Even before COVID-19 canceled San Francisco’s iconic Pride Parade for the second straight year, gay teen Steven Sutton was finding celebration and solidarity online.
On his TikTok account, between videos celebrating gay love and trolling Millennials, the 15-year-old San Mateo high schooler posts raw, vulnerable updates about his daily life and challenges. While Sutton is out to his family, he said he feels most comfortable among fellow queer Gen Zers, whom he perceives to be “the most mature and kindest.”
“To be out and gay at a young age requires a lot of introspection and maturity,” Sutton, a rising junior at Design Tech High School in Redwood City, told The Chronicle. “Never once on TikTok have I been told that my emotions are not valid. I get told that all the time in real life.”
Especially during the pandemic, TikTok — and the queer internet at large — have been lifelines for LGBTQ youth experiencing the most isolating effects of lockdown, according to research published last fall in the Journal of Adolescent Health and a more recent survey by the Trevor Project, which offers crisis services to LGBTQ youth.
According to the analyses, societal lockdowns and social distancing had more pronounced mental health effects on LGBTQ youth, who are more likely to reside in unsupportive home environments and seek out identity-based resources. According to the Trevor Project survey, 42% of LGBTQ respondents in the U.S. considered suicide in the past year, including more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth.
Even with the end of the pandemic in sight, experts say the psychological fallout — and the need for virtual safe spaces — will linger.
Samson Stebbins, 16, films his San Mateo neighbor and friend Steven Sutton, 15, for a TikTok video. Steven, who is gay and has a TikTok series, says he finds affirmation from his TikTok followers that he doesn’t always receive in real life.
Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle
“A lot of LGBTQ youth were living in situations where they weren’t able to be themselves, or their pronouns weren’t affirmed by the people they lived with,” said Amy Green, vice president of research at the Trevor Project. “It gives new meaning to the need for safe online spaces for LGBTQ youth who otherwise may have been isolated in places that were unaccepting.”
Indeed, as the world went virtual, many LGBTQ Gen Zers went looking for alternative support systems online, particularly on TikTok.
The social video app has exploded to 689 million active global users in less than five years of existence (and more than 1.2 billion if counting TikTok’s differently named iteration in China, which is owned by the same parent company). While the service became a popular quarantine hobby over the past 15 months, it has, according to online publication GayTimes, “transformed into a place of education and self-discovery helping to reclaim the queer experience online.”
That’s certainly what it felt like to Cas Davis. The 19-year-old genderqueer lesbian from Fairfield is better known to their 56,800 TikTok followers as @uppercasman, where they post everything from comedy sketches to “frog lesbian” content to guitar songs performed in drag.
Davis experienced loneliness in the early months of lockdown, they said, because while they’d found acceptance in their college theater program, their family didn’t know they were trans. Their experience wasn’t unique: Trevor Project’s data showed that over the pandemic, only 1 in 3 LGBTQ youth found their homes to be LGBTQ-affirming.
“I was pretty depressed at the start of the pandemic,” Davis told The Chronicle. “It was just me, myself and I.”
Cas Davis records original music at home in Fairfield. Like many LGBTQ youth, Davis found their community online when pandemic lockdown cut them off from their peers.
Brittany Hosea-Small/Special to The Chronicle
Eventually Davis turned to TikTok, where they cultivated a highly alternative feed, experimented with pronouns and received constant affirmation from their followers, all of which created the perfect conditions for a pandemic metamorphosis.
“TikTok knows who you are,” Davis joked, adding that their online friends were the first to adopt their nonbinary pronouns. “Queer TikTok is massively unique, very colorful, one of the most expressive online communities I’ve ever seen. I met a lot of wonderful mutuals. We give each other nice comments, it’s just great.”
Not all queer youth find immediate community online, however.
Anu, a 20-year-old nonbinary person from the Bay Area, said that they initially felt “invalidated” because many of the service’s inside jokes and trends — even those as seemingly benign as cuffing one’s jeans, drinking iced oat milk coffees and wearing androgynous fashion — centered on queer white people.
“At first the algorithms didn’t realize I was brown,” said Anu, who is of South Asian descent. “It was all white gays. I thought, ‘I can’t be androgynous like that, my face and body looks different, none of this represents me.’”
Anu knew they were queer since age 13, but isn’t out to their parents. In 2019, Anu experienced a transformative freshman fall at UC Berkeley, coming out to supportive roommates within the first two weeks. They also experienced an affirming role reversal when they became the first person another student came out to.
Less than seven months later, the coronavirus forced Anu back to their childhood home. The experience effectively re-closeted them. (The Chronicle has agreed to withhold Anu’s last name.)
“I’ve never had a dating experience, and was looking forward to that in college. It’s been a setback,” Anu said. “There’s no blueprint; I’m figuring this all out on my own. I feel like I’m not growing. It’s the feeling of not being able to move forward.”
Anu’s pandemic experience isn’t uncommon — and it occurred at an important developmental period for LGBTQ youth, said Green of the Trevor Project.
“Part of that process is being able to talk about it with others,” Green explained. In the absence of real-life interactions, she added, “Online becomes the forum through which youth are able to understand and express themselves, or for those who have formed their identities to find support from others to be themselves.”
Anu said their digital feeds are slowly diversifying, with more creators of color and discourse about South Asian queerness. They also discovered empowerment in online political advocacy.
On Instagram, Anu said they’ve educated themselves and others on issues that aren’t solely related to queerness, like climate change and tech policy. In doing so, they’ve tapped into a network of justice-oriented young people who validate their passions and identity.
“I’m learning about how climate policy is directly connected to the liberation of people in the global South and their queer identities,” Anu explained. “I love talking about it online and people are always responding and DMing me, like, ‘This really resonated with me!’ I feel quite bold and willing to share myself, because I meet other people who feel similarly.”
But they’re also looking forward to getting back to their peers “irl.” That’s set to happen in August, when in-person classes are scheduled to resume at UC Berkeley. Anu already knows who their roommate will be — the same friend who came out to them in freshman year.
Malavika Kannan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: malavika.kannan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @malavikawrites
