D
ating tip: If you want to re-
ally get to know someone,
take a scroll through their
TikTok “For You” page. From there,
a stream of 15-second video and
audio clips will teach you about
the many little idiosyncrasies and
bizarre interests you might need
to know to move things along with
that prospective special someone.
I gave this a try recently, sheep-
ishly offering my niche “For You”
page tab for my date to peruse.
Looking over her shoulder as she
surveyed the likes of my meticu-
lously-cultivated,
liberal-parents/
outfit-of-the-day/iced-coffee/wlw
(women loving women) “sides” of
TikTok, I quickly realized the ma-
jority of the videos that the app’s al-
gorithm had strung together for me
were all tinged with a certain level
of, well, gayness.
Like many other Gen Z-ers, I
first bought into the TikTok craze
in those fateful months leading up
to the shutdown of public life mid-
March, when the COVID-19 out-
break was officially declared a glob-
al pandemic. A few months prior, I
had begun frequenting the app as
a kind of Youtube-esque platform
that seemed to cater to the rapidly-
shrinking attention spans of people
my age with its pocket-sized videos.
And it was also around this time
that I first began to seriously ques-
tion my (non) heterosexuality, talk-
ing to my LGBTQ+ friends about
their experiences and tip-toeing
into the sphere of gay dating apps.
After having been sent home,
along with all of my other peers, I
unintentionally entered a kind of
real-life case study testing the fol-
lowing variables: quarantine iso-
lation, sexual identity formation
and a platform called TikTok that
had proliferated the global digital
sphere. Having just separated from
the LGBTQ+ community I found at
the University of Michigan, mid-
quarantine TikTok meant I could
continue learning about and seeing
diverse representations of queer
femmes across the world. With this,
I could circumvent the kind of re-
ductive representations of queer
women long broadcasted to me
across mainstream media.
Upon my own reflection and af-
ter numerous conversations had
with other queer-identifying Gen
Z-ers on and off campus, I can say
with confidence that these non-het-
erosexual ideations have always ex-
isted. TikTok has simply concreted
and digitalized the breadth of queer
experience — from finding your
style to “coming out” to navigating
your first queer relationship. And
this visibility carries invaluable
significance to LGBTQ+ Gen Z-ers
across the world who, due to their
religion or familial background or
local community, may not be able to
find any other, relatable queer con-
tent to consume.
A crash course on queer commu-
nity and cultivating safe spaces
The need to access cultural con-
tent representative of queer iden-
tity has been a fundamental struggle
within the LGBTQ+ community,
which has been forming our own
spaces separate from heteronorma-
tive culture for decades. From the
century-long proliferation of New
York City’s ball culture, a perfor-
mance phenomenon developed by
and for queer people of color, to the
advent of Queercore punk music in
the 70s and 80s, the cultivation of
subcultures distinct from heteronor-
mative norms has been a trademark
of forming and nurturing queer iden-
tity.
TikTok’s ability to digitize this
formation of queer subculture is not
entirely unprecedented — the on-
line platform Tumblr accomplished
a similar feat when it gained promi-
nence among Gen Z-ers in the 2010s.
In an article for the Cinema Journal,
American Studies professor Allison
McCracken likens Tumblr to “an
alternative, tuition-free classroom,
a powerful site of youth media lit-
eracy, identity formation, and politi-
cal awareness that often reproduces
cultural studies methods of media
analysis. Tumblr’s design makes to-
day’s progressive youth subcultures
(including ‘LGBTQ-identified fans’)
‘on the ground’ visible to us.”
The idea of “on the ground” queer
visibility, or completely authentic
portrayals of queerness, is exception-
ally important for a community that
has been historically stigmatized and
caricatured by mainstream media
for decades — specifically for queer
women. Lesbian representation re-
flected in TV and movies during my
childhood met a dead-end of pixie-
haircut and flannel-clad stereotypes.
Platforms like Tumblr and TikTok
are so successful in countering these
types of reductive tropes because
they place the power back in the
hands of content-creators — real-life
gay women whose mere existence
and visibility dismantle heteronor-
mative stigmas of femme queerness.
Towa Bird, Avery Cyrus, Marthe
Woertman, Sof Adelle and count-
less other leading queer content
creators on TikTok are showing us
that women-loving women come in
every shape, size, color and gender
presentation — and you don’t even
need cable TV to access that level
of representation. Emma Carey of
Them Magazine elaborated on the
significance of this particular lineup
of creators.
“Through sapphic TikTok and
its numerous fandoms, young queer
women and femmes are carving out
a space to connect with each oth-
er, especially at a time when many
physical LGBTQ+ spaces are inac-
cessible due to the pandemic,” Carey
explained. “(Towa) Bird and her
contemporaries are more than just
relatable influencers, heartthrobs,
or icons of the moment. They are
the vanguard of a community greater
than themselves, within which queer
youths are redefining what safety
and belonging can look like online.”
The typified “gay” genres of Tik-
Tok content have become so much
more than little viral videos —
they’ve become spaces of community
and solidarity. And the effects of the
sapphic community in particular are
being felt across campus, with queer
femmes finding their own ways into
coveted, queer TikTok algorithms.
“It is so hard to find interesting
and relatable queer communities on
other forms of social media (other
than TikTok),” LSA junior Marlon
Rajan wrote in an email to The Mich-
igan Daily. “The queer tiktok com-
munity … at least, the cottage/diy/
lesbian/non-binary side of TikTok
that I’m on … continues to grow and
change as my interests do the same.”
For LSA sophomore Anastasia
Hernando, the nature of the app —
with the algorithm crafting genres
of content dubbed the “sides of Tik-
Tok” — has allowed digital connec-
tions to translate into prospective
friendships with other queer people.
“Sometimes I feel as though these
‘Sides of TikTok’ have really made
it easier for people to be exposed to
more welcoming areas (of the In-
ternet),” Hernando wrote in an with
The Daily. “I think (TikTok) has re-
ally provided those who have never
been able to access a queer commu-
nity the ability to relate and even
make mutual social media friends.
Especially since you can follow
someone on Instagram through the
TikTok app very easily, people have
been connecting on multiple plat-
forms.”
LSA sophomore Abby Chris-
tian acknowledged TikTok’s queer
femme community as both a safe
space and an area for education and
continued introspection.
“I think TikTok has helped me
feel more comfortable in figuring out
or being in the in-between space on
certain queer identities,” Christian
wrote in an email to The Daily. “Es-
pecially in regards to gender identity,
I’ve been trying to figure out what
feels right for me and it’s so com-
forting to know that others are hav-
ing the same experience and I’m not
alone.”
TikTok has cracked the queer code
In conjunction with the app’s
ability to foster queer communities,
TikTok’s “on-the-ground” queer vis-
ibility has been characterized by a
considerable shift toward candid
depictions of queer presentation.
That is, it’s begun to democratize the
physical “codes” that signify that a
person, (in this case, a female-identi-
fying person) is … you know.
In my experience, the jewelry box
of queer femme “signals” promoted
on TikTok contains the following:
Chelsea boots, tattoos, nose pierc-
ings, cuffed jeans and a primitive
affinity for indie-sad-girl artists like
Julia Jacklin and Phoebe Bridgers.
When I see any one of or a combina-
tion of these things, I can usually as-
sume that a female-identifying per-
son’s response to the weighted “are
you gay?” question is affirmative.
Carey elaborated on this phenom-
enon of queer femmes asking the
question in a kind of secret, coded
language and the ways sapphic Tik-
Tok has concretized this experience.
“Sapphic TikTok has grown to
develop a distinct culture of its own,
and queer signaling has been an im-
portant way for users to find each
other through a coded language of
identification,” Carey said. “‘Do you
listen to girl in red?’ — a reference to
the lesbian Norwegian pop star Ma-
rie Ulven — is a stand-in for asking
a woman if she’s queer. Other signals
include using the cello theme from
‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire,’ wearing
Doc Martens, making wacky ear-
rings, and so much more.”
While today these typified queer
“codes” have been packaged into
15-second TikTok videos and catchy
audio clips, their origins prove much
more serious in nature, once used
as a means for avoiding antigay vio-
lence and homophobia.
Researchers in a study by the Na-
tional Library of Medicine noted the
role of appearance in the perception
of queer identity.
“Given the vulnerability gay men
and lesbians face in terms of anti-gay
violence and prejudice, perceptual
accuracy provides self-protection,
both on a physical level and on a cul-
tural level, as queer people attempt
to convey their sexuality outside of
the awareness of heteronormative
society,” the study reads.
Before “listening to girl in red”
and “cuffed jeans” were a thing, queer
people found many other inconspic-
uous ways to express their non-het-
erosexuality. Common practices in-
cluded asking someone if they were
a “friend of Dorothy” in the 50s or
following the hallowed “hanky code”
of the 70s and 80s — which allowed
queer men to express their sexuality
via the pre-determined color-code of
their handkerchief. With these kinds
of “secret signals,” LGBTQ+ people
were able to circumvent being on the
receiving end of explicit homophobia
and transphobia while still making
their queerness known to the folks
who mattered: other queer people.
Thus, while this phenomenon has
always existed in some form within
the LGBTQ+ community, TikTok has
widely democratized and concret-
ized the experience — curating a tan-
gible set of images, audios and texts
that queer people can consume and
learn as widely-recognized “signals.”
And for people like me who continue
to sort out their place in the LGBTQ+
sphere, TikTok’s treasure trove of ac-
cessible resources has been essential
in learning and adapting to this se-
cret language.
All about the algorithm: Avoiding
the “wrong side” of TikTok
I would be remiss not to acknowl-
edge one of the severe disadvantages
of a platform like TikTok that seems
to instantaneously filter and distrib-
ute content: falling into the wrong
algorithm. With a highly-intricate
“recommendation
system”
that
has been coded to respond to what
kinds of videos you like, comment
on and even quickly scroll past, the
idea is each user’s algorithm would
be highly-personalized and effec-
tively infinite. You like dog videos?
And then you press “heart” on a dog
video? Welcome to an algorithm
that pushes endless dog videos, bet-
ter known as the “dog video” side of
TikTok.
This also means that, after pressing
one wrong “heart” or clicking on one
wrong hashtag — like #straightflag
or #superstraight — you can quickly
land yourself in a not-so-favorable
algorithm. This motivates detrimen-
tal effects for queer folks who would
rather not come across homophobic
slurs or transphobic sentiment like
“pick a gender” just one swipe after
their regularly-scheduled, queer pro-
gramming.
The good, the bad and the gay
In the process of creating this
“thinkpiece” of sorts, I posted a poll
on my Instagram story just to gauge
interest among my LGBTQ+ peers:
“Do you think TikTok (and the LG-
BTQ+ community it’s fostered) has
increased the rate at which/amount
of young people coming out as LG-
BTQ+?”
Within minutes, my direct mes-
sages were peppered with new, blue
notifications from friends and peers
I hadn’t heard from in months (some
of whom I never even knew openly
identified as LGBTQ+). In their mes-
sages, they spoke candidly about
TikTok’s queer community and the
increase in LGBTQ+ representation
and even how the app has sparked a
queer curiosity in them they hadn’t
channeled before.
TikTok and other Gen Z-centric
platforms like it have been thorough-
ly criticized for their lack of true,
human connection. But all I know is
this: In the age of virtual classes and
breakout rooms and heartless nice-
ties sent via Zoom chat, I found my
first blip of something that felt like
a real connection via TikTok. It was
this globally-resonant little dance
app that led people I hadn’t spoken
face-to-face to in over a year into my
Instagram DM’s — opening up about
something as personal as sexuality.
And for that, I am forever grateful for
TikTok, and all the good, the bad and
the gay it brings.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement
ILLUSTRATION BY EILEEN KELLY
Wednesday, April 14th, 2021 — 11
Do you listen to girl in red?: Femme queerness on TikTok
BY GRACE TUCKER, STATEMENT COLUMNIST