Some people wake up from anesthesia crying about a sandwich. Some are convinced they’ve been abducted.
Rachel Levin woke up from having a wisdom tooth pulled, looked at the man standing next to her chair and asked if he was her husband.
He isn’t. He’s her gay best friend. He said yes anyway, and then he kept the phone rolling while she tried to work out how she’d ended up married to a gay man.
The result has been played close to 38 million times on Instagram alone. And if you’ve already seen it, you still haven’t seen him. The “husband” is the one filming, so you hear every answer but never see his face.
He turns out to be an award-winning fashion designer whose clothes have been worn by Megan Thee Stallion and Katy Perry, and he looks the part. We’ll get to him (and his photos) in a moment.
Who’s Rachel Levin?
If the name doesn’t ring a bell, ask any niece who was online in 2015. Rachel, born in Philadelphia in 1995, started uploading makeup tutorials as RCLBeauty101 when she was 15. She moved into comedy skits and grew the channel past 14 million subscribers, which put it among the 100 most-subscribed channels in the US. Her fans call themselves the “Levinators.”
These days she’s mostly making pop music and posting short, chaotic clips of her life. This is one of the most chaotic.
The Best Friend Was Waiting In The Recovery Room
Rachel had to have a wisdom tooth taken out, and her best friend came along to take care of her afterward. He also, being a good friend, filmed what happened when the sedation started wearing off.
The on-screen caption sets it up: “when you forget who your best friend is after getting your wisdom tooth out 💀.”
She’s slumped in the chair with the blood pressure cuff still on her arm, looking up at him. Then she asks the question, he plays along, and a heavily sedated woman starts reasoning out loud about her marriage.
Wait for her last question. His answer is the reason millions of people have shared this clip, and her reaction to it is even better.
“Why Does This Keep Happening To Me?”
Our favorite part is how fully he commits. Rachel asks whether he knew he was gay before or after being with her. “After,” he tells her.
Rachel takes a moment to process that, then wails, “why does this keep happening to me.” That’s the line commenters grabbed onto. One asked the obvious question: how many times has it happened, girl?
Then comes the big one. Is it because she’s so hot that he thought, “Ah I must be gay if I’m not into her”? Or is it because she’s so ugly that… she can’t even finish the sentence.
His answer: “I think you’re gorgeous.”
That’s the gay best friend’s job description in four words. If you skipped ahead, go back and watch her face when he says it.
She captioned the whole thing “no more anesthesia for me,” and the comments filled up fast. “Why you end it? I want more gay man 😂,” wrote one viewer.
Another offered the simple verdict: “He definitely sounds gay.” A few insisted it had to be staged, which prompted other commenters to share their own post-anesthesia meltdowns, including a woman who says she pulled out her IV and roamed the recovery ward demanding her “boulder holder.”
Which leaves the question a lot of viewers had once they stopped laughing: who is the guy with the voice?
The “Husband” Is Fashion Designer Kaeden Kalaqtic
The man behind the camera is Kaeden Kalaqtic, and he co-posted the video with Rachel on Instagram. Since he never appears in it, here’s what you missed:
Between the curls and the forearm tattoos, we can’t blame her. Rachel, sweetie, we’d have assumed the same thing.
Kaeden grew up in Seattle and started out on YouTube as a teenager, making openly gay lifestyle videos and story times that picked up more than 100,000 subscribers. So his answer of “after” was a bold one, coming from a man who was out online years before any imaginary wedding.
In 2018 he moved to Los Angeles with, by his own account, about $100 to his name, and he slept in cars and on friends’ couches while he figured out what came next.
What came next was fashion. He started making festival accessories, then built them into his own label, Kalaqtic, which he describes as “a blend of modern minimalism and space-age design.” Megan Thee Stallion, Katy Perry, Heidi Klum and Machine Gun Kelly have all worn his pieces. He made his New York Fashion Week debut in 2023, and the following year Out put him on its Out100 list and honored him as its Fashion Designer of the Year.
He also grew up without a father, raised by what he called his “two moms, Yolanda and Katie,” who backed him through every unusual career turn.
Best Friends Who Go Everywhere Together
Scroll Kaeden’s Instagram and Rachel keeps turning up. In May the two of them hit the pink carpet together at the 35th anniversary party for The Abbey, West Hollywood’s most famous gay bar. In July he posted a batch of festival photos and tagged her as “my bestie forever.”
There’s also a Las Vegas weekend, a New York trip in September and a pile of group shots with the same circle of friends. The dental clinic was just one more outing, if a less glamorous one.
Every gay man who has ever been the plus-one, the emergency contact or the ride home from the dentist knows exactly what Kaeden did there. You say “I am.” You say “after.” You tell her she’s gorgeous.
And then, obviously, you post it.