Gen Z social media culture has blurred the distinction between basic and niche interests by creating a sort of niche-flation. As certain topics grow in popularity online, and more fans of lesser known topics find each other, the standard of what truly counts as a niche interest keeps rising. Geese, yesterday’s alternative band, can become tomorrow’s mainstream trend overnight. As a result, the niche connoisseurs within this fandom must turn on each other to fight for the spot of the “Number One Fan”, or risk joining the rest of the flock of basic, trend-hopping followers.

Although the ‘Niche Connoisseur’ could covet any band, book, or object, they are easy to spot: whether their subject of choice is the highest grossing band of all time, or has 200 monthly Spotify monthly listeners, they will make sure you know they have a deeper connection to said subject than anyone else. They have two ways of achieving this.

In the first case, when the subject is already popular, the ‘Niche Connoisseur’ turns a widely shared opinion about their interests into a unique statement about their own individuality, one that screams “I like this because I am special.” To do so, they delve into the nooks and crannies of the fandom lore. While this involves more mental gymnastics, it can also be more rewarding because it provides the ‘Niche Connoisseur’ with many, many opportunities to show that while others jumped on the bandwagon, they were the ones who drove it.

For example, I once met a ‘Niche Connoisseur’ who insisted I wasn’t a “real fan” of The Beatles because I didn’t truly know The Beatles discography. Apparently listening to only one album, or a few songs, wasn’t a strong enough expression of my dedication to the band. They argued that if someone really liked The Beatles, they would listen to all of their tracks and see that “Number Nine” is the most sonically impressive Beatles song. Further, they continued, the backstory to each song is incredibly important to actually understanding the music, so a real fan would listen to the tapes of the band recording the songs, then read the footnotes cited on each member’s Wikipedia page.

So, those 36 million people who listen to the Beatles each year may think they like the band, but they don’t truly understand the music because they don’t get the band. After all, can you really appreciate a song like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” if you don’t know why Paul McCartney isn’t wearing shoes on the Abbey Road album cover?

In the second case of the ‘Niche Connoisseur’, where the subject of enjoyment is more obscure, conflict is (paradoxically) much more likely to arise, especially in online spaces. An alternative band may be known to very few, leading each fan to believe that they are the band’s only true follower. The only one who knew them before they got big — that is, until they find other fans online, and now must prove they were the original fan that posers only seek to imitate.

Let’s imagine an indie band called Hard-Kick that has one popular song that blew up on TikTok. Hundreds of thousands can sing the chorus, but only two people have listened to and enjoyed the full album from which it is from. Both criticize their friends for praising Hard-Kick without meeting the ‘Niche Connoisseur’s standards for enjoying the song. Online, they comment under videos of strangers dancing or lip-syncing to the trending chorus, saying that they’re too “basic” to understand the deeper meaning behind the song, and don’t understand the culture behind it. One day, Fan #1 sees Fan #2’s comment reading, “Real ones know Hard-Kick from the song ‘I Kick Real Hard’ rather than the catchy single ‘Kick Quick’.” Instead of agreeing with Fan #2 that more people should enjoy “I Kick Real Hard”, Fan #1 retorts that, actually, real fans would understand that Hard-Kick’s best song (which is somehow also their least known) is “Kick, Hit, Kick.”

A thread then emerges of both fans trying to out-niche the other over their shared love of Hard-Kick, instead of geeking out about it together. They can’t appreciate their mutual interest, because if others like Hard-Kick just as much as they do, then they are just like everyone else. People who could have been friends are turned to enemies by their own insecurity of being seen as basic. As seen in Marvel comic book and movie fans, who respectively claim that a real fan would read all the comics or watch all the movies.

This niche-on-niche violence happens everyday online, with no peace in sight so long as the standards of what counts as niche is gatekept by a wall of over-possessive fans, who would, to protect their egos, rather see their chosen artist poor and unknown than mainstream and, God forbid, basic. Similarly, for the same reasons, they would rather listen to music alone than play it aloud to an equally enraptured friend.

The ‘Niche Connoisseur’ is annoying to meet in person, discouraging to meet online, and above all else harmful to their artist of choice. In the first case, a person puts down the interest of others in order to further their own ego. The second, they turn what could be an engaging online forum to celebrate an artist into a battleground of “If you liked Y, you would know X.” Both create a negative connotation between the subject and a possible fan. Until the terms “basic” and “niche” are deemed neutral, rather than inferior and superior, ‘Niche Connoisseurs’ will continue to deter people not only from getting to know them personally, but from getting to know their obsession of choice.

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In 1969, at the ironically named Second Congress to Unite Women, co-founder and then president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) Betty Friedan campaigned for women to enter “into the mainstream of American society, now [in] fully equal partnership with men.”

With this goal in mind, and a position at the top of America’s largest women’s advocacy group at the time, she became the “mother of second-wave feminism.”

“Homosexuality is not, in my opinion, what the women’s movement is all about.”

Friedan was given free license by the public to speak on behalf of all women’s interests, and with that power, she made amazing progress in terms of asserting women’s rights across America.

All except queer women, that is.

“They are a lavender menace to women’s rights.”

With the word “lavender,” Friedan was referring to a slang term for “gay,” which first originated in the 1930s. Queer people at the time would wear light purple lapels to signal their sexuality to other homosexuals. Over the years, this covert method became public and lost its safety as a sign of silent solidarity. It became either a term for closeted (as in a “‘lavender marriage”’) or, in some cases, a reclaimed colour of pride.

Friedan was also alluding to the “red menace” phenomenon during the Cold War, wherein Americans were increasingly suspicious that their neighbours were secretly undercover communists. Friedan clarified this connection, stating that if lesbians were publicly mentioned in NOW’s directive, feminists as a whole would be seen as “a bunch of bra-burning man-haters.”

Despite what Friedan wanted the public to believe, NOW had a very close and beneficial relationship with the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), a San Francisco based lesbian activism group named after Sappho’s courtesan on the Isle of Lesbos.

The DOB started as a social club. Gay bars were often raided by police, so the DOB organized meetings at confidential locations. Two of its founders, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, said the club started as a safe space to slow dance, as doing so with the same sex in public was illegal. A member would be assigned to door duty, greeting each new participant with the phrase “I’m [name]. Who are you? You don’t have to give me your real name, not even your real first name.”

Though the group was formed to avoid police, it nonetheless attracted the attention of the FBI. Undercover agents were sent to meetings to report back on the group’s activities. Eventually, they concluded that the goal of the DOB was “to educate the public to accept the Lesbian homosexual into society.” Russel Wolden, former City Assessor until his arrest for conspiracy and bribery in 1967, criticized San Francisco’s government by describing the city as a “haven for homosexuals.” In a City Hall Hearing, he warned the public of the “danger” of the DOB:

“You parents of daughters — do not sit back complacently feeling that because you have no boys in your family everything is all right … Make yourself acquainted with the name Daughters of Bilitis.”

We know that NOW was well-acquainted with the DOB, having been sponsored by the group for years. Despite this, they refused to put the DOB’s name on their list of donors, in order to further distance the feminist movement from that of gay rights.

Regardless of how hypocritically Friedan denied lesbian participation in feminism, her sentiment was echoed by the movement as a whole. The message was simple: lesbian issues aren’t women’s issues because lesbians aren’t proper women. Or, as Friedan put it: “We want feminine feminists.”

The effect of this statement was immediate, and NOW began its goal of removing lesbians from feminism, beginning in their own organization. Newsletter editor Rita Mae Brown was fired for being a lesbian, along with all other openly queer women employed by NOW.

In response, Brown created a new group for women who had been excluded by mainstream feminism due to their sexuality, which she called “Lavender Menace.”

The original members, seventeen in total, were made up of previous NOW advocates and women from the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Both groups had similar complaints about lesbian issues being sidelined in their organization and yearned for an advocacy group where their demands wouldn’t play second fiddle to either straight women or gay men.

Brown created Lavender Menace with that exact goal in mind, finally offering queer women a space where they wouldn’t have to shout in order to be seen. Their first directive was to remind NOW of the power they’d lost in excluding lesbians from the women’s movement.

So, about five months later in May 1970, they hijacked the Second Congress to Unite Women. Friedan had just taken the stage to introduce the event when several crowd members stood up abruptly. They tore off the shirts to the audience’s shock, only to reveal a second shirt underneath which read Lavender Menace.

A Lavender Menace member took Friedan’s momentary shock as a chance to take the microphone and introduce the group to all the feminists gathered, explaining that their goal was to educate the crowd, not talk over them. She simply announced that outside the building, Lavender Menace was setting up workshops about queerness for any women interested.

They also passed around a manifesto titled The Woman Identified Woman, which contained a resolution to the Second Congress asking feminists to recognize, then and forever, that the movement must:

1. “Be resolved that women’s liberation is a lesbian plot.

2. Resolved that whenever the label ‘lesbian’ is used against the movement collectively or against women individually, it is to be affirmed, not denied.

3. In all discussions of birth control, homosexuality must be included as a legitimate method of contraception.

4. All sex education curricula must include lesbianism as a valid, legitimate form of sexual expression and love.

Each resolution works to give queer women an equal standing in feminism as their straight counterparts. NOW’s biggest pitfall was assuming that all women benefitted equally from the legislation they put forward, completely ignoring intersections of race, class, and sexuality in their platform. In order for feminism to benefit all women equally, the movement must acknowledge the diverse experiences of womanhood, and advocate accordingly.

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