A Man Showing His Girlfriend a Harmless Film Sparked a Non-Stop Twitter Tirade

We may be in an era where it’s fun to hate on the people in power — more specifically, any cishet straight white man — but sometimes, it’s important to know the time and place. Art curator Chaédria LaBouvier severely missed the mark and started doxxing straight white men when she decided to take up issue with someone’s love of Miami Vice on X, formerly Twitter.

A man, Brandon Streussnig, tweeted, “Gf asked me to show her my favorite movie tonight. Probably the most important step in the relationship. No goin back now,” with a clip from Michael Mann's 2006 movie Miami Vice. For some reason, Chaédria decided this was a good opportunity to call him out, leading to a long discourse about Miami Vice. So we’re breaking it all down.

After Brandon tweeted about showing his girlfriend Miami Vice, Chaédria chimed in with a hot take: “Straight men live on a completely different planet than the rest of us, WHOT is this,” she wrote. But Brandon responded, “Making a lot of assumptions here lmao. She asked to see it and had a great time. Good luck with your miserable f--kin life,” getting the rest of X on his side.

Chaédria quickly clapped back, “F--k you Brandon,” continuing the unnecessary exchange. Several people quickly chimed in to support Brandon, sharing their disappointment in Chaédria’s “need to act so miserably towards someone who has done nothing to [her].” Others added that Miami Vice doesn’t actually fit this “straight, white” insult. “My love for Miami Vice exists thanks to three gay men who loved it and recommended it to me, thank you very much,” Rob Humanick wrote.

This may seem like a minuscule moment on the internet, but it grew as Chaédria refused to back down, responding to almost every person who dared insult her perspective. It all began on July 4, 2024, and an entire week later, people are still talking about it.

More and more people decided to share their positive opinions of Miami Vice, including their queer experiences with it. Chaédria chose to respond by tweeting “who cares,” and the more people talked, the more she responded. As an art curator, Chaédria began to see the Miami Vice thread as a study of human behavior.

“This has so much more to do with the mental health crisis in this country than anything I said about a movie that even the stars and directors distance themselves from,” Chaédria tweeted. “People feel no one is listening, the class issues and that people look down on them — and this a result of that.”

But many disagreed with Chaédria’s perspective, surprised that a professional art curator can’t appreciate the fact that art is subjective. As more people dug into Chaédria’s past), the more they learned that she doesn’t have the best record on X.

An October 2022 deep dive from The Atlantic into Chaédria’s part in a quiet Guggenheim scandal found that she’s not an uncontroversial voice in the art world. She was brought in to work on a Black Lives Matter exhibition at the popular New York City Guggenheim Museum because of her expertise on Jean-Michel Basquiat. She was the first Black curator and the first person of Cuban descent to curate an exhibition at the museum.

During her short time at the museum, she made big waves. Nancy Spector, who worked at the museum since the 1970s, said Chaédria’s essays on Basquiat for the exhibition were “poorly written” and in the extensive rework suggested she could be credited as co-author. But Chaédria tweeted in response, “I said f--k no and fought back.”

As tensions increased between Chaédria and the Guggenheim, Chaédria tweeted negatively about her experience working with them in the fallout of George Floyd’s murder, specifically calling out Nancy. After an internal investigation that found essentially no outright examples of racism from Nancy, she still ended up the inevitable scapegoat as her staff lost confidence in her.

But Chaédria has never been afraid to be outspoken. She once called a curator a “mediocre b---h,” claiming that they tried to erase her from discussions about a Basquiat exhibition in London and claimed that BBC documentary producer David Shulman of Basquiat: Rage to Riches “stole” Chaédria’s research.

She also accused the British GQ of not citing her work in a Dazed article about Basquiat despite no evidence of plagiarism, so for all of those asking why Chaédria is still tweeting about Miami Vice … the answer is right in front of us.

The inexplicable conversation has spawned so much discussion that the IFC Center in New York City is showing Miami Vice on July 12 and 13 at 11:40 p.m.