There’s also the emphasis on the song’s titular sweater, which becomes a beacon of warmth that is increasingly contrasted with “cold,” “goosebumps,” and pouring rain outside. There’s touching necks, fingers on tongues, beating hearts and holding hands, just to start.
The song is also filled with imagery depicting closeness, touch and physical intimacy. Other details pop out much more, like the speaker’s toes digging into the California sand or the addressee’s “high waisted shorts,” (high-waisted pants have coincidentally become a staple in some bisexual style niches, usually paired with a sweater.) The speaker announces that they’re a man in the opening line, and later on that the addressee is a woman, but that seems pretty unimportant to the narrative. The lyrics are decidedly intimate but also ambiguous. The song’s content lends itself to a bisexual reading. There’s a likelihood that many of the people with nostalgia for the song that use Tumblr associate it with their emerging queer identity.īut it’s not just the time that “Sweater Weather” got popular, or the circumstances in which it got popular, that make it a bisexual anthem. It’s possible that, being on the same Tumblr sphere, the soft-grunge dashboards that housed “Sweater Weather” art melded with this emerging queer pop landscape. It was also the hottest place to discover up-and-coming queer pop stars like Halsey, Troye Sivan and Hayley Kiyoko. With its dreamy, rock tinged sound, a song like “Sweater Weather” was the perfect compliment to bleary-filtered typography edits and moody photo sets.Īs the 2010s progressed, this space on Tumblr provided a haven for kids questioning their identity. It was also a notable staple on Tumblr, where The Neighbourhood had similar soft-grunge notoriety to artists like Arctic Monkeys, The 1975 and Lana Del Rey. But the song didn’t only find success on pop radio.
To today’s adolescents, it’s a piece of music that evokes nostalgia. “Sweater Weather” boomed in popularity in 2013, reaching Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 chart. So then, how did “Sweater Weather” become the definite shorthand for identifying as bisexual? But it’s there, in all the “bisexual” playlists on Spotify, and in all the TikTok, Tumblr and Twitter comments. The song isn’t explicitly about being bisexual, either. “Sweater Weather” is by The Neighbourhood, a band that does not have any members that are openly a part of the LGBTQ+ community. But the case for this song is a bit different. The song “Sweater Weather” has also become a code, one for identifying fellow bisexuals.
She is openly gay and has penned several wlw (woman loving women) anthems, including a song called “i wanna be your girlfriend.” A notable line from her song “girls” includes: “They’re so pretty it hurts / I’m not talking ‘bout boys / I’m talking ‘bout girls / They’re so pretty with their button up shirts.” She’s fully cemented herself as a queer icon why she’s lesbian shorthand is pretty self explanatory.
#YOURE GAY MEME TIKTOK CODE#
The artist girl in red has become the online code for being a lesbian. This shorthand through music has been emerging for a while now. It’s not uncommon to log onto a platform like TikTok, go into a person’s comments, and see an exchange along the lines of: Lines like “friends of Dorothy” or noted ring placement have been swapped out with a different way of finding out if a person is another member of the LGBTQ+ community. There’s a new kind of language forming in today’s queer comunities.