“Your Identity Is Not Up for Debate”: How the Black LGBTQ+ Community Is Queering Racial Projects on TikTok

As digital platforms increasingly shape how young people navigate sexual, racial, and gendered experiences, they have become vital spaces for marginalized users to construct identity through self-discovery, resistance, and affirmation. Informed by racial formation theory, queer of color critique, and resistant knowledge production, and in response to calls for a queerer sociology that centers race, this study analyzes 102 publicly accessible TikTok videos identified with the hashtags #blacklgbtq, #blackqueer, and #blackqueertiktok to explore how Black LGBTQ+ creators confront dominant racial projects and enact queer racial projects that rework racial meaning online. Thematic content analysis reveals four key practices: (1) historical reeducation; (2) community building; (3) Black queer joy; and (4) symbolic self-expression. By centering Blackness and queerness as co-constitutive, this study advances a queerer sociology that decenters Whiteness and highlights TikTok’s potential for collective resistance and liberatory knowledge production despite algorithmic and institutional power asymmetries.