Being pressed up against a naked man? Sounds pretty gay to us. But a British art exhibition is adding another layer to that queer experience with one very tough question: is it gayer to face the naked dude, or to face away from him?

The exhibition, a career retrospective of Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, ran at London’s Royal Academy from September 2023 through January of this year. It’s only now making the rounds on the gay internet, thanks to a viral image of the exhibition’s entrance.

To enter the art show, visitors had to squeeze through a narrow doorway framed by two naked performers, a man and a woman. Andrea Tarsia, the Royal Academy’s head of exhibitions, told The Telegraph that the entrance forces a “confrontation between nakedness, and the gender, the sexuality, the desire.” (But rest assured, any guests uncomfortable with squeezing between the performers were offered an alternate way into the exhibition.)

In the image, full body contact looks basically unavoidable, leaving hypothetical guests across the internet with one big question: face the man, or face the woman? “Is it gayer to go butt to meat, or meat to meat?” asked one viral (and highly contested) post with nearly 50 million views.

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Others thought that question was missing the elephant in the room: Why ask what’s gayer, when the whole situation is screaming bisexuality?

Then there were those who thought the situation just looked like another Saturday night. Maybe Abramović got the idea after visiting a gay club’s dark room.

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