boi

You may know boi from Dat Boi, a 2015 meme featuring a frog on a unicycle.

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But, what about that time in the early 1990s, when Georgia rapper Antwan André Patton adopted the stage name Big Boi before going on to become one half of Outkast. This spelling of boi was in line with other street spellings, like in the 1991 film Boyz in the Hood.  Kind of like phat or thicc, deliberate slang misspellings. Boi is also likely a lexical middle finger to white people who insult adult black men by calling them boy …

In the mid-to-late 1990s, boi came to mean a more sensitive form of masculinity as it was taken up by skateboarding, rave, and, eventually emo scenes. Boi was also adopted by young women, some of whom identified as gay, in skateboarding. This helped boi spread in the 2000s for young, hip, genderqueer and trans individuals who presented as masculine. From here, boi moved into the the larger LGBTQ culture, adopted by young gay men, especially so-called “bottoms” or “subs” in the BDSM community.

The meme-ing of boi began in 2014 with a news broadcast screenshot of a “Wanted” photo. It featured a digitally added mustache and replaced the wanted person’s name with dat boi, or that boy. In 2015, a Tumblr user, Phalania, made a now-deleted but internet-famous post: “Here come dat boi. O shit waddup!”

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Meanwhile, an absurd late 1990s animation of a frog on a unicycle was creeping around in the caves of the internet. In April 2016, the phrase “here come dat boi” and that weird frog were brought together, in pure internet randomness and absurdity, on a Facebook meme page to create Dat Boi, which went massively viral—though it was also criticized as an appropriation of black and queer culture.