Tumblr, July 4, 2012—Independence Day. A week before the release of Channel Orange, the debut studio album that cemented his mainstream success, Frank Ocean traded liner notes for a Tumblr note. “4 summers ago, I met somebody. I was 19 years old. He was too,” he wrote, memorializing his first love in a now-immortal post.

Ocean’s two-paragraph message of thanks was largely received as a coming-out letter, and helped to formalize a significant relationship between Tumblr and music. He was one of the first popular queer musicians and celebrities who came of age, sexuality, and fame this decade on the microblogging site—folks like Troye Sivan, Halsey, Cara Delevigne, and Amandla Sternberg would also find fanbases there. For many young queer people and those otherwise culturally marginalized, Tumblr played home to communities where they became educated and politicized, to the point of their empowerment from cultural consumers to producers.

Founded by David Karp in 2007, at a time when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was still in effect and marriage equality felt like an impassable dream, Tumblr offered queer and nonconforming youths “an opaque space where users were less likely to be found and attacked,” says Allison McCracken, Associate Professor of American Studies at DePaul University and something of an expert on Tumblr-based youth subcultures. These same attributes—the heavily coded and highly visual way of communicating, the hard-to-parse archives, the mostly pseudonymous users—have made it difficult for the press and general audiences to fully grasp the platform’s impact on music and music fandom. “Tumblr has had a larger influence on English-speaking popular culture than most people realize,” says digital anthropologist Alex Cho, who’s written extensively about the site’s queer POC users. More than any other digital space, it helped to queer an entire generation.

In 2019, pop is beginning to look like everything Tumblr wanted it to be in the early 2010s: inclusive, empowered, and increasingly gay. Many artists are out and proud about their nuanced queer identities, from Kehlani to Janelle Monáe, while non-queer artists are making sure to bring in, and sometimes pander to, highly engaged queer audiences. Even Taylor Swift, newfound queen of Tumblr aesthetics, has built the practice of “queerbaiting” into her release strategy. Hints of homoeroticism have become as common among pop stars—from Ariana Grande to Dua Lipa to Charli XCX—as they are characters on a teen soap.

The new language used to articulate gender and sexual identity has been popularized in lockstep with the platform. “The site’s queer users have led the way for the mainstream proliferation of queer/gender-conforming identity development,” McCracken says. Asexuality, demisexuality, grey sexuality, pansexuality, as well as non-binary—which may have even originated as a term on the site, it’s difficult to tell—have made their way, as public labels, to the pop world. Miley Cyrus, Kesha, Sia, Monáe, and others have identified themselves as at least one of the above, in the time since Tumblr popularized these micro-minorities in the early 2010s. “This is the Tumblr effect,” McCracken adds.