Young Fag Looks Back on the Latter Aughts -- Animal Imagery

The early days of 2011 arrived ominously, heavy with promises of doom and dread, when 1,000 blackbirds fell dead from the sky in Arkansas. This strange, sad, and very southern Gothic occurrence got me thinking about how us kids idealized and dreamed through the animal kingdom in the late-2000s, a time before flocks of birds fell mysteriously ill and the sky rained fowl. In the latter aughts, for some reason or another, a defining visual trend emerged among young creative peoples: lots and lots of animal imagery.

Enter the deer.













Yes, deer are beautiful, magical creatures that evoke lots of inspiring thoughts, feelings and dreams to many. They’ve floated through American cultural currents for years, probably because of their constant, visible presence in North American landscapes both natural and pop-cultural (e.g. “Bambi”). Also, deer are just plain beautiful: stately and strong, yet typically harmless creatures, deer are aesthetic specimens pleasing our eyes with their elegant beauty and our hearts and minds with their gentle, timid natures. The ubiquity of deer in the North American consciousness can also be read in the slaying and subsequent wall-mounting of our gentle, furry friends as they appear in rustic lodges and taxidermy offices across these great states.

The aesthetic echo of deer and, specifically, this wall-mounting icon has reverberated among young, art-making communities:

Lots of deer heads and silhouettes in the last years of the 2000s. However, though the deer motif began as an inspiring symbol appropriated by younger, creative communities, it soon seemed trendy, and that trend eventually became commodified:

The kids initiated another development (and arguable trend) of the latter-aughts that utilized animal imagery: the use of animal masks/heads on human bodies.

The visual shock of seeing an animal head on a human body might be read in several ways: as an escapist fantasy, where young human souls, wide-eyed and hungry with animal energy, could be and become animals, inhabiting a world removed from our own shitty one. Yet we could also, by keeping our bodies intact, remain ourselves and continue to enjoy our human lives and pleasures.

Or perhaps this animal-appropriating reflects a little postmodern American irony and cynicism: maybe we wanted a new way to shock the world, taking powerful, non-human, typically unglamorous animals and placing them on writhing, human, model-bodies. Maybe we ran out of irony and the unexpected, and the idealized purity and fury of animals we could corrupt by pairing with our own superficial, base human bodies.


For whatever reason, these phenomenons occurred. Celebrating deer and buying deer shit, or adopting the look and spirit of animals, looked cool and felt powerful. Though these images eventually became trends and, in some cases, commodities, the creative potential of animal imagery was, at one point, inspiring and vital. And hopefully, the aliens and robot inheritors of our doomed earth might see how animal heads on human bodies looked, to the kids at the 21st century’s beginning (of the end of days), unsettling and weird, bizarre and fun, and maybe even hopeful and idealistic. Someone might see our deer fetishizing as joyful and sweet, nostalgic and unique to our quaint little culture. Or maybe there won’t be anyone looking back. Regardless of the legacies we may or may not leave, as these latter faggy days come and go, at least we will know and remember how, at some point, we dreamed our dreams through animals, and that we even had dreams at all.