Gay Chicken

Tropes and genres
Related tropes/genres	Undercover in a Gay Bar
Related articles on Fanlore.

Gay Chicken is a game that is sometimes used as a plot device in slash. As psycholinguistic puts it:

Basically you have two (or more) guys being dudes, and because they’re so bro-y and manly, they have this stupid game where they do increasingly “gay” things to each other in an attempt to make the other person SO UNCOMFORTABLE they forfeit. This can take place over one sitting, or many moons. As you can probably determine from the explanation thus far, the game does NOT USUALLY END THE WAY THEY INTENDED.

The game can be taken to humorously extreme lengths in crack fics. In a gay chicken fic, there is generally a point where a character has to accept that they are doing gay things because they like it and have feelings for another person, and the game is a pretense. This may be tied to a sexuality crisis/sexual awakening plot. A subversion of the trope is to have a scenario in which one party believes they are in a game of gay chicken and the other party thinks that they are genuinely flirting, leading to a Didn't Know They Were Dating situation.

Fanwork Examples

• MCU: America Isn't Chicken by Amuly. Steve/Tony (28 June 2013)
• One Direction: slow to acknowledge the knots in our laces by dicktective. Louis comes up with a points-based version of gay chicken and convinces Liam to play it with him... for months. (24 December 2014)
• Homestuck: The Finer Details of Gay Cluckbeast by clumsyoctopus. Wherein Dave decides at his wedding that this game of gay chicken may have gone a little too far. (December 1 2017)

Links & Resources

• Gay Chicken tag on AO3