People love to clock the tea. They love drama, gestures, and the sound of the phrase rolling off their tongues. Somewhere between TikTok videos and reality TV, “clock it” got pulled away from its beginnings and turned into a trend that barely reflects what ballroom culture created.
Long before it became a mainstream gesture, “clock it” was part of ballroom’s vocabulary. Ballroom culture was built and nurtured by Black and Latine queer people who created their own world because the one on the outside refused to make space for them.
Ballroom culture began in New York City between the late 1960s and early ‘70s, and since then, it’s evolved into what we know today. For many, ballroom was home, safety, and family. It was where people could exist loudly when society told them to stay quiet.
Ballroom culture has its own language: reading, serving, and yes, clocking. To ‘clock’ someone in ballroom culture is to observe them or catch something others might miss. It’s an observational term, a community-specific code that wasn’t intended to be random slang.
The gesture that people associate with “clocking it” wasn’t originally tied to shade. The thumb to middle finger clicks, the one ballroom uses, is more like a finger clap, a tiny snap of approval. It’s a subtle, quiet applause. It’s an agreement, affirmation, and a recognition that someone did something worth acknowledging. It doesn’t always signify a read or something shady.
Somewhere along the way, the signals got mixed up. Like many pieces of Black culture, “clock it” slowly reached the wider world. Ballroom didn’t become mainstream all at once. It trickled in through shows like Pose and RuPaul’s Drag Race, and later, TikTok and X.
The problem wasn’t exposure. If anything, visibility can honor people who made the culture, as culture is meant to be shared. The problem lies in what happens when a marginalized community’s language goes mainstream: people begin to copy without context.
Today, “clock it” is a reaction. The thumb to index finger, instead of the thumb to middle finger, is used in situations that have nothing to do with clocking anything. It became a gesture separated from the people who created it.
Ballroom is one of the few spaces where queer Black and Latine people shaped the rules, social norms, and vocabulary. For communities that had to fight for safety, identity, and belonging, language is that deep. Doing the gesture correctly is a small but meaningful way to honor its origins.
At the end of the day, language inevitably spreads. As ballroom vocabulary travels further into mainstream culture, it deserves to be carried with accuracy. Using the gesture and saying the phrase correctly shows that we respect and care enough to get it right.
Ballroom gave the world a new lexicon. The least we can do is honor the source respectfully.
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