Tiktok is a social media app that exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 quarantine. I know from my experiences as a queer woman on the app that there is a “gay side” and a “straight side” of Tiktok. As a researcher and sociologist, I became interested in what role the app plays in shaping and maintaining queer community through the proliferation of queer content and culture. So I asked my interviewees about their experiences on the app… Here you can find a compilation of “gay tiktoks” made by me. Their topics range from making fun of straight people, sticking up for themselves, celebrating their queer identity, explaining gender identity and pronouns, showing off cute queer relationships, drag, and making fun of themselves and their culture.
You can access my Tiktok compilation by clicking on the Tiktok logo below:
I spoke at length with two of my interviewees about their experiences on the app and the role it plays in their lives. One of them, who I refer to as Elizabeth, is a 21 year-old white upper-middle-class lesbian who garnered a bit of a following on the app from January-May 2020. She had about 9k followers and decided to delete her account as a result of one of her videos reaching “straight tiktok,” where she received many homophobic comments that took a toll on her mental health. We spoke about the drawbacks of the app for queer community, that the app was never made for queer people to use it in this way and has instead been appropriated for such use – there is no moderation of people trolling and spreading hate, so if a creator’s videos that are directed toward a wlw audience reach straight tiktok, the effects can be damaging.
Before Elizabeth decided to delete her account, she was having an amazing time on Tiktok. She made friends with other semi-famous lesbian content creators and they formed their own friend group, complete with a group chat and almost-daily facetime calls, happy hours, and trivia nights. This is the first time Elizabeth ever felt she has had a queer community, and it brought her a lot of joy; she says “it’s just like a place that I feel like welcome like being myself.” She jokes that for her friends in this group, tiktok is almost like a dating app, and “also it serves as a place where like, within the queer community we can like joke about things that are specific to queer people.”
Deeper than a surface-level sense of belonging as a result of tiktok, Elizabeth talks about the effects of queer representation on tiktok on her self-confidence and acceptance.
“just seeing representations of like, queer women that like aren’t afraid of like, being on the more masculine side, whatever, like that really helped me like embrace, how I wanted to look and dress, in a way that like… I always like wanted to dress more masculine, but like didn’t have the courage to do it… and now I do because I realized like, there are people, there are more than like a few people out there like me. So, like it kind of like serves as a confidence boost I’d say”
For Elizabeth, Tiktok was the first time in her life she felt immersed in queer community, and her interview reveals the ways in which tiktok provided space for collective identity formation, queer support, and representation through the proliferation of queer content and culture. Another interviewee, Jess, a Chinese-American upper-middle-class lesbian, identifies the ways in which Tiktok provided queer women and non-binary people a platform to discuss issues specific to their community. Jess explains and critiques a recent aesthetic trend on the app, cottagecore:
“Specifically with lesbian tiktok I think a lot of people are into this so called like ‘cottagecore’ aesthetic of like, wanting to like, basically like do like little house on the prairie and like live in a cottage with your girlfriend, make your own jams, have a lot of chickens, like all that kind of stuff, and um, I think that like cottagecore can be like a fun starting point I think, you know like if you wanna dress like you live on the prairie like, have fun with that! But I also think that um, a lot of like what’s built into cottagecore is like very, like, colonial, like, I’m gonna go live on this land which, if you’re in the US and you’re not indigenous, like that’s stolen land and you’re settling on it. So I think that, I think that there’s definitely potential in cottagecore to like, reject and disrupt notions of like capitalism and settler-colonialism, but like I think that again, it’s a very white-dominated narrative that has become like, ‘I want to settle on this land.’”
Jess explains she has seen many tiktoks where members of the community start dialogue about this topic, and that is where she found this critique. Jess’ testimony speaks to the potential of Tiktok as an app to facilitate dialogue within the queer community about how to resist forces of heteropatriarchial colonial-capitalism. I think this point shows that a central value of the community of queer women and non-binary people is what scholar Jen Jack Gieseking calls “dyke politics,” a radical antiestablishment advocacy. Both Elizabeth and Jess, along with the compilation I have created, provide us with examples of how queer women and non-binary people appropriate space within the Tiktok app for their own use: they share their stories, facilitate community dialogue, support one another, and just generally use the app to gain a sense of belonging to the greater queer community.