88 MARCH 2020

RICKEY THOMPSON AND I ARE IN THE WOMEN’S SECTION OF THE VAN NUYS

Goodwill, playing a game we call “Is This ’90s Fashion?”—and I am losing. I

fish out a sweater from the thrift-store racks, hold it up, and ask the social-

media star: Is this ’90s fashion? The difficulty of this game is humbling, which

makes no sense because Thompson was alive for only three years, ten months,

and twenty-three days of the 1990s and I lived through the whole damn decade.

But, he says, “recently, I fell in love with the ’90s/2000s era,” so I guess he’s

the expert. When I show him a block-colored Dope polo shirt, he says, “That

could work. It’s getting there,” but his eyebrows say otherwise. His nose is

slightly crinkled. His upper lip is snarled. He has given me nothing but posi-

tive feedback, yet he is also a terrible liar. I have failed in the eyes of Rickey

Thompson—social-media personality, style aficionado, and toddler of the

’90s—whether he will admit it or not.

We came here because this is the thrift shop he frequents most, but ironi-

cally, we spend a decent chunk of time scrolling through the Internet’s vintage-

clothing offerings on his phone. He claims ’90s vintage is easier to find on a

site called Depop, where “creatives” buy and sell clothes. That’s where he got

the sweater he’s wearing, which he has accessorized with a black Prada bucket

hat and twelve sterling-silver ear piercings.

With five million Instagram followers, more than a million YouTube sub-

scribers, and tens of millions of video views, Thompson is an Internet phe-

nom. Dyed in the wool of the World Wide Web, he is best known for his comedy

videos and eccentric style. In the fall of 2018, he went mega-viral for a highly

quotable video that his followers know as his “you can’t defeat a bad bitch”

monologue. It’s a Rickey classic: filmed on his phone, featuring low produc-

tion values and the same comic note hit multiple times with growing inten-

sity, until the viewer can’t help but feel in on the joke.

His posts buck all storytelling conventions. Instead of having the expected

beginning, middle, and end, Thompson’s videos are a collection of climaxes.

The set is almost always his sparsely decorated L. A. apartment, with pop prin-

cesses of the late ’90s covering his bedroom walls. He may shantay toward

the camera or sashay away, but all of his energy combusts in this limited space.

He ends the video without warning. There is no coda or goodbye; he exits the

stage. We are not done with him; he is done with us.

Just as I’m starting to feel he is, in fact, done with me and my fruitless search

for something that doesn’t make me look like an old, he pipes up: “I think the

thing I get most nervous about is my age. I get very nervous. I’m twenty-three

right now”—he turned twenty-four in February—“but I talk like I’m twenty-

seven. What if someone thinks I’m too old or something? That’s my biggest

fear. How long will this hotness last?”

Nothing’s older than the fear of getting old, but if Hollywood is an ageist

industry, social media is even more brutal. Time just moves more quickly

there: The ’90s are vintage, Dynasty has been rebooted, and kids are coming

to snatch your social-media authority. (Of TikTok, for example, Thompson

says, “I haven’t really got on it because I’m like, Oh my gosh, the young kids

are on there. But, you know, TikTok is cute, though.”) Legacy careers are

nearly impossible to attain. Veterans like Tyler Oakley (a whopping thirty

years old) and Jenna Marbles (thirty-three) are regarded as hall of famers,

elder statesmen who pioneered the industry for those who would come after-

ward. Thompson is part of the second or even third generation of logged-on

icons straining to retain relevance in a world where going viral and being

famous are not the same. Social-media fame may be the Next Big Thing, but

in many ways, the career trajectories of social-media stars still have a tradi-

tionalism to them: Think of the Bo Burnhams or Casey Neistats of the world,

who started online and moved into producing work for big-name brands and

studios. It’s a pressure Thompson is aware of. “Do I want to be thirty years

old and still, like, you know, making videos in my room or whatever?” Ouch.

THOMPSON BEGAN HIS CAREER POSTING VINES FROM HIS RALEIGH, NORTH

Carolina, bedroom as a high schooler, in 2013, at a moment when becoming a

star on Vine was a real possibility for a funny, good-looking kid with a knack

for writing six-second bits for a generally friendly audience. At school, Thomp-

son was bullied, and Vine and Instagram became outlets. I joke that if two gay

men engaging in conversation like we are don’t share coming-out stories, it’s as

if we didn’t speak at all, but Thompson’s coming out in North Carolina strikes

me as relatively tame and plays a smaller role in his origin story than I’d expected.

The short version: After his mother took him to a Miami pride parade when he

was about seven years old, he remembers thinking, This could be me. His dad had

a tough time in the beginning, but Thompson says, “When I grew up and he saw

that I was so successful and that I was out there being me, my dad [became] like

my best friend.” The real problem, according to Thompson, had much more to

do with his race and his personality—people who didn’t think that a striking black

man could also be a buoyant, pop-culture-obsessed diva were cruel to him. Being

older than Thompson, I had assumed that he was bullied for being gay, conflat-

ing sexuality with personality. But in fact, the same qualities that landed him in

a trash can in high school are what make him famous now.

Bullies, at least the idea of them, have inspired some of his most beloved

outburst videos on Vine. Before the platform was shut down, he had accrued

2.5 million followers. He moved to YouTube, where he started producing fash-

ion videos, but “people weren’t enjoying them,” he recalls. “They were like,

‘I want funny Rickey back.’ ” Taking that penchant for the fabulously defen-

sive and turning it into a character is complicated: It does put you into a box.

Since moving to L. A., he’s achieved the goal of notoriety, but he admits that

it doesn’t feel like he’s particularly made it yet. “I was talking to my manager

one day, and she was like, ‘You’re a celebrity,’ and I was like, Whoa. It kind of

scared me, because I—I still to this day think that I’m not a celebrity.”

As I rummage the racks, two teenage girls appear from across the store, full

of chaotic energy. They bombard him: “Can I take a picture with you? Damn,

where’s my phone? I forgot your name.” Thompson responds in a fan-ready

tone of voice I haven’t heard all day. While one of the girls preps her iPhone, she

and Thompson compliment each other’s outfits. She says, “I want to put this

on IG. This will be in my top nine this year.” He and the fan flash identical peace

signs, then the teens disappear out into the sunlight of Victory Boulevard.

“I see it now wherever I go,” Thompson says afterward. “There’s a phone

like, you know... it’s Rickey. I do get very nervous. I don’t want to mess around

and one day, I’m living my life, get caught doing whatever.” He means getting

“canceled.” Laugh, but the Internet is fickle about viral sensations turned celeb-

rities; for someone like Thompson, that could mean an entire career derailed.

He’s managed to circumvent that fate by giving his millions of followers

exactly what makes the Internet tick: seemingly unbridled tangents. But the

shots he fires never actually hit anyone in particular. His monologues do not

explicitly name the villain—that is your job. (In a recent video, he says that in

2020, he will not know of “that bitch sadness.”) Such an approach scratches

the itch of Internet ire without leaving any blood on Thompson’s hands.

This formula has worked pretty well, too. He gains a million or so Instagram

followers every four months. His manager updates him on his metrics, espe-

cially for every million-follower marker he crosses, but he insists that it doesn’t

excite him anymore. He knows his progress isn’t something to scoff at, though.

“I literally am just so obsessed with, like, all my success.... There are days

when I’m, like, going to a movie with my mom, and then a bunch of people

are like, ‘Rickey, can I get a picture?’ Sometimes I’m like, Oh my God, not right

now, but I would never say, like, Ugh, I’m done with this life.”

Thompson’s logged-off persona is much more subdued than that of the

flamboyant figure most know him as on Instagram, even if aspects of it are

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TWO TEENAGE GIRLS APPEAR. “CAN