My love of lesbian TikTok began in 2020, when I swore to everyone that Dance Moms-underdog-turned-TikTok-influencer JoJo Siwa was gay. I had always loved her attitude on Dance Moms, and now she was growing up and her love of sparkles and rainbows was becoming suspicious. When she came out as queer in 2021, at the peak of our pandemic boredom, her followers went crazy. She was ushered into the messy, wonderful world of lesbian TikTok, and soon she became our crown jewel of influencers.
Now, Siwa’s TikTok followers outnumber Canada’s population, her account has 1.7 billion likes and she’s become not so much the lesbian messiah in the public eye as he lesbian Judas: potentially playing a part in the breakup of one of TikTok’s most beloved lesbian couples, Avery Cyrus and Soph Mosca. The duo became famous for their relationship, so it seemed unfathomable to imagine one without the other. They had been dating for two years, and had been searching for a home to move into together. Two weeks after they called it quits in August, Siwa and Cyrus were dating, flying cross-continent to see each other.
Now, nearly two months later, Cyrus is spending most of her time at Siwa’s house, and seems to be practically one of the Siwas, spending time with her’s parents and brother, and joining family trips to Disney World. It’s fast becoming one of the most audacious cases of U-Hauling I’ve ever seen.
But let’s rewind. Did Siwa really start the lesbian TikTok drama of the past few months? Or was it a few weeks prior, when Oregon Ducks basketball player Sedona Prince and her girlfriend Rylee LeGlue announced an amicable public split, followed by scathing cheating allegations dropped in the comments by LeGlue only a few days later? Was it when singer Fletcher released a song lusting over her ex Shannon Beveridge’s new girlfriend Becky Missal? Or when Beveridge released Becky-themed shirts what felt like hours later? Or was it when model Alissa Carrington and girlfriend Sam Miani broke up—that’s Alissa, who’s now dating Soph, who used to date Avery, who’s now dating JoJo. Please keep up.
Basically, it’s The L Word in real life (down to the nearly homogenous cast of thin, pretty white women), and it might feel impossible to stay up to date with who’s dating who. Enter gossip accounts, like kales_0. Kaelee Overfield, based in Tampa, Florida, has nearly 500K followers on the app, and a whopping 26 million likes. In a recent New York Times profile, she was called the “lesbian Perez Hilton of TikTok,” although Overfield is probably more accurate with her theories. She really started blowing up on TikTok when she made videos speculating on the relationship status of Siwa and on-again-off-again-ex Kylie Prew in late 2021.
“After JoJo got back with Kylie, I was just like, great. I can end it here. You know, this was fun,” Overfield tells me. “But then I realized there was obviously a need and a desire for it. People honestly loved it.”
Overfield, who is also a full-time law student at Stetson University College of Law, quickly began making TikToks providing commentary on all the evolving lesbian drama, sharing screenshots of certain influencers posting together, pointing to incriminating comments and tags, and updating her growing fan base as to who was in and who was out. Though she was receiving some hate in her comment section for stirring the pot, it didn’t fazee her.
“I’m really just sticking to reposting what these people have already put on social media,” she explains. When she does interact with the famous lesbians she’s gossiping about, she says there’s “a kind of mutual respect.”
That’s the question I was most interested in asking Overfield to weigh in on: do any of these influencers purposely leak tea about themselves to gossip accounts like hers? It turns out, not really. When they do contact her, it’s usually in response to gossip she’s already put up about them. One example she gives is Rylee LeGlue’s messages after her breakup with Sedona Prince, when LeGlue asked Overfield to respect her wishes to keep the breakup offline—a request that LeGlue understood was thrown out the window when Prince made the juicy details public knowledge. Other than that, Overfield says that the influencers she talks about are generally happy to be discussed online, and for rumours about their relationship status to be spread.
“They’re kind of, like, into it,” she tells me, clarifying that the more famous the influencer is, the more they tend to not mind content being made about them. “I’ve kind of learned that the famous people I do talk about, they’re kind of wanting people to know the information … they understand that it’s just all publicity. And all publicity is good publicity. And usually, those things I’m saying, you know, are the truth.”
Overfield tells me sometimes influencers will reach out and ask her to not dive too deep into their personal lives if it’s something difficult that they’re going through—she always respects their requests.
Bacall Sterling and Diamond Lane (@sterling.lane) are a well-loved TikTok couple with over a quarter of a million followers. They say they have respect for the kind of content Overfield produces.
“There are a ton of gossip accounts on TikTok,” the couple pointed out in a joint email. “We personally don’t feel it’s an invasion of privacy … Kales pops up on our [For You Page] all the time, and we will say, she be puttin’ in the work!”
Though Overfield’s account is mostly home to the most relevant and recent lesbian TikTok tea, there have been times where she has had to break away from the lighthearted drama for a moment to address issues in the community. When TikTok users started comparing Siwa to new squeeze Cyrus’s ex-girlfriend Soph Mosca, and insulting Siwa’s looks, Overfield snapped back, posting a TikTok criticizing those coming for the influencer.
“I took a side there,” Overfield says. “Like, you guys just gotta stop calling the girl ugly and comparing these two women. You gotta put that to rest. It’s benefiting nobody; it’s just hurtful.”
Overfield highlights a worrying aspect of the drama of lesbian TikTok: at the end of the day, these are young people experiencing their first queer romances on an immensely public platform, and they’re having to deal with the consequences of millions of people knowing intimate details about their relationships and breakups.
For instance, when Siwa claimed she didn’t like the word “lesbian” to describe herself, implying it felt gross to say, fans attacked her. She eventually made a TikTok reply to a comment that read: “She called it a dirty word. She did nothing but insult us, my sexuality is not a dirty word.” Siwa ended up clarifying, explaining, “It is not a bad word, it is not a slur, and it is especially not a word that I am ashamed of saying or ashamed of identifying as by any means.”
Siwa started on Dance Moms in 2014 at age 11, meaning that her most vulnerable moments have always been recorded and shared with thousands, if not millions, of viewers. While it’s great that she’s charting her own territory as a queer influencer, it can be worrying to see just how much of Siwa’s private life fans still feel they’re entitled to.
“I’m grateful social media wasn’t something I experienced through high school and even college,” Overfield, who at 25 is part of the older section of Gen Z, tells me. “I don’t know what my life would’ve been if I started making TikTok content while in college. Oh my God. I think I would’ve been a lot more sad. It would’ve been a lot more toxic.”
Sterling and Lane have also noticed that fans have an interest in knowing all the details of their relationship, though they’ve found that on the whole their interactions have been positive. “The biggest thing for a TikTok audience is feeling connected,” they tell me. “They want to feel connected to you. Like they really know you.”
The couple says they limit what they share online, and keep some aspects of their relationship private. “When people put their relationships on TikTok, their audience is going to feel connected and involved … kind of like they are a part of it,” the couple explains. “That is when they feel like the relationship is their business, and can put their two cents in because they see 15-30-second clips of a relationship.”
Though it’s particularly worrying to see very young queer people like Siwa, Cyrus, Mosca and Carrington experience this level of publicity, more seasoned online queers aren’t immune to the drama either.
Overfield and I reminisce about watching Shannon Beveridge in her YouTube heyday around 2014, and nearly a decade later, she’s the talk of the online lesbian community again. This time, it’s provoked by her ex, Fletcher, whom she lived with and produced music for during quarantine, even after their 2020 breakup. Beveridge is with a new girl, Becky Missal. When Fletcher dropped her single “Becky’s So Hot” in July of this year, fans were shocked to hear lyrics such as “If I were you I’d probably keep her/ Makes me wanna hit her when I see her/ Cus Becky’s so hot in your vintage T-shirt,” as well as the particularly audacious couplet: “Oh she’s the one I should hate/ but I wanna know how she tastes.”
This kind of drama is so unflinchingly bold that it seems implausible it’s not a PR stunt—though Beveridge herself denied any knowledge of the song on her own TikTok a few days later, stating “this is not PR that I’m a part of,” and noting that “no one asked permission.” Fletcher and Beveridge are a full decade older than Siwa and co., but the messiness and the hurt of lesbian TikTok drama seems to be affecting them too, proving that it’s not just a lack of maturity, but perhaps the app itself. With the app allowing users to post short videos that are added to an infinitely cycling pool of content, perfectly curated by the algorithm to show up on the For You Page of relevant demographics, gossip takes off at lightning speed. Users can duet, adding their two cents into the discussion instantaneously. And some accounts are posting tens of videos per day, meaning that the gossip is quickly buried as users move on to new drama.
Lane and Sterling, however, don’t think it’s the app that’s the cause of the toxicity—it’s just that the app allows us to see that toxicity much quicker. “Lesbian breakups have been happening way before TikTok,” they said. “TikTok is just a quicker and more interactive app, so that is why I feel like these breakups seem so big and well known.”
TikTok, in their opinion, provides a platform to whomever wants one. If negative energy is on the app, they say, it’s because of the people. “We don’t think a single app brings toxicity. Toxic people bring toxicity. TikTok has made us realize that people do love some drama!”
It’s unclear which of the current TikTok couples at the forefront of the drama are going to last, if any. When I ask Overfield what her expert predictions are for the next breakup on the horizon, she’s got her sights on Siwa and Cyrus.
“People are saying JoJo’s going to be over it in a couple of months … but I think that relationship’s gonna last as long as Avery feels like playing along.”
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