TikTok Lesbian Drama Culti vates Curiosity in Queer Relation- ships

TikTok Lesbian Drama Cultivates Curiosity in Queer Relationships

Juliana Gaspar

Arts & Culture Editor

TikTok, a platform that curates niche content for its users’ personal interests, has risen in popularity over the past two years. This algorithmic personalization has allowed for different circles to take shape within the app, and the part of the platform known as “Lesbian TikTok” has been at the center of recent controversy.

It is widely understood that once someone has a large public following, privacy becomes hard to maintain. This is no less true for TikTok content creators, especially when it comes to lesbian couples who act as important respresentation for young queer girls online.

Jojo Siwa, a previous member of the Abby Lee Dance Company known for her appearance on hit reality TV show Dance Moms, came out as queer in January 2021. She has since become a significant online voice and advocate for queer youth. However, the publicity Siwa has recieved since coming out has generated its own negative discourse — not only have there been homophobic responses from the usual right-leaning media sites, but there’s also been critique from members of the online queer community regarding her new relationship with Avery Cyrus, another lesbian influencer on TikTok.

Four TikTok-famous couples that have recently broken up — Sedona Prince and Rylee LeGlue, Soph Mosca and Avery Cyrus, Alissa Carrington and Samantha Michele Miani, and Jojo Siwa and Kylie Prew — have now been thrust even further into the spotlight, with many TikTok users making videos in response to perceived similarities between these influencer breakups. Many fans felt that there was more behind the carefully crafted videos and Instagram stories which broke the news. Thus began speculation from followers looking to find the truth behind these breakups.

Sedona Prince and Rylee LeGlue were the first to publicly announce their breakup to their audience. Then Jojo and Kylie split for the second time, and Avery and Soph, who had been dating for two years, also went their separate ways. Finally, Sam and Alissa quietly announced their breakup. These rapid-succession breakups drew the attention of followers, who began to closely follow the responses of each creator. Avery is now confirmed to be dating Jojo, who was a friend of the couple before they split. Fans then noticed flirty videos and comments exchanged between Soph and Kylie.

TikTok users took to the platform to share their opinions, feeling disrespected on behalf of Soph that Avery had moved on so quickly from the breakup and was already posting about her new relationship all over social media. In addition to followers of these creators, other content creators who were friends with Avery and Soph also voiced their discontent, most notably Dallas Smulson.

Nuanced queer relationships are underrepresented in mainstream media, such as television and film. However, on platforms like TikTok, personalities within the queer community are able to post and authentically share their lives and relationships frequently. Queer communities and relationships share dynamics that differ from their heterosexual counterparts, and these complex dynamics are magnified on platforms such as TikTok, where users often feel entitled to the personal details of creators’ lives. The common ground of a queer identity creates opportunities for a parasocial dynamic to form between queer influencers and their young fans.

Similar to the closeness queer TikTok users experience with one another, Oberlin creates a shared identity between queer students, which often generates curiosity in knowing who is hooking up with whom, who is dating whom, and who has broken up. Beyond shared identity, the Oberlin student body is a dating pool for queer students. Once students graduate, they’ll be hard-pressed to encounter this many queer people living so closely together. Queer communities, relationships, and dynamics function in a unique way and this can blur the boundaries of privacy both on social media and off.

Girlpool’s Performs Nostalgia Invoking Farewell Concert at ’Sco

Kathleen Kelleher

This past Monday, LA-based indie rock group Girlpool graced the ’Sco with its third-to-last performance as a band. Led by friends Avery Tucker and Harmony Tividad, the group formed in 2013, releasing its debut album Before the World Was Big in 2015. Forgiveness, Girlpool’s latest album, came out this April and recieved a 7.6 rating on Pitchfork.

In August, the band announced it would break up at the end of the year. Two-thirds of the band’s tour dates were canceled, leaving only eight of the initial 23.

“This upcoming tour will be our last one,” the band wrote in a statement announcing its breakup. “It will be an ode to the past, a celebration for the future, and something we will pour both of our hearts into completely.”

I knew two Girlpool songs before Monday night: “Before the World Was Big” and “Chinatown,” both off the band’s debut album. I knew those tracks from high school and hadn’t listened to them much since, though I still held a quiet appreciation for them. With a little variation, I imagine the majority of the audience at Monday night’s show might say the same thing: that they only knew a few songs from an early record. Perhaps, like me, they gave the band’s latest album or two a listen in preparation for the show. Forgiveness wasn’t for me — I’d describe it as bad hyperpop, wearing its Charli XCX-esque influences on its sleeve. I mostly hated the admittedly raw, real lyricism for its content: themes of disappointing sex and too much partying. I think I hoped that Tividad and Tucker, now both in their late twenties, might have matured from the pleasantly teenage whining and vulnerability of Before the World Was Big.

The audience at the show seemed disinterested in the new works, more often chatting over the concert than reverently dancing. If we all only know a handful of tracks from an album released seven years ago, why was the turnout for Girlpool so great?

“Knowing that it was their thirdto-last show, I liked the idea of being able to say, ‘I saw indie pop icon, cultly loved band Girlpool, in one of their last shows!’ even though I’m not their biggest fan,” Anisa Curry Vietze, OC ’22, said of the show. “I feel like it was a good pick for an Oberlin show; I feel like it was a very Oberlin band, and I bet a lot of people listened to them in high school. But also, I feel like sometimes you just go to the ’Sco show because it’s free, and at the ’Sco, and it’s a Monday night.”

Having music so readily available at our fingertips, and for free, gives students something to do in the midst of classes and assignments.

“All in all, I think I got what I expected: a video for my one second of the day, a brisk walk to the car, and to see Harmony Tividad play the bass. Kind of cool that their drummer is an Obie alum with an English major,” College third-year Sequoia Jacobson said.

Although I kept to the back at the Girlpool concert, I know what it’s like to be in the front row at a ’Sco show for a band you don’t know all that well. It’s a feeling that you are performing as much as the band is — performing to a loving and well-versed audience, dancing to every song joyfully and tirelessly. It’s a small venue, and the artists who come to play for us are just people who hope we love their music.

“I have a theory that your experience at the ’Sco show, any given ’Sco show, is really not about the show itself at all, but instead about your own mental state going in, who you see there, and how much you want to be in a crowded bar-like experience,” Curry Vietze said. “All that is to say, I don’t know that I loved the songs that they were playing necessarily, although I didn’t dislike them either, but I still had a good time because I was with people that I really care about, and in a space that ... still means a lot to me.”

Tucker, who came out as a transgender man following the release of the band’s sophomore album in 2017, wrote an essay for Them about the struggle with identity that has come alongside Girlpool’s identity and its past success.

“I felt so distraught over my identity in Girlpool,” Tucker wrote. “The name of the project was gendered, our voices intertwined in a way I couldn’t imagine reinventing. Girlpool was my whole life, passion, journey, and career.”

As artists rightfully grow up and out of their old music, though, the audience still holds onto it dearly. I still love the two songs I know. It’s a nostalgic, tender love, particularly for “Chinatown,” a raw and sparse song about uncertainty and loving your friends. Listening to the track, I feel transported back into my sophomore year of highschool, driving around town in the passenger seat of my first girlfriend’s Prius, staring down at my checkered slip-on Vans. It’s not the kind of music I like now, but I honor it for the place it once had in my life.

“The one main song that I really wanted them to play — and they actually did — I knew because of my experience at Oberlin, because I have so many memories of my freshman year roommate playing it on her guitar in our Dascomb dorm room,” Curry Vietze said. “So it was actually really sweet for me, now as a graduate, an alum, to be able to see them at Oberlin.”

Girlpool plays a show at the ‘Sco. Photo by Erin Koo, Photo Editor

Contact Improv Facilitates Deep, Mindful Touch During COVID-19

Leela Miller

Senior Staff Writer

This semester, College fourth-years Nina DiValentin and Piper Morrison are facilitating a mixed-level contact improvisation class through Oberlin’s Experimental College. Contact improvisation is a dance form that centers around giving and receiving weight and moving organically and harmoniously with other dancers. In free-flowing contact “jams,” dancers come together, find a point of contact between their bodies, and move in tandem with each other.

Contact improv as it’s known today originated at Oberlin in 1972 with dancer Steve Paxton, who taught the art form to twelve men on campus. Paxton pulled from his experiences with aikido and gymnastics to create a form of dance that was more concerned with bodily awareness and the experience of connecting and interacting with others rather than with performance for an audience.

“I think that it’s important to emphasize that people have probably been doing this with their bodies for much longer than fifty years, but the codified term ‘contact improv’ was created by Steve Paxton at Oberlin,” Morrison said. “It started as kind of like an experiment, with a bunch of guys throwing their bodies at each other. It was initially very inspired by aikido and other martial art forms and modern dance, and it all meshed into this playground of rough housing. And now, it’s expanded into a global phenomenon.”

Morrison and DiValentin are the first students to teach an ExCo course on contact improv since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both are experienced with and passionate about the form.

“Unlike other dance forms, it’s really about the act of doing and the experience of movement in the body, versus preparing something to show,” Morrison said. “That’s not to say it hasn’t been performed — and we do get into that a little bit in Varsity Contact — but that’s not its primary function.”

Morrison was vaguely familiar with CI before committing to Oberlin, and she had her first in-depth instruction with the form when she took the ExCo in fall 2019, then taught by Rebecca Janovic, OC ’18. DiValentin got involved with CI during the fall of 2021 by taking Professor of Dance Ann Cooper Albright’s class. Morrison and DiValentin met — and, over time, became closely bonded — when they both took part in the intensive CI Winter Term project with visiting artist Jurij Konjar.

“To me, finding contact [improv] felt like finding a home within dance,” Morrison said. “It felt like a bridge between more social, freeform dance settings and traditional dance classes. [CI classes] were places where I could experiment with dancing in a space cut out purely for dance, rather than a social space, like a party.”

Morrison and DiValentin noted that this iteration of CI consists of an unexpected majority of newcomers, rather than a balanced mix of levels. Both Morrison and DiValentin expressed that this is both a source of difficulty and a moment of opportunity for them to push themselves as educators.

“Something I would say I’m finding difficult in teaching the ExCo is trying to ingrain this idea that we’re not performing for each other,” Morrison said. “We’re witnessing each other and supporting each other in movement, but the goal of learning different strengthening techniques and exercises is to be able to dance to our fullest ability. It isn’t for the sake of making it look a certain way.”

According to Morrison, the heightened interest in CI among those who’ve never experienced it before is tied to the overlapping social and artistic side of the form.

“I think a lot of people were really curious about what it would be like to engage in close contact in this dance form that’s social, but also artistic,” Morrison explained. “It’s often unfamiliar, and even weird, to be that close to strangers or to new faces and without the connotation that it carries a romantic or sexual connotation.”

The challenges of teaching CI to first-timers is heightened by COVID-related anxieties.

“I think that there’s a general sense of trepidation surrounding getting within people’s personal space bubbles,” Morrison said. “When facilitating a class where we’re directly instructing people to do that, we have to be really cautious and careful to communicate clearly why we’re doing what we’re doing, and we need to be sure to provide alternatives for people who aren’t comfortable or maybe aren’t quite comfortable yet. Since the pandemic, there’s this bubble that everyone has that feels much more nerve-wracking to break than it has in the past. We have to go slowly.”

Although the pandemic has made the already vulnerable experience of dancing in intimate contact with strangers more stressful to navigate, it has also increased the collective desire for meaningful touch. People are eager, perhaps now more than ever, to

ExCo instructors Nina DiValentin and Piper Morrison demonstrate contact improv. Photos by Abe Frato, Photo Editor DiValentin and Morison perform contact improv.

feel present in their bodies and to feel physically close to others.

“[During the pandemic] it was like my body was screaming to be touched by other people and to have that skin to skin contact,” DiValentin said. “And then, in contact improv, someone is trying to truly feel your body through their body and have your weight and their weight coalesce. It’s a mindful, meaningful kind of touch. To have that kind of touch when I was craving touch was spectacular to me. It was exactly what I needed.”

Brooke Levan, a second-year College student, is one of the newcomers to CI. Thus far, Levan has found her experience in CI to be freeing, especially after COVID.

“We’ve all been avoiding [physical] contact for these past couple of years, so it feels really nice, honestly, even if it requires a shift in my mindset,” Levan said. “It feels like something I’ve been missing. … I think that physical touch is an important form of connection with other people.”

Going forward, Levan wants to integrate her experiences with CI into her daily life.

“After my first class, I felt much more present and aware of my surroundings and my place in space,” she said. “I think that is something that I would definitely like to carry into everyday life if possible, especially considering the crazy busyness of school. I don’t know if I’m there just yet, but I would like to get there.”

Respresenting the Underrepresented Through Art

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ancestors, are still here living through us, and we can celebrate it in ways that they did. It’s a cycle; another seed comes up and grows into new experiences, memories, traditions, songs, and ways of culture, which we pass on to the next generations.

Reaching out to the community for photos of their deceased loved ones for this exhibit must have been quite the emotional task. How did your team go about this outreach?

When I sent out the calls, it was sort of awkward because not everybody is very familiar with Day of the Dead. So instead of saying, “Hey, send me pictures of your dead relatives,” we had to word it in a certain way to be respectful. It was also a labor of love because a lot of my own family members are up on the ofrendas as well. I lost myself in the work and built out the vision I had. When everything was done, I took a moment to sit down and take it all in.

It took us about two and a half months to build it. My fatherin-law helped me with the build and my sister Lilly, who had a cultural dance group here for many years, helped with the film. It’s been a family affair.

How has it been to produce this performance with Babel Box Theater?

I figured this show was a good opportunity to get the name out there. I had always wanted to do something like this, especially because of the void in this part of the country when it comes to Mexican and other Central American cultures. In Cleveland, the Mexican community is not a huge one. You go to a lot of other major cities like Chicago or New York and the Mexican population is rather big.

Our mission is to represent the underrepresented and the marginalized through performance and partnerships. Our first play is about a transgender immigrant. We already have the rights to do the play but we don’t have the funding yet, so it’s not official. Everyone who’s involved in Babel Box Theater loves art and performance. We do it out of love for the art, love for our culture, and to do it justice.