Are People Really Calling McDonald's Grimace a Queer Icon?

Move over Babadook, Grimace is coming for you!

In a truly bizarre story this Pride Month, some McDonald’s fans have declared that the fast food chain’s mascot Grimace, who is “celebrating” his birthday this month with a special promotional Grimace Meal, is the internet’s latest gay icon.

McDonald’s has declared that June is Grimace’s birthday month, making a new meal that includes a purple milkshake that tastes like cereal milk. June is also famously Pride Month, meaning that anything that happens this month is officially gay.

Fans have started to spot the purple creature at Pride events, draw fanart of him, and praise him as a queer icon.

However, the trend isn’t as popular as some of these news articles (like in Polygon and Bon Appétit) would suggest. Twitter searches for “grimace gay” and “grimace queer” don’t find many Tweets that aren’t about the articles about Grimace being an icon.

Is this all a corporate psyop? Does anyone actually consider Grimace to be gay, let alone a gay icon? Are billion dollar corporations allies?

Still, if embracing Grimace as a gay icon will cause overly-sensitive conservatives to boycott the chain like they did after Bud Light worked with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, we’ll take this one as a win.