It didn’t take long for Lady Gaga to get the meme treatment for her breakthrough role in A Star is Born. A full month before the film was even released, one scene from the trailer alone—in which Bradley Cooper’s character Jackson Maine tells Gaga’s Ally to stop so he can take another look at her from the window of his limousine—launched a thousand memes. Heck, even her grand entrance at the Venice Film Festival, where the film premiered in August, ended up becoming a meme.
Now that the film has been released nationwide, Twitter has become fixated on another scene. Following Ally’s meteoric rise and transformation from country singer to pop star, she lands a musical performance on Saturday Night Live. And not just any performance, but the season finale—so you know she’s really hit the big time.
To calm her nerves, Jackson leads Ally to the balcony of their Sunset Strip hotel and points to a large billboard with her face and name in bold letters splashed across it.
The billboard itself definitely gives off some serious LGBTQ vibes with its rainbow hue, and of course the word “ally” in itself doubles in meaning as a common word for a straight person who supports the gay community.
In other words, it didn’t take long for LGBTQ folks—mostly gay men, in particular—to connect the dots and turn the billboard into a meme, illustrating with mostly tongue-in-cheek examples of how others have been an ally to them personally.
My friend in 9th grade who would watch The Anna Nicole Smith show with me. pic.twitter.com/nzryc5pTuG
— sam greisman (@SAMGREIS) October 7, 2018
https://twitter.com/mttspdfr/status/1048766294840041472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1048766294840041472&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.out.com%2Fpopnography%2F2018%2F10%2F07%2Fstar-born-meme-salutes-lgbtq-allies
a straight friend invited me over to have nachos and watch You’ve Got Mail pic.twitter.com/WaV3JaGY76
— Matt Erspamer (@erspamer_matt) October 7, 2018
https://twitter.com/kevinpokeeffe/status/1048773664387170304
every het walking through the door when I have my birthday party at a gay bar pic.twitter.com/rORbECLZoY
— Brendan (@notbrendan) October 7, 2018
And there were, of course, some borderline NSFW examples:
When God invented the prostate pic.twitter.com/aJ48A9bN3W
— Mike T (@rhymeswithbeg) October 7, 2018
when my str8 coworker likes my tweets about eating ass pic.twitter.com/ji2wEcECrv
— 𝕄𝕚𝕔𝕙𝕒𝕖𝕝 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕣𝕥𝕫 (@MrMichaelSwartz) October 7, 2018
https://twitter.com/Chris_Hanna/status/1049077314212978688
As well as a few obligatory references to the 2017 film Call Me by Your Name:
https://twitter.com/Slade/status/1048773140766183424
When Mafalda changed the bedsheets pic.twitter.com/WRgL6c9KOr
— Jorge Molina (@colormejorge) October 7, 2018
And this reference to the 2016 Academy Award winning film Moonlight:
https://twitter.com/RealToddHaynes/status/1048798535989129216
Gaga herself has always been an outspoken ally to the LGBTQ community—it’s not hard to imagine that she would be pleased that her film inspired such a funny yet wholly positive queer meme.