IT BECAME A meme the second the words came out of Jennifer Coolidge’s mouth. Trapped on a yacht with a small group of ornately charming men who’ve lured her into their world with calculated flattery, she now realizes they have no intention of letting her ever return to the luxury resort where they found her.
In the final minutes of the second season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” Coolidge’s rich, lonely, addled Tanya McQuoid pleads her case to the boat’s captain. “Please!
These gays,” she implores in her signature husky bleat. “They’re trying to murder me!” That moment — the line that launched a thousand GIFs, not to mention T-shirts, coffee mugs and emblazoned hand fans — was brilliantly designed for the decontextualization it quickly underwent.
But it also marked a milestone in the history of gay representation in film and television because … it was true: Those gays were trying to murder her!