Gen Zers are calling out Neil Patrick Harris for this very justified reason

Once upon a time, child star-turned-stage and screen sensation Neil Patrick Harris was seen as a cuddly, loveable gay blazing a path for out-queer performers everywhere. But this, my friends, is a very different era. This is an era in which Neil Patrick Harris is experiencing a wild comeuppance for his 2011 crimes.

What crimes, you might be asking? Don’t worry, we’ll get there. But let’s start at the very beginning. Earlier this year, the How I Met Your Mother and Uncoupled star decided to join the rest of the world on TikTok. By way of introduction, the Tony Awards presenter filmed a video in which he announced his intentions to “ramp up [his] rizz” while his twins Gideon and Harper looked on in sheer (mock) embarrassment. It was a cute video, but commenters were quick to bring up a pain point from long ago by flooding the comment section. “Amy Winehouse,” commenters wrote over and over again, along with “Amy Winehouse cake.”

So what do Neil Patrick Harris and the late “Back to Black” singer have to do with each other? Well, it’s a rough story.

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Back in 2011, only a few months after Winehouse passed away at the tragically young age of 27, Neil Patrick Harris and his husband David Burtka threw a Halloween party that poked gruesome fun at the late singer’s passing. To tell the truth, it was worse than that. On Twitter, Harris posted a picture of a pulled pork centerpiece he’d commissioned from the company catering the event—and if you decide to Google image search this, please exercise caution, as the results are graphic. The dish was made to resemble Amy Winehouse’s corpse, and it was all passed off as a joke. Because 2011 wasn’t too far away from the peak Perez Hilton days of the Internet—in which gossip blogs felt it acceptable to poke fun at female stars going through mental health crises and other painful life events—this passed as a silly, playful move on Harris’s part.

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But Gen Z knows better. They haven’t forgotten the Amy Winehouse pulled pork platter—oft erroneously referred to as a cake—and they’re making sure that everyone else knows about it, too.

“Man I love Amy Winehouse,” wrote one commenter, while a flood of other posters commented phrases to the effect of “Amy winehouse cake” or “what about Amy Winehouse?”

Harris has yet to respond, and it’s unclear whether he even really knows what’s going on—though there’s absolutely no way he’s forgotten that fateful 2011 Halloween party. So many disrespectful, tasteless things were said about Winehouse’s death and struggles with addiction in those years, but one thing is clear: Winehouse’s legacy will survive all her detractors. Yes, including that horrible biopic.