If you’ve watched the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix, you’ll remember the iconic moment of tragicomedywhere Fyre Festival employee Andy King admits he was ready and willing to ‘suck dick’ in order to get the Bahamian authorities to release a truck full of Evian water that hadn’t had customs charges paid on it.
Fyre Festival’s founder, Billy McFarland, who engineered this entire disaster of a festival, called Andy, he said, telling him that, ‘We need you to take one big thing for the team… Well you’re our wonderful gay leader, and we need you to go down. Will you suck dick to fix this water problem?’
Eventually, Andy didn’t have to do the deed, but the fact he was willing to is testament to just how sucked in (sorry) many of Fyre’s employees had become by Billy, the charming criminal at the centre of Fyre’s fraud.
Billy’s now in jail, but Andy is now a meme. In positive examples, he’s held up as a symbol of the sacrifice true noble people make in pursuit of getting the job done. In less favourable representations he is taken to task for being willing to do the dirty for the benefit of a festival that was already shaping up to be a catastrophe.
The issue, though, is so much more serious than a meme. Post-#MeToo, we all know what the rules are on asking staff to do sexual favours as part of their job.
The silver lining to the silver-haired meme, who didn’t even know what a meme was until he became one, is that he’s using his new-found fame to bring attention the cause of the unpaid Bahaman workers who were most hurt by the Fyre Festival calamity.
In a video for Netflix, he explained that a previous crowdfunder set up for the owner of a Bahamian restaurant who’d lost her entire life savings to Fyre had already succeeded, and now a new one was being set up for the labourers who tried, with all their might, to get Fyre going. Andy said: 'If I can drive positive influences and a lot of positive energy towards you know social and environmental impact, which is what I base my business on, then I think I can utilize this movement to do a lot of good.