🏠️ they were roommates??? 🏠️

QUEER WORD
AND THEY WERE ROOMMATES

What It Means:

A meme used to poke fun at the knots some historians will twist themselves into in an attempt to explain away obviously queer relationships from history.

Let’s Use It In A Sentence:

The museum placard described the two women who lived together for 40 years, shared a bed, and wrote each other passionate love letters as ‘dear friends’…. Sure, and they were ‘roommates’.

A Little Bit of History

If a male skeleton is discovered somewhere buried next to a female skeleton, historians don't hesitate to assume the nature of their relationship. They must have been lovers, married, betrothed. Without a doubt.

But if a male skeleton is discovered buried with another male skeleton? Or a female skeleton next to another female skeleton?

Suddenly, it's not so simple. Suddenly there's a whole lot of hemming and hawing, and everyone becomes terribly cautious.

‘Well, we'll never really know!’

‘They could have just been very good friends!’

‘Perhaps they were soldiers in the same squad?!’

‘Could they have been sisters?’

And so on. And so on….

This double standard, this desperate bit of mental gymnastics to avoid acknowledging queerness, is exactly what gave birth to the and they were roommates meme.

The phrase comes from a 2014 Vine (remember Vine? That strange sort of pre-TikTok video-sharing app), in which user @mattsukkar filmed a woman walking past saying ‘and they were roommates!’ before turning the camera on himself and repeating it with exaggerated disbelief.

From there, the internet did its thing and the phrase quickly morphed and escaped its original context, first in fandom circles and then, most deliciously, as a way of mocking the absurd lengths people will go to in order to avoid admitting that queer people have existed throughout history.

The format is pretty simple. All you have to do is take a quote from a history book, museum plaque, or documentary that bends over backwards to avoid saying two people were queer, and slap and they were roommates underneath it.

Let's look at some of the funniest examples.