Content warning: This article contains mentions of human trafficking and sexual assault.
“Hamilton” did the impossible: it made kids care about American history. A Broadway musical with hip-hop battles about the Federalist Papers was, unsurprisingly, more engaging than the cyclical American middle school reteaching of the same curriculum about the same war, year after year.
But in true modernist, internet fashion, “Hamilton” didn’t just inspire a newfound appreciation for revolutionary war figures; it also led to an explosion of wildly inventive fanfiction, intense online discourse and — most unexpectedly — an entire scandal surrounding an HIV-positive couple, medical fraud and sockpuppeting.
Yes, somehow Broadway rap battles inspired significantly more AIDS fanfiction than anyone would have predicted. Welcome to the wild, weird world of the “Hamilton” fandom, where Tumblr users invented marginalized identities in order to make America’s founding fathers gay high schoolers in the 1980s.
If you need a refresher from eighth-grade American history, Alexander Hamilton is the guy on the $10 bill, and the man that Lin Manuel Miranda (“In the Heights”) — the playwright of “Hamilton” and actor for the titular character — chronicled through song. But “Hamilton” wasn’t just a history lesson set to music; it was a cultural reset. The show took dusty, long-dead figures and turned them into something fresh, vibrant and, most importantly, relatable. It wasn’t just about revolution; it was a revolution, reimagining America’s past through a modern, diverse lens. This recontextualization wasn’t just an artistic choice — it became the foundation for how fans engaged with the material.
One of the defining features of the show was its casting: reimagining the founding fathers as Black and brown men, which deeply influenced the way fandom engaged with the material. Tumblr, in particular, saw a surge in fanfiction where these characters were explicitly written as Black or Indigenous people of Color, further shaping how audiences related to American history.
This process of reimagining went beyond just race, layering additional identities onto these historical figures until they were no longer bound by their origins but instead became fictionalizations of themselves. For Tumblr users, race, gender, sexuality, disability and even addict status were all dress up items for our founding fathers. I mean, we’ve all seen Miku Binder Thomas Jefferson, right?
Now, “Hamilton” is a widely applauded musical, both winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and accruing 11 Tony Awards in 2016. Obviously, the musical was well received. But … why did Tumblr have such a vested interest in the founding fathers rapping? The answer lies in men kissing.
Tumblr loves men kissing — men that might kiss, men that definitely won’t kiss, and so on and so forth for eternity. Rest assured, this fascination predates “Hamilton” — all of Tumblr’s early fandoms circled around men kissing men: “Supernatural”, the Onceler fandom, BBC’s “Sherlock.” All of these titans of fandom space predominantly concerned themselves with men locking lips.
While Tumblr has always been a breeding ground for homoerotic reinterpretations of media, the “Hamilton” fandom took things a step further. And in the case of “To Scale the Blue Sky,” a fanfiction published by the now-deactivated blog hivliving, this impulse to transform historical figures into modern characters collided with something far stranger, something that somehow ended up encapsulating medical fraud and false identities.
Presently, “To Scale the Blue Sky” has been taken down from Archive of Our Own and it was effectively scraped from the internet.
At least for a brief time, before someone recovered the entire fanfic which is now available to read on docdroid. And while it would be brilliant if we all read this piece of history, a 365-page pretext to this article would be quite ludicrous, hence, I’ll supply a synopsis. The fic took place in an alternate universe where the founding fathers attended an American high school in the 1980s. “Alex” Hamilton contracts AIDS after being drugged and assaulted, and his boyfriend, “Jack” Laurens has AIDS too.
If that premise wasn’t unhinged enough, the dialogue truly cements “To Scale the Blue Sky” as a masterclass in melodramatic, self-important fanfiction. With all the subtlety of a brick to the face, the fic delivers lines like this, dripping with misplaced gravitas:
“‘Welcome to the fun and exciting lifestyle of being LGBT in 1988,’ Laurens sighs.”
This is the kind of writing that reads as though it was penned by someone who just discovered the concept of oppression yesterday and is absolutely thrilled to inform you about it. The sheer posturing here is almost admirable — if it weren’t also laughably absurd.
But honestly, this is all par for the course for Tumblr, so where does this supposed controversy come in? And why? Shipping real people has always been contentious, more so now, but it was more accepted in the far-gone age of 2015. Still, no shot that wanting the founding fathers to kiss got the fic (temporarily) wiped from the internet.
The alleged authors, as they initially presented themselves, were Israa — a nonbinary Chinese-Pakistani survivor of sex trafficking — and their wife, Raj, a Catholic-Somali transgender lesbian of Color. Raj was born in the U.S., but both were supposedly living in India. Both claimed to be HIV-positive and ran a popular blog together — hivliving — documenting how the disease affected their lives.
They used hivliving as a platform for activism, but also a way to share their personal experiences with various forms of trauma and discuss how being HIV-positive had impacted them. They also used it to promote their fanfiction, frequently ending up on oft re-blogged posts of popular BIPOC authors within the fandom of “must reads.”
So, why did it all come crashing down? What was the impetus, the catalyst, the dreaded callout post? Within an era of this blogging space that contained advocacy for child slavery, human pets, and rampant, unforgiving grifting, what exactly did hivliving do in order to upset the delicate Tumblr ecosystem?
On the cusp of the grassy knoll stands the villager crier, digoxin-purpurpea, an infamous writer within the “Hamilton” fandom. In their wake, supernatural slash fanfictions lay strewn: Lin Manuel Miranda as a cannibal mermaid, Thomas Jefferson as a ghost giving some sloppy, sloppy head and so much more that has been lost to vicious, unforgiving internet shame — and the unrelenting delete button.
Okay, so this is the … savior? Of our story? Sure, no one’s perfect, and ideological perfection is a killer, so let’s go with this: Digoxin-purpurea, here on out referred to as Dig, is the hero of this story, with cannibal fanfiction as their virtuous sword.
The righteous path forward that Dig sought to take was laid out to them when hivliving published a CashMe (similar to CashApp) fundraiser for some vague, esoteric medical expenses. Dig, ever-astute, realized the owner of the CashMe account must be based in either the U.S. or the U.K., since CashMe is only available in those countries. After much back and forth, Naj confessed to all disclosures previously stated: There is no Naj, no Israa, no HIV-positive status, and no lesbian couple.
The real, singular author was one white girl named Alix, a 19-year-old American college student. Not HIV-positive, not living in India, not married and not a lesbian. In the end, the elaborate web of identities unraveled to reveal a single person behind the curtain — no sprawling backstory, no international struggles, just one college student fabricating two entire existences.
But why go to such lengths? Why construct an intricate false identity just to participate in a fandom? The answer lies in the deeper psychology of online spaces, where personal validation often becomes just as important as creative expression. Nothing can be written, drawn, pondered or put out in the world without an accompanying accusation that the one who put it out also partakes. To write is to condone!
Tumblr thrives on an all-or-nothing purity culture where creative curiosity is replaced by moral posturing. It has always been home to strange, self-sustaining ecosystems where fandom, identity, activism and an overwhelming fear of being problematic collide. The Hamilton fandom was no different — it wasn’t just about enjoying a musical; it was about proving you were engaging with it correctly.
In these spaces, simply liking something isn’t enough. Tumblr, more than perhaps any other social media platform, runs on a currency of identity and oppression. The more marginalized identities one can claim, the more authority they wield in conversations. It’s not just about being right — it’s about having lived experience to back it up. The result? A bizarre, self-perpetuating competition to see who has suffered the most, where one’s worth is determined not by their contributions, but by their perceived struggles.
This phenomenon, often dubbed the “trauma Olympics,” fosters an environment where individuals feel immense pressure to justify their presence. In the wake of reactionary, callout-heavy online culture, participation in fandom isn’t just about artistic exploration — it’s about proving you deserve to be there. Creativity takes a backseat to personal validation, and suddenly, fandom isn’t about the content itself but about who has suffered enough to engage with it in the first place.
That’s how you get something like the hivliving scandal. It wasn’t enough for a white college student to simply be interested in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and write a fanfiction about it. Something in her own psyche — some need for validation, authority or maybe just an unexamined sense of entitlement — made her take it further. It wasn’t just about writing a story; it was about becoming someone who was “allowed” to write it while dodging all the necessary steps to write it respectfully.
Perhaps, we now feel the effects of the oft-donned victim complex of white women: the deep-seated need to center herself in narratives of suffering, to prove that she, too, has endured, that she belongs in the conversation. But, to her, being a white woman wasn’t enough — she needed something grittier, something more tragic. So, she draped herself in an identity she saw as more compelling, one soaked in oppression and hardship: a queer, HIV-positive, sex-trafficking survivor from India. It wasn’t just about trauma — it was about exotic trauma, the kind that people would listen to, the kind that couldn’t be questioned.
There’s an undeniable fetishization at play here, a romanticization of the BIPOC lived experience as something both tragic and poetic, something she could borrow to justify her own creative impulses. She didn’t just want to tell a story about suffering — she wanted to own it, to speak over the very people she was supposedly representing. It’s easy to point fingers at Tumblr’s culture of performative identity, and sure, it may have enabled her, but at its core, this wasn’t Tumblr’s doing. This was her own calculated fabrication, born from a mix of insecurity, entitlement and a deeply ingrained belief, however incorrect, that her voice mattered more when it wasn’t actually hers.
2015 Tumblr was an Ouroboros-esque circle jerk of people nursing their own victim complexes.
The hivliving scandal wasn’t just about medical fraud or fanfiction ethics; it was a case study in how internet culture pressures people to fictionalize themselves just to feel allowed to participate. And, ironically, it proves the very thing Tumblr’s moral watchdogs fear the most: Sometimes, people are not who they say they are, and they’re lying to get the better of you.
At the end of the day, fandom — at its best — is supposed to be a place where people can embrace the weird, the niche and the unhinged without fear. It should be a space where creativity thrives, where people can explore ideas, identities and historical rap battles without needing to justify their interests. But when the culture of constant scrutiny and purity policing forces people to prove they have the “right” to engage, it doesn’t foster better, more ethical fandom — it just pushes people to lie. Instead of demanding credentials for every creative endeavor, maybe we should be open to people’s personal explorations, writing silly little stories and embracing their freakishness without endless flashing credentials. If we could do that, we might not have to deal with elaborate catfishing schemes, medical fraud scandals or yet another white college student pretending to be an HIV-positive, sex-trafficking survivor just to write about historical figures kissing.
Maybe — just maybe — we could let people get weird without the witch hunts.
Daily Arts Contributor Estlin Salah can be reached at essalah@umich.edu.
