How Christian Girl Autumn Became a Gay Twitter Meme
You’ve seen her, the avatar of basicness, on your feed. But where did she come from?
Make no mistake: Hot Girl Summer is still in full effect, but we have a new season rolling in right around the corner. And with a new season comes a new catchphrase, meme, icon to exalt. Ths fall, the internet has given us Christian Girl Autumn.
On August 9, when a Twitter user @lasagnabby tweeted, “Hot Girl Summer is coming to an end, get ready for Christian Girl Autumn ??” with a picture of two smiling brunette women with oversized scarves, flowy white shirts, skinny blue jeans, suede heeled booties, and matching leather totes—the uniform of the typical pumpkin-spiced latte-sipping basic girl—Twitter naturally turned it into a meme. Many people clowned the two women in the picture, the crux of the joke being that the two basic-looking white girls were homophobic or racist.
But not so fast—the two women in the photo are apparently more self-aware than the Twitter-verse gave them credit for. The woman on the right, Caitlin Covington, is a self-described “Southern Belle” who runs a lifestyle blog (and has amassed over 30,000 followers on Twitter), and fully leaned into the attention she garnered from sparking the Christian Girl Autumn meme.
Two days after the initial photo went viral, Covington tweeted “Ok at least give credit to me & @EmilyAnnGemma!” She later replied “????? love is love!” to a tweet asking her for her thoughts on the LGBT community and clarified that she is not a Republican. It was then that (Gay) Twitter decided they had to stan.
Even Covington’s mother has inched towards meme-level heights online.
Covington and Emily Gemma, the friend posing with her in the initial photo, eventually spoke to BuzzFeed to give their full stamp of approval on the Christian Girl Autumn meme, which all started with a “blogging trip” they took together in 2013. “People started realizing, ‘Oh, these girls are real. They’re not whatever we thought they were.’ They assumed we were anti-LGBT, but we’re not at all,” Gemma said after Covington admitted, “It doesn’t bother me. It’s funny.”
And that is how skinny fall legends are born.
