Sorry to disappoint you, but far-right activist Charlie Kirk isn’t secretly a gay furry on Grindr
Despite recent claims to the contrary, Charlie Kirk is not a gay furry. (Rebecca Noble/Getty)
Despite what you may have seen online, it seems that far-right radio host Charlie Kirk isn’t gay, or a furry.
The internet recently was set ablaze when a screenshot appeared to show that Kirk has the gay dating app Grindr and furry app barq installed on his phone.
It would have been quite a powerful gotcha if he had, given Kirk’s negative comments about the LGBTQ+ community in the past.
The rumour began circulating online that the 30-year-old Republican had accidentally come out and joined the gay furry army when trying to make a point about the “woke gay agenda.”
It seems that he’s now getting a taste of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of online misinformation.
“Went to check my phone storage and saw the woke gay agenda is alive and well. Is anyone surprised?” the American conservative political activist’s post on X seems to read.
Also in the post, Kirk appears to draw a comparison between the Pride flag and the iPhone’s storage space chart colours.
The user who posted the fake screenshot, which received over 1.9 million views, wrote the comment, “Nothing surprising to see there, Charlie Kirk, except the fact your top app is Grindr!”
Fact-checking site Snopes has confirmed that the tweet is fake, writing: “the post was completely fake and apparently intended as a pointed joke. Kirk never made any such post.”
Seemingly poking fun at the situation, another X user asked: “I can’t find this on his profile. Do you think he deleted it when he realised that it shows his top app?”
Responding to one of Kirk’s tweets, another responded: “Why is the top app on your phone Grindr, Charlie? I already knew you are gay, and there is nothing wrong with it.
“Unfortunately, you hate yourself so much that you want to punish every single gay person with policies that take away their rights and freedoms.”
Another user joined the conversation about Kirk and Grindr, posting: “Conservative Charlie Kirk isn’t so conservative after all. He has Grindr on his phone and it says ‘Last used: today’.”
“We should cut him a break and show everyone. He could possibly find a good man that way.”
Who is Charlie Kirk?
Charlie Kirk is a Donald Trump superfan, and also the founder and president of Turning Point USA, an American nonprofit organisation that advocates for conservative politics on high school, college, and university campuses, and which has been accused of spreading anti-LGBTQ+ and transphobic rhetoric.
Kirk has also spread Covid misinformation, promoted false and disproven claims of fraud in the election after Trump lost and is also a climate change denier.
Journalism watchdog organisation Media Matters have denounced him as a “pro-Trump troll”, writing: “he has a history of pushing right-wing hoaxes and conspiracy theories.”
Previously, he has described transgender people as a “throbbing middle finger to God”, before calling out and deadnaming transgender swimmer Lia Thomas for no particular reason – he just felt like it.
In 2022, he made the bizarre claim that the “transgender movement is an introductory phase to get you to strip yourself of humanity to mesh with machines.”
Kirk has repeatedly made startling suggestions when it comes to LGBTQ+ folks but most recently he suggested that rioters should have had gay sex instead of rioting during the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
“There are hundreds of peaceful people that went into the Capitol on January 6. They did not touch a police officer. They didn’t smash a window, but they have been charged federally for trespassing and called insurrectionists for the rest of their life,” Kirk said.
“They should have stripped naked and filmed themselves having gay sex,” he added, seemingly referencing the sex tape filmed in a US Senate hearing room.
