TikTok’s Elderqueer Creators Bring LGBTQ+ History to Life

“This is what I looked like at 18 when I met my wife,” says the creator behind the TikTok account Your Lesbian Mom (@your_lesbian.mom), who shares videos retelling her “vintage lesbian love stories.” A 1988 photo of a fluffy-haired blonde sorority girl in a pink off-shoulder dress pops up on the screen. Then she introduces what her wife looked at the time: a punky skateboarder with a pink mohawk and blue eyeshadow. To the camera, the older narrator casually recounts how they switched college roommates to be able to room together, sticking towels under the door to smoke pot as they tentatively explored their first queer relationship. It’s a compelling story, deepened by Your Lesbian Mom’s great memory for sensory details and the film photographs. Though she refrains for sharing personal details about her current life, including her name and age, it’s hard to not feel excited for these two queer girls, soothed by the knowledge that there’s a happy ending ahead.

Your Lesbian Mom’s 16-year-old daughter first got her to join TikTok in April, “because her friends said I give good advice,” she tells them. “I did it to connect with those kids. Going viral was a complete surprise!” Her first video, which recounts the story of how she first met her wife in 1987, has over 1.4 million views. Since then, all of her videos — which document aspects of her relationship from coming out in the 1980s, and planning a wedding in the ‘90s, to trying to conceive in the early 2000s — have garnered hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views. “My vision is to provide hope and inspiration for young queers,” Your Lesbian Mom explains. “I want to show through example that your dreams can come true.”

The TikToker lays out the historical context that marriage and babies weren’t a given then; she and her wife had to fight for opportunities and information each step of the way to build the lives they wanted. In turn, her 158,000 followers and other viewers leave comments asking for advice with relationships and sexuality, and Your Lesbian Mom responds with advice based on her own experiences, illustrated by vintage photos and videos. She now feels like she’s become a role model to so many young queer women who want to see lesbian “success stories.” It’s a point of pride considering the only out lesbian she could look up to as a teen was k.d. lang. “We… didn’t have anyone to really relate to at that time,” she remarks. “This was before Ellen!”

Your Lesbian Mom is part of TikTok’s burgeoning community of #elderqueer creators, who bring 20th century queer history to life through archival photos and memories. These creators, who began popping up early on in the pandemic, are providing crucial, first-hand LGBTQ+ history to many young queer people who don’t get taught it in schools or might not know an older queer person in real life. Though there are plenty of videos on TikTok and elsewhere about the worst facets of queer history, like the AIDS epidemic and violence against trans women of color, elderqueer creators are able to share the rich reality of queer life in the 20th century — good, bad, or otherwise.

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.”

Felicity is delighted by her new intergenerational friendships, recognizing that it’s difficult for queer elders to build such relationships because they’re “limited by [their] real life locations from being able to find each other.” She understands firsthand how important it is to have a queer chosen family that can provide the support and love that one might not get otherwise.

In one video, Felicity recalls a time in her 30s when she met a lesbian woman in San Franscisco in her 80s. It gave her hope, as they never expected to live that long as a queer person. “Young folks on TikTok… are encountering me, specifically, for the first time, picturing their own self as a living, hopefully still-relatable person like them,” she explains.

Perhaps celebrities amongst queer elders on TikTok, The Old Gays (@oldgays) are a group of four retired gay men — Jessay, Robert, Bill and Mick — in their 60s and 70s, who make videos about their lives and current queer culture and trends. Though they all knew each other from living in the same neighborhood of Cathedral City, California, they started their TikTok account in collaboration with Grindr in 2020, and continue to work with them on the production of their videos.

Jessay, a musician, said that young queer people are so attached to their videos because they “don’t know old gay men” and that their followers “want us to be their grandpas.” They usually feature the group reacting to recent trends, which creates an intergenerational dialogue about queer culture, with some that speak directly to their experiences of growing up gay. As a result, the few moments where they talk openly about their pasts hit even harder; in one video Jessay tears up while trying to share his story of coming out to his mom, holding up a vintage portrait of them both. He ends with saying, “Here I am” — a moment of pride in having long overcome that hurdle. Jessay hopes young queer people can take from comfort and confidence from the stories of the Old Gays, recognizing how much progress there has been for the community within one lifetime.

While there is clearly a shared passion amongst these creators to mentor queer kids, they also in turn benefit from connecting with the younger generation, as they learn more about new trends in queer culture and feel that they are still a part of a wider queer community. Bill, of The Old Gays, says his time on TikTok has inspired him: “I thought I was just sort of another old man, but this has given me great confidence in living my life to the fullest.” Jessay, sharing in that joy, simply adds, “I’m just taking it all in. Tomorrow we could be nothing.”

Despite how quickly TikTok cycles through trends, none of these creators are likely to completely disappear. Like the 80-year-old woman who met with Calla Felicity in the 1980s, these stories might be carried on through the queer people who have watched and listened. They will, in turn, share them with the next generation of young queer people, keeping the history alive.

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