“If You’re Watching This, You’re Gay”
By Maddy Court
Maddie Brady downloaded TikTok in 2019. At that time, the app was generally dismissed as a place for children and the very corny to post lip synching videos. Maddie wasn’t worried about TikTok’s cool factor. As a professional social media manager, it’s her job to stay atop new social media platforms. By the time the pandemic struck in March 2020, she was spending upwards of six hours a day on TikTok. Part of it was for work, but it was also something more.
“From the beginning of being on TikTok, I was served a good amount of queer, gay, and bisexual content. I chalked it up to having a lot of queer friends and participating in a lot of gay culture. Then in the spring and summer of 2020, I remember there being a distinct shift towards bisexual content at a time when I was developing a crush on a woman. It was a chicken-and-egg situation – I wasn’t sure if I was getting more bisexual content because I was engaging in the algorithm, or if I was just noticing it more.”
Maddie, who came out as bisexual in her late 20s, is not alone in this experience. Many queer women who spent their adult lives identifying as straight, or struggling to understand their sexuality, describe their For You page as a kind of queer oracle. It answered questions they weren’t sure how to ask and connected them with a surrogate community that made them feel less alone in coming out. Their For You, it seemed, knew they were queer before they did.
According to a 2020 blog post, the For You page is determined by an algorithm that uses dozens of “signals” to predict what kinds of content a given user will enjoy. Signals track how users interact with a video – did they quickly swipe past, or did they watch to the end and check out the creator’s profile? In this sense, the app isn’t so different from other social media platforms. But considering that TikTok has been downloaded more than three billion times around the world, optimizes the process of creating new content, and is constantly introducing users to fresh topics and creators, it’s unsurprising that users find their innermost thoughts and lived experiences reflected back at them, especially when those thoughts and lived experiences are by all accounts, pretty typical.
“There are a ton of reasons why an LGBTQIA+ person’s orientation may not fully emerge until well into adulthood. First, there may be external forces at play: heteronormative culture, religious expectations, stigma, discrimination, etc. Then there are the internal forces like shame, fear, and discomfort. There’s internalized homophobia. There’s denial. There’s unawareness of one’s own desires,” writes Wistar Murray for Thriveworks.
Meg, who identifies as pansexual, started going to gay bars and dating girls after high school. Her friends, family, and a woman she dated told her that she was going through a phase and that eventually, she would have to choose between being gay or straight. When she went out with women, she was frightened by experiences of homophobia and creepy comments from men. Exhausted and lacking support, she quietly went back in the closet and immersed herself in a demanding career. When the pandemic closed her place of employment, she had the time and space to reflect for the first time in a decade. She started working with a therapist and questioning why she couldn’t connect intellectually with the men she dated. Around the same time, her TikTok app, which she initially downloaded for plant and gardening content, started showing her videos about queerness and sexuality.
“I saw videos where people listed things that devalued their queerness, like bi erasure, straight men fetishizing you, and feeling inexperienced. I realized I wasn’t alone in those experiences.”
Stephanie also felt alone and disconnected from her queer identity. Growing up Catholic in a conservative area, she never saw or interacted with other lesbians. The lesbians she saw on TV were either homophobic stereotypes or played by straight women.
“I always knew I was gay but as a girl, if you ever mentioned anything slightly homosexual, your friends would be like, ‘ewwww!’ It was very taboo. Lesbians seemed like an urban legend to me.”
Stephanie, who is in her 30s, downloaded TikTok at the onset of the pandemic and quickly found her way to a niche corner of the app known as lesbian TikTok. She watched videos of lesbians trying on clothes and being normal, everyday people. For the first time in her life, Stephanie saw lesbians she could imagine dating. She started getting videos that said: “If you’re watching this and wondering if you’re gay, you’re gay.” The algorithm, it seemed, was speaking directly to her.
“It was about visibility. I didn’t have lesbians around me, so having that community of lesbians online and just seeing that they existed made me feel safe.”
Stephanie started making her own lesbian TikToks. The positive feedback she received encouraged her to download Hinge and set her preferences to women-only, something she had attempted to do in the past before getting frightened and resetting the app back to men. She even came out to her best friend by showing her a video of a TikTok-famous lesbian changing into a suit. “How does this make you feel?” she asked. “Because it makes me feel weird.”
Today, Stephanie no longer makes videos. She’s a year into her first queer relationship and tries to spend as little time as possible on the app. “It was bad for my brain. I would sit down on my phone at 3pm and the next thing I knew, it was 7:30.”
Maddie and Meg have also ventured away from their phones and into real, in-person queer spaces. Meg started following queer performers and artists in her city to find out about events and opportunities to connect with other queer people. She recently attended a drag and burlesque show and ended the night with three new friends. She wants to build more queer, AAPI community in her city and is brainstorming ways to collaborate with local restaurants, artists, and affinity groups. This summer, Maddie attended a Pride celebration for the first time since coming out as bisexual. She felt emotional, which surprised her because she has had a large circle of queer friends since college and her online life had long reflected her identity.
“Queerness had been such a part of who I am, just not in real life,” she said. “Even if you do have a great digital community, in-person spaces and community are so important. It’s everything.”