A Celebrity Lesbian Romance Changed My Life. (Even if It Never Happened.)
At the bottom of the frame, our narrator’s jaw is on the floor. She’s giggling, spilling someone else’s supposed secrets into the internet’s open mouth.
She has a hunch about the women filling the rest of the screen. Tipsy on wild speculation, she’s telling us her theory. A slide show plays, and we watch a montage of two tall blondes holding hands in various locations: a basketball game, an awards show, a night out.
Keep scrolling, and another TikTok creator is telling several hundred thousand viewers (and counting) her obsessively researched hypothesis, and we’re liking and reposting, screaming and squealing, frantically texting friends.
We’re commenting with wide-eyed emojis as we scroll through video after video of similar scenes, fingers swiping fast, sweating sticky hope onto the phones in our palms.
