From @Your_Lesbian.Mom to “The Old Gays,” a growing community of older queer TikTokers are connecting with legions of young fans.
TikTok also allows viewers to have the feeling that they’re building an ongoing conversation with a queer elders. Because creators speak directly to the camera, the videos often have a sense of intimacy akin to a FaceTime call, with the ability to follow one person’s story through a YouTube-like profile page. This is certainly the case for Calla Felicity (@callafelicity), a 68-year-old nonbinary lesbian and minifarmer who first broke onto the platform last November, with a video of them simply smiling to the camera, captioned with the word “elderqueer” and hashtags relating to the nonbinary community. Many of the comments on that video and ones that followed ask Felicity to be their “auncle” or mentor (one even asks, “Can you be my fairygodbutch?”) Finding an audience on the app felt like reconnecting to the world and a welcome “distraction” to the recent end of her 32-year marriage, she says.
With her bright green hair and gentle voice, Felicity’s presence is calming as she shares TikToks about how her identity has shifted through the past five decades. She came out as a lesbian in 1976, when lesbian culture was heavily focused on “butch” and “femme” identities, neither of which she felt fit. It wasn’t until years later that they began using the term nonbinary, even though they had felt that way since the age of 3. Felicity’s age and wisdom offers validation and comfort to their younger nonbinary viewers, since gender nonconformity is often mistakenly viewed as being “new” or “trendy.”
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