Trixie Mattel says she and Frankie Grande shared Barry Keoghan. She was the rat boy.
via PinkNews and Socialite Life
Netflix's I Like to Watch has been running since 2019 on a simple format: put Trixie Mattel and Katya in front of something and let the conversation deteriorate. In the episode posted on August 29, the something was Let's Marry Harry, a reality show in which a group of women compete to marry Australian influencer Harry Jowsey. The women got onto the rat boy trend, the current appreciation for scruffy, skinny, faintly feral men in the Timothée Chalamet and Pete Davidson mould. Katya confessed to being "a victim of the rat boy community." Then Trixie delivered the sentence of the week.
what she said
"Me and Frankie Grande were in a consensual, non-monogamous relationship with Barry Keoghan," she said. "Ironically, I was the rat boy. I was the mole king."
To be clear for the lawyers and for Barry: it is a joke. PinkNews frames it as a joke, the show frames everything as a joke, and Frankie Grande has not been asked to confirm, which is the only correct way to handle this. It is also a joke that does more cultural work than most think pieces. In three sentences it names the trend, identifies its patron saint, adds a beloved gay theater kid for scale, and then flips the whole hierarchy so the six-foot-two drag queen in a fourteen-inch wig is the small scruffy one. The mole king. A royal title for a creature that lives underground and has never seen a gym.
rat boy summer, explained
Rat boy summer, if you missed it, is the culture deciding after a decade of gym rat Hemsworths that the hot man is now the one who looks like he owes you money. Gay men have been on this since forever. We had a word for it. It was "twink." The straights simply rediscovered it, added rodents and put it on TikTok.
Anyway. Trixie and Katya's chaos remains the most reliable content on that platform, Let's Marry Harry is now a show we have to watch, and Barry Keoghan is a rat boy with two exes he has never met. Congratulations to everyone involved.
