Last month, the cryptocurrency-based online casino Duel aired a blackjack livestream that it said would be hosted by former pro kickboxer turned controversial masculinity influencer Andrew Tate.

But while the dealer—a bald man with dark stubble, wearing a black T-shirt, tight suit, and sunglasses—bore a resemblance to Tate, he didn’t act much like the swaggeringly macho and voluble streamer. His mostly silent performance was punctuated by sudden bouts of singing, vigorous twerking, and still more ridiculous dance moves, the most impressive being a full split on the blackjack table. He also spontaneously made out with a male assistant posted to his side, pulling him in for the kiss by his necktie.

The performance went viral, but sometime after the livestream began, Duel’s founder and owner, Ossi Ketola, claimed that the casino had been duped by an influencer management agency. “We were promised a deal where Andrew Tate would deal blackjack for one of our live games,” Ketola wrote in Duel’s Discord server. “When he arrived at the studio, we realized we had been rugged. The person that stood in front of us bore some resemblance, but he wasn’t the real Andrew Tate. It was an impostor. By this point we are too far in and the costs have been incurred, so we are forced to run with it to save face.” Duel did not respond to a request for comment regarding the alleged bait and switch.

But just who was that “imposter”? His real name is Brian Michael Hinds, though many quickly recognized him as “Bottom G,” a half-German, half-Barbadian social media star who, while looking like Tate, acts in every way as his exact opposite, flamboyantly twerking and twirling from Miami Beach to Barcelona, ready to burst into song at any moment. Even the name “Bottom G” is a queer-coded play on Tate’s self-applied title of “Top G.”

Hinds, 29, tells WIRED that Duel fully understood it was hiring Bottom G, not the real Tate, who has separately advertised the casino on terms that are not publicly known.

“Of course that was the whole request,” Hinds says of his Duel livestream on a Zoom call from Istanbul, where it’s 2 am. An avowed night person, Hinds, whose résumé includes singing on Germany’s version of American Idol and dancing at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, says he has no fixed address, traveling wherever opportunity knocks. “I'm for the streets,” he declares. “I’m everywhere.” Because of how the Duel clips blew up, Hinds says, he now has offers to perform his songs at a show in Bangkok and at a wedding in Las Vegas—less because people want a Tate look-alike per se and more because they’re thrilled by his joie de vivre. “My true fans, they get it,” he says. Hinds also plans to work with Duel again.

Such is the surreal life of an aspiring gay pop star who found accidental fame through a strange connection to a man notorious for his extremely misogynist views. (Both Tate and his brother have been charged with rape in multiple countries; they have also been charged with human trafficking in the UK. The pair have denied all allegations.)

It was back in 2022, not long after Hinds had launched himself as a street-dancing internet personality in order to promote his music, that his accounts were first flooded with comments comparing his looks to Tate’s. He had never heard of Tate, didn’t find his content of much interest when he looked him up, and tried to ignore these replies while focusing on his own personal brand.

Eventually, though, Hinds decided to make the most of the coincidence and embraced a kind of memehood. Recognizing that it was something this online audience wanted, he adopted the persona of Bottom G—while trying to avoid outright impersonation—as a strategy for marketing his music. “I didn't even think about Andrew Tate at all,” he says. Apart from beginning to book work in which he Tate-ified himself a bit more, he kept on doing what he’d always done for his channels. “I feel unbothered,” Hinds says. With Tate, to the contrary, “it's so important how he's perceived,” he says. As Hinds’ profile rose, the tension between those two attitudes came to fascinate and amuse Tate fans and haters alike.

For Hinds, maintaining his own distinct identity amid this bizarre situation is essential. He doesn’t deliberately dress like Tate unless he’s being paid; his manager claims that live Bottom G performances can fetch $10,000 to $15,000, while the biggest brand deals, like Duel, can reach six figures. Lately, Hinds says, he is experimenting with more “outlandish” wardrobes that differentiate him from Tate. “People won't stop calling me Gay Andrew Tate, so I might as well just have a big emphasis on ‘gay,’” he says. “I just had a call with a stylist and said let's just go maximalist.” For a wedding job in Thailand earlier this year, he went with a colorful shirt that resembled a quilt. “It was a pretty pricey shirt, and I'm like, it's pretty ugly—but it's something he would never wear, so the job is done,” Hinds says.

Nevertheless, there is a constant pressure to mimic Tate from those who enjoy the idea of a pseudo-rivalry between the two, or just want to add to the sort of confusion generated by incidents like his interview with streamer Adin Ross, who claimed on that livestream that he had mistaken him for Tate until he began dancing. Some prospective clients have asked Hinds if he would consider temporary tattoos that match the ones on Tate’s chest and arm. Hinds thought that went too far with the joke in a way that obscured his individuality. “I said no for now,” he says. “Let's see if they convince me to actually do it.”

In 2022, Hinds claims Tristan Tate reached out to him via Instagram DM to support what he was doing as Bottom G, though the exact message was lost when the Tates were banned by Meta in August of that year. He also claims Andrew Tate separately called him from Dubai and asked if he was the artist behind “Can We Talk About Us.” The brothers later recorded themselves grooving in a sports car to the song, which Hinds says remains his most popular track to this day—it has been streamed nearly 4 million times on Spotify. (A representative for the Tate brothers did not respond to a request for comment on their relationship with Hinds.)

But despite the increased exposure, Hinds found that his association with the Tates also had its downsides. He speculates that this phenomenon may account for the deletion of various social media accounts over the past four years, particularly on TikTok. Reached for comment, a TikTok spokesperson said that the company does not share moderation details about specific accounts. However, two of Hinds’ previously deleted accounts were subsequently reinstated.

“November last year, I was like, ‘I hate Bottom G,’ he says. “‘I get deleted. It doesn't make me as rich as I thought.’”

To his surprise, the Duel livestream showed him how to have fun with the character once again. “I never thought I would enjoy it like that,” he says of the experience, which made him want to continue pursuing collaborations in that vein. Meanwhile, he’ll keep expanding his fashion sensibilities and is building toward releasing a full-length album. His latest single, “Another Time,” deals with the disconnection and distance that are part of Hinds’ globe-trotting life. “I feel misunderstood all the time,” he says, observing that this theme of alienation adds a deeper layer to his otherwise carefree image.

And if Hinds wants to escape from the drama and anxieties of the influencer economy someday, he does have another passion. Years before he got into social media, he says, he was “dreaming about wigs and different looks and guys having fun with it and wearing it like cool hats.” He had ambitions for a “wig business, legit, like, male wigs—and maybe that's my way out of this mess.”

Because he felt “bored” the other day, and admires how women can dramatically change their appearance with hairpieces whenever they want, Hinds ordered a “beautiful, nice wig” to try out. Perhaps it will rekindle that old dream.

At the very least, it might be another helpful reminder that he isn’t Andrew Tate.