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Hello Baby, or Why Straight Women Love Lesbian TikTok
As a millenial who spends more time listening to Spotify podcasts than one human being should, I had no plans to ever use the Tik-Tok app. That was until The New York Times came out with the article “For Lesbians, TikTok Is ‘the Next Tinder’” peaked my interest. After years of studying queer communities on YouTube, I was surprised to find that the burgeoning research on queer TikTok communities was very similar.
It would seem that most, if not all, queer communities online are a heterogenous mix of LGBTQIA+ individuals and those who do not identify with any part of the alphabet mafia. These outside others within the community are many times allies, but in both online and offline spaces the others can be individuals who are vehemently opposed to what they consider to be deviant expressions of gender and sexuality.
By examining the relationship between those who identify as queer online and those who do not, I have found that social media is playing an integral role in our understanding and acceptance of more complex performances of gender and sexuality. Specifically, video-sharing platforms like TikTok create space for people outside of the LGBTQIA+ community to express and engage in queer desire in ways that either expand or transform their own gendered and sexual identity. And nowhere is this more apparent than the recent…
