welcome to strong feelings! Essays by writers we love, in which they share their most impassioned opinions on a given subject. In today’s strong feelings, Gen Z and Tamil-American writer Malavika Kannan (she/her) explores the potential downfall of the QueerTok we knew and loved.
I, like many, downloaded TikTok during the collective depression of the Covid-19 pandemic. Midway through my freshman year of college, classes were cancelled, and like gay Cinderella, I was sent back from the ball to my childhood bedroom in Florida. I had been out for all of six months, and Covid felt like the biggest cock-block from the universe. In college I’d experienced queerness as freedom – shaking ass in basements, catching crushes in the wild, making out with friends – but in quarantine, I explored the underside of the historic queer experience: isolation, longing, repression, silence. I often thought about that Saoirse Ronan quote from Ladybird: “I want to live through something.” Now I was living through something – we all were – but at the time it felt more like dying. My screen time nearly mirrored my waking time. When I downloaded the app, the algorithm slapped me in the face.
My TikTok experience started similarly enough to everyone else’s – jokes about coronavirus, recreating the “Renegade” dance in a pair of slouchy quarantine pajamas – but then it took a specific turn. I started seeing thirst traps of pretty girls who didn’t care if guys saw them. Androgynous OOTDS and straight-to-camera pep talks from hot people who called you “queen.” I’d made it to queer TikTok, in its nascent form, and I was thrilled.
In my diary that December, I wrote, “Being part of queer TikTok feels like being part of an inside joke with literally thousands of gay teens across the country.” Earnest, yes, but the first time I saw a video with the title “signs you’re bisexual,” I couldn’t believe it. Cuffed jeans? An inexplicable childhood obsession with Greek mythology? You think women look good in suits and men in skirts? I was convinced TikTok had accessed parts of my brain not even I had.
I credit this beleaguered app for being a portal when I needed it most, connecting me to queer community, past and future. TikTok became a necessary community hub for a generation growing up with shrinking third spaces, a loneliness epidemic, and high economic barriers to participation.
But TikTok is likely going to undergo a new kind of significant change in the coming months. This past weekend when the app experienced a brief shutdown only to be resurrected mere hours later via executive order, TikTok gave President Trump the credit for “saving” the app in a message that was served to its millions of US users. It begs the question — what conversations were had between our new political administration and this tech giant? What potential deal was struck to have encouraged a push notification with such pointed language? Theories have abounded; concerns over potential algorithmic changes to beliefs of outright censorship are occurring on the platform.
Even prior to this, the app had, in my eyes, already started falling down the tech spiral that one writer called “enshittification” – when an app becomes self-serving and worse for users, (think: aggressively pushing shopping features or ads). But the world is shifting for queer people, too. Trump has committed to anti-LGBTQ legislation within his first 24 hours in office, including ending Biden-era protections of trans people. His inauguration featured a stacked lineup of tech CEOs pandering to Trump. In this climate, can we trust that TikTok will remain a third space for marginalized identities? Will it ever have the same tenor or feeling to it? I think not.
It’s a real loss, because TikTok was once a powerful site for queer community building. Amelia Montooth, the founder of the queer TikTok show Gaydar, said the TikTok user experience differed from more search-based or following-based platforms like YouTube or Instagram because its algorithm “gave you the safety of not having to seek [queer content] out, it would bestow it upon you,” she told mixed feelings. Indeed, like a genie, TikTok seemed to know your heart’s desires, showing you exactly what you wanted all along. Now, 1 in 5 members of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ – and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Sage, a queer twenty-something, grew up in a conservative religious community where queer people, and even Democrats, were viewed as “sinners.” Her algorithmic conversion began quietly: fit inspo that veered genderqueer, carabiners, patchwork tattoos. She’d been dreaming of cutting off her long hair, which she associated with traditional femininity, and realized that all the short-haired baddies she was following had something in common.
“It was a really honest look in the mirror,” she said, laughing. “My algorithm was starting to turn in a direction, clearly I’m clicking on all this stuff, I’m finding myself increasingly on this corner of the internet, maybe this isn’t just an interesting curiosity.” It was almost like exposure therapy: “TikTok broke down initial barriers I had, which coincided with my own journey of what faith meant to me.” She’s since found TikTok creators at her same intersection of queer and religious identities, including gay preacher Jonathan Merritt – and chopped her hair.
Others described a bizarre, affirming experience of their algorithm evolving alongside them. There was a sense of coming up with creators in real time. One twenty-year-old lesbian told me that when she first downloaded TikTok during quarantine at fifteen, she mostly saw coming out videos – a storied internet tradition and hangover from YouTube-era gays – but in coming years, she began seeing relationship TikTokers, dating advice — just queer people living their lives. She also had her own personal evolution, from identifying as bisexual to lesbian – an experience I share.
To me, coming out as lesbian is inextricable from the viral Lesbian Masterdoc. This grassroots-y Google Doc, originally posted anonymously to Tumblr in 2018, has helped droves of people question whether they might actually be a lesbian, including singer Kehlani. Its argument is rooted in deconstructing compulsive heterosexuality, aka social pressures and learned behaviors encouraging straightness. Although “comphet” has long been central to lesbian theory, this casual, first-person document struck a chord and reached a new generation that might not have otherwise encountered it when it went viral again on TikTok in 2022.
The Masterdoc, authored by an anonymous teenage girl who hasn’t given interviews since 2020, became like the older lesbian mentor you might never meet if you weren’t lucky enough to live in a major – and expensive – queer city. Maybe that’s why in 2024, Them reported, “the word ‘Lesbian’ was so back.” I’ll always associate TikTok with a lesbian renaissance, from Chappell Roan’s megasummer to a new crop of artists who put the stigmatized L-word back into Gen Z’s lexicon.
It was representation that our generation sometimes didn’t deserve. In the absence of in-person connections – or a groundedness that TikTokers might call “touching grass” – it was easy for chronically-online bad takes, exclusiveness, or new-age TERF-iness to abound. But the point is that on TikTok, young people weren’t just passive consumers: we were actively shaping queer culture in our own image, radical and messy.
Take Montooth, who said she created Gaydar, a viral man-on-the-street-style interview series about queer issues starring guests like Towa Bird, because she was “alarmed by the shift to the right on LGBTQ issues in the past four years,” particularly trans issues. “I was hoping to make people laugh and make it truly entertaining, but I wanted queer people to learn more about our own history,” she said. Ultimately, Montooth was “trying to communicate a queer politic – it’s not just who you sleep with, but also a perspective on the world.”
This queer politic feels like one of the biggest departures between queer TikTokers and their predecessors, which were perhaps shaped by generational campaigns for representation, rights, and visibility. Mutual aid campaigns, including for Palestinian communities who were live-streaming their own genocide on the platform, took off – which some people suspect contributed to the ban. Artists used TikTok to communicate directly and unfiltered to their audiences, perhaps bypassing a more traditional marketing apparatus that would have rewarded respectability and moderation. I can’t imagine an artist like the aforementioned Chappell Roan, who controversially refused to endorse Kamala Harris for her stances on trans and Palestinian rights, taking off on a different app.
Now with the app changing, users are pondering their next move. Some are considering different apps, or just trying to reduce their screen time altogether. My friend Christina Li, a novelist whose sapphic young adult book True Love and Other Impossible Odds released last year, said she reached so many eager queer readers on TikTok, which “pushed books with a lot of genuine interest to corners it wouldn’t reach.” (TikTok is also how we met!) She’s not sure how she would reach people on a different, or worsened, app. “It’s like the Library of Alexandria burning,” one TikToker posted, when the TikTok ban seemed imminent – and even though the app was technically saved, its future looks gloomy.
I’m grateful that I don’t need TikTok anymore. The things it gave me – community, representation, hot women, language to describe what felt like my lonely, bewilderingly specific experience – I am lucky to have in real life. But that’s because I am almost twenty-four, living in Brooklyn, which is teeming with in-person community, like the lesbian mecca of the Eastern Seaboard. Once I was eighteen, in Florida, and before that I was fourteen, confused, lying awake in bed and praying to God to make me normal again. Not everyone has these privileges. Even the public libraries – my refuge when I was younger – are under attack, with queer YA books like mine getting banned in my home state. But queer ingenuity has a long life, on- and off-apps, and is marked by continual rebirth and the ability to weather change. And I am still hopeful for what comes next.