Contrary to the stereotype that all gay men are urbane sophisticates with a tendency to reel off epigrams about the deceptive nature of appearances, gay humour today is mostly comprised of jokes about burrito-induced diarrhoea. Sometimes bottom culture is jokes about spicy food and/or the fact that people excrete faeces out of their anuses. Sometimes, bottom culture is just the hyper-specific situation of the person making the joke: “bottom culture is crying to Kim Petras because a man who has successfully rebranded themselves as a few notches more masculine than you (despite the fact they also got bullied in school for being gay) ignored the pathetic voice-note you sent them eight hours earlier,” for example. But what does this identity actually consist of? If online jokes are anything to go by, there’s a vein of sadness running through bottomhood, a boundless capacity for abjection.
'Bottom' (the person who performs the receptive role during gay sex) has never been stronger as an identity category than it is today.