During COVID lockdown in 2020 and 2021, Emma, now a 28-year-old in Cambridge, Massachusetts, discovered something unexpected on TikTok. Suddenly, her For You Page was full of content that would lead her to challenge her own identity: Cool lesbians.
Emma, who chose to go by her first-name only for privacy reasons, had not allowed herself to engage with the part of her that desired women, though she always knew it was there, deep down.
"I tried so hard to be straight," she says of her adolescence, having exclusively dated men up until her mid-20s, despite being raised in a supportive family that consisted of multiple queer people. "Society forces us to kind of be in the closet."
In the wake of sapphic TikTok rabbit holes, Emma decided to add women to her Hinge preferences, while still "really questioning" her sexuality and grappling with internalized homophobia.
"I would use it from afar," she says. "I wasn't fully engaging in it."
After spending a quarter of a century not allowing her attraction to women "surface" even in her own conscious thoughts, the idea of matching with — or even dating — a woman was almost unimaginable. "I couldn't really see myself doing that," she says.
She soon met a man from Hinge whom she dated for nearly a year and a half. Throughout that relationship, she was open and honest with her partner about her sexuality journey. With his support, she redownloaded Hinge and set it on women only. Emma noticed right away how much easier it was to make a profile geared towards women rather than men. Finally, she wasn't "trying to be someone [she's] not."
Eventually, when that relationship ended, she felt ready to start seeing women out in the real world, not just within an app on her phone.
Now, she is still with her girlfriend whom she met on Hinge.
Emma is part of a huge cohort of women who are discovering their queerness later in life with the help of social media platforms and dating apps.
It's no great shock that dating apps offer the semblance of a private place to explore. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual Americans are "far more likely" to date online than heterosexuals, as the Pew Research Center found in a 2022 study. In its 2023 Future of Dating report, Tinder found that 54 percent of young LGBTQ+ survey respondents had "come out" on dating apps before coming out to friends and family.
Justin R. Garcia, Ph.D., executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, says dating apps "allow people to dream" in an "unprecedented" way, offering "a window into a world of possibility."
Gen Z has ushered in massive generational shifts in awareness around human sexuality and forces like compulsory heterosexuality, or "comp het": the idea that women are socialized to compulsively desire male attention, regardless of sexual orientation. The "Lesbian Masterdoc," a viral PDF originally published on Tumblr, can take at least some credit for the widespread understanding of the concept, as Them reported in January. But TikTok and a new wave of pop cultural representation have been engines of sapphic education.
More than 38 million videos on TikTok use the hashtag #comphet as of publication. Top videos under the hashtag, many of which have millions of likes, educate women on the "signs" and "symptoms" of comp het that may be holding them back from realizing they're gay.
Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe!" — all about a woman who makes out with boys in bars "just to stop the feeling" of being attracted to girls — is the artist's most popular song on Spotify with over 440 million streams. The artists Reneé Rapp and Billie Eilish have both recently come out as women who love women, with both sharing that they took time to come into their sexualities.
This visibility is changing the landscape for women like Emma, who said she didn't observe much lesbian culture that resonated with her in her upbringing in the 2000s and 2010s.
"There's just less documentation and awareness of sapphic culture," says Robyn Exton, the founder and CEO of HER, a sapphic dating app that first launched in 2015 and changed the dating app landscape for queer women.
Now, Exton says, our culture is having a "sapphic renaissance."
When I've come out to people over the last year, many peers have joked that my queerness is part of the moment. And maybe it is — I definitely knew all the words to Chappell Roan's "Casual" before I let myself have feelings for a woman for the first time. But it took a hell of a long time to get here.
I downloaded Tinder soon after turning 18. I had only dated boys, but in the safety of my iPhone, I allowed myself to engage with my attraction towards women for the first time.
Over the next 10 years, this became a habit, as I teetered in and out of the closet. Whenever I was single, I'd toggle my dating app settings from men to women and swipe, chat, and flirt with women. There was an illicit rush in what felt like lurking.
Inevitably, when someone would ask to meet up, or I ran into someone in real life whom I'd spoken to on an app, I would panic: matches deleted, app switched back to men. But for a little while, I allowed my desire for women to seep through in small bursts, hidden within my phone's blue light.
I had only dated boys, but in the safety of my iPhone, I allowed myself to engage with my attraction towards women for the first time.
Moe Ari Brown, LMFT, a relationship therapist and queer advocate who works for Hinge as the company's love and connection expert, says dating apps give people who are questioning the "control to navigate their journey and preferences at their own pace."
Those days, I sometimes felt guilty for taking up space in an app where I wasn't sure I belonged. Several Reddit threads depict women questioning the ethics of engaging in a queer online space while still figuring out their own sexuality.
Experts say there's nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you're open and honest about where you are in your journey.
"While not every queer person has identified as questioning, the exploration and integration process is still a common experience," Brown says, adding that 80 percent of LGBTQIA+ daters polled in a 2023 Hinge survey said they were open to being someone's first queer dating experience.
I remember so many of those girls whose pretty faces and flirty texts terrified me. Something felt foreign and dangerous in my desire, so different from my attraction to men.
Last year, Eilish herself famously told Variety that she was "still scared" of women, highlighting how anxiety-laden new sapphic experiences can be.
Ava Shakib, ASW, a therapist and educator at the queer-focused Expansive Group in San Diego, California, says she has had many sapphic clients express fear around coming on too forward with women, especially after years of playing a submissive role in relationships with men.
Women fear their "assertiveness" may be seen as "aggressive or coercive," because they have a "high awareness" of the potential for a dominant sexual partner to "victimize other women."
Garcia cites the lack of sex education in America as a key element to folks struggling to understand their sexual desires. "A lot of people don't have the language to speak about this," he says.
HER, Tinder, and Hinge allow users to identify their sexualities as "Questioning." Exton says she believes HER plays an "incredibly critical role" for people in the coming-out process, specifically.
Feeld, which is most popularly known as a kink- and polyamory-friendly app, regularly updates its sexuality and gender identity label offerings. The app's users are encouraged to "pursue personal growth through connection with others" on the app, according to Ashley Dos Santos, head of communications at Feeld.
Dos Santos says that more than 60 percent of Feeld members reported having a "personal transformation" in their first year on the app, shifting their sexuality or desires.
Of course, women with same-sex attraction don't always end up with other women once they've had the time to explore. When Amanda* was in her early 20s, she took to Tinder to explore her attraction towards women. She had long been masturbating to lesbian porn and images of beautiful women in magazines, with no understanding of what that might mean for her sexuality.
While she spent some time dating and sleeping primarily with women for the first time, both in Boston and in Chicago, she felt she lacked the romantic connection she had always felt with men. Her sexual attraction for women was real, but there seemed to be something missing.
"Such a bummer," jokes Amanda, now 33 and living in Chicago with her male long-term partner.
Still, Amanda is hesitant to label her sexuality. "People always want to call me bisexual," she says, citing her frustration around memes mocking bisexual women in relationships with men. "It's more nuanced than that."
Amanda says she is still open to further exploring throughout the course of her life. For now, she tends to use the word "queer" when describing her sexuality, though she's afraid to take up that space as a cisgender woman in a relationship with a cisgender man.
As Shakib says: "Questioning your queerness is part of queerness."
* Pseudonym used to protect sources' privacy on the topic of sex and relationships.
