, both were right.

Those shorts are far from an anomaly. To rattle off just examples, Stephen Colbert called Trump "Putin's cock holster," a hacked government building broadcast AI-generated footage of Trump kissing Elon Musk's feet, and SNL had Putin reassure Trump that he was "like, my main girlfriend." This pattern is durable and consistent, and it extends well beyond Trump: people who sincerely hold progressive values on sexuality reach for sexual stigma as a weapon. Every one of the people in the examples above believe in marriage equality, but the thing they see as most mockable in Trump is his supposed homosexuality.

Queer writers have been raising the alarm on this behavior for years. The observation is not new. But most accounts stop at calling the behavior hypocritical or lazy, and I don't think either label is adequate. Here are the strongest alternative explanations, and where each one breaks.

Hypocrisy

The simplest read: the folks using these slurs don't actually believe in marriage equality (or whatever other progressive value). But this seems obviously untrue. In our examples above we find people who donate to LGBTQ causes, who fight for more equal policies, and who would be genuinely distressed if a gay friend faced discrimination. The weirdness of a progressive commitment paired with gleeful deployment of stigma is the observation. If either side of that tension were put on, there would be nothing to explain.

Irony and camp

This claim is that nobody literally means "being gay is bad." It's playful. Detached. The humor comes from the absurdity of the charge, not any residual bigotry. But if the humor were purely about maximizing absurdity, you'd expect it to be equally funny to call Putin a talented piano player. Or an avid reader of Amish Romantic fiction. Absurd-but-neutral attributions should land just as well as absurd-but-stigmatized ones if the stigma is truly inert. And they don't. The joke's power comes not from absurdity but from degradation.

Anticipating the response: "the humor is in the target's discomfort, not the bigotry." Fine. But you're still using homophobia as entertainment, even if it is someone else's homophobia. You're keeping the charge operational, legible, potent, available, even preferred.

Code-switching

The most sophisticated version hinted at in the previous paragraph: this is deploying the target's own moral framework against them. The moral framework isn't being accepted, the insulter is just meeting the insulted where they are. Intuiting their soft spots, then hitting them.

But the selectivity undermines this. If people were simply reaching for whatever would land hardest on a specific target, you'd expect to see them calling Ted Cruz a bad Christian, or mocking a Koch brother's taste in modern art. Or they'd change tact when it doesn't land; Trump doesn't really seem to react to the gay stuff. But they don't. They reach for the same small set of categories every time: sexuality, gender presentation, physical appearance, regardless of the target. Gregory Bovino was enshrined as the grinning face of a mass kidnapping and state terrorism campaign, and the main insult folks landed on was "short." Even when not deploying specifically sexual bigotry, there is a reflex to use an insult that undermines their otherwise unmarred progressive bonafides.

Other explanations capture a piece of the behavior but none explain the selectivity. Why reach for these categories of insults and not others? That's the question that survives all the alternative explanations, and it's what led me to a different frame.

In my experience, this behavior clusters. The people I see doing this are mainstream liberals. It's difficult to imagine what a conservative version of this insult formulation would even be. Maybe calling a Biden diehard a "loyal soldier," or something. It also seems like a less common trend among the broad "left" of American politics. I think the explanation for this grouping is also the cause of the behavior, namely: differing perspectives on the status of the fight for human equality and destigmatization.

If the salient variable is where you think destigmatization stands, then the behavior isn't a lapse in values, but a consequence of a particular theory of progress. If you believe the fight is won, if you feel destigmatization is complete, you may feel licensed to play.

This is where shame arbitrage gets its name. It's the exploitation of a price differential between two moral markets. In the target's moral market the category carries a heavy negative charge. In your moral market, it is neutral or positive. The arbitrage is in the spread: you profit from the target's valuation while claiming your own position makes you immune to the cost. The category is marked in their market, unmarked in yours, and you pocket the difference.

The behavior lives in the gap between what you've publicly declared neutral and what you reach for when you want to cause damage. The Gay Trump Clown joke only works if the charge is live, if calling someone gay still carries a sting. But the speaker only feels licensed to make the joke because they believe the charge is dead, that they've personally moved past "gay" as invective. Both conditions have to hold simultaneously, and they can, because destigmatization is being treated as a binary toggle — done or not done — when it's actually a gradient.

You can believe sincerely that there is nothing wrong with being gay. You can vote accordingly, raise your children accordingly, organize your social life accordingly. And you can still, under pressure, in the heat of tribal combat, reach for that category as a weapon because the emotional charge of the category is older and stickier than the belief that tried to neutralize it. The people calling Putin gay aren't hypocrites. They're people who've completed one phase of destigmatization. They have updated stated beliefs. But they have mistaken that for the completion of the process. The gap between "I believe this is fine" and "I don't reach for this when I want to hurt someone" is the territory where shame arbitrage operates.

If incomplete destigmatization were simply a matter of time, a lag, then you'd expect the gap to close on its own as the process continues. But it doesn't. The behavior has been consistent for a decade. The same meme formats, the same categories, the same gleeful deployment. Something is keeping the gap open.

In trying to find what, I found Wendy Brown, though you could arrive at a similar place through Butler, Sedgwick, or the slur-reclamation literature. In States of Injury, Brown argues that progressive political identities organized around historical wounds develop a dependency on those wounds remaining legible. The coalition both fights against the injury and constitutes itself through the injury. Its coherence, its boundaries, and its claim to moral authority all require the wound to remain visible and recognizable. This is a structural feature of how identity-based politics reproduces itself. Shame arbitrage is the street-level mechanism by which this reproduction happens. Every time someone calls Putin gay and means it as an insult, they are simultaneously performing the completion of destigmatization: "we're so past this that we can be playful with it." But they're simultaneously demonstrating its incompleteness, because the joke only works if the charge is live.

The same logic applies wherever a category has been officially neutralized but operationally preserved, in body, gender presentation, and most clearly and commonly, in sexuality. But the mechanism is a generalizable one. The people who don't fall for the shame arbitrage, those who don't reach for sexual stigma as a weapon even when the target deserves contempt, aren't more disciplined or more humorless. They just have a more accurate map of where the process actually stands. They know the charge is still potent and live and dangerous, so they don't pretend to be immune to it. The result is that they do less damage to the project they share. Destigmatization is a practice, and you can tell how far along in your heart by watching what you reach for when you want to hurt your enemy.