POV: you’re gay in PE – discourses of ‘gay trauma’ in social media narratives of physical education (PE) lessons

Physical education (PE) lessons can be heteronormative and exclusionary spaces for LGBTQIA + students, with their experiences often marked by homophobia and discrimination. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on perspectives from sociolinguistics and the sociology of education, to explore how queer users articulate their experiences of PE through the social media platform TikTok. Using digital ethnography, and drawing on a corpus of 51 videos and over 2500 comments, we apply a small stories analytical framework to examine how PE is discursively constructed by gay men as a site of collective trauma. Our analysis identifies a dominant discourse of disengagement, underpinned by two main story tropes: (i) PE as a performance of heterosexual masculinity, and (ii) PE as a site of overt discrimination. We argue that TikTok functions as a digital affective public, enabling queer users to co-articulate shared experiences, validate their collective trauma and resist cis-heteronormative structures and orientations in PE through parody and satire. The findings highlight the need for inclusive and affirming PE environments for LGBTQIA + students and demonstrate the potential of digital platforms such as TikTok as spaces for queer solidarity and story-telling.