Cincinnati broadcaster Megan Mitchell is out and proud on TikTok
Megan Mitchell may very well be the most popular TV news personality in Cincinnati by Gen Z standards: she has 1.8 million followers on TikTok.
On top of being TikTok famous and being an anchor and reporter at WLWT News 5 in Cincinnati, the 29-year-old Connecticut native has the distinction of being an out and proud lesbian.
Mitchell uses her successful social media platform to share her experiences as an out LGBTQ personality working in news, and her reach goes far beyond Ohio.
Coming out fears
In an interview with Yahoo Life, the broadcaster revealed that she realized she was a lesbian during her sophomore year at Emerson College.
For Mitchell, there was an extra layer of anxiety about coming out: that she may not be accepted as a newscaster if she was open about her sexuality.
“There weren’t any out lesbians in news that I was aware of at the time,” she said.
For that reason, Mitchell chose to use her social media platform to set an example: she could be the openly queer broadcaster she had hoped to have seen when she was starting out.
Going viral on TikTok
Mitchell recently went viral for a Tiktok video wherein she chronicled her struggles to accept her sexuality. “Comp het made it so hard for me to realize,” she captioned the post.
The video struck a nerve and resonated with her followers, one of whom wrote in the comments section: “Oh we have such a similar story. I’m so happy you get to be you.”
“Comp het made me push down my bi-ness for my whole life. Glad we can both be out and proud now,” commented another of Mitchell’s followers.
The road to TikTok fame
Mitchell started her Tiktok account in 2020, right at the start of the pandemic, with her brother’s encouragement.
“He was like, ‘Do a dance with me.’ So I learned this TikTok dance. And then he kind of nonchalantly was like, ‘Hey, I bet if you post something about being a news anchor, you’d get some followers,'” she shared in an interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer last year.
Her brother was right. From that first post, it only took five months for Mitchell to get a million followers.
Self-aware and using her platform for good LGBTQ representation
Of her quick rise to social media stardom, Mitchell had this to say: “I think it’s a combination of certain privileges that I hold. I know that I’m consumable. I am a white, blonde, kind of happy Golden Retriever-looking girl, so a lot of people can consume that pretty easily.”
“And I think the other main thing is that I also represent a good portion of queer women in the LGBTQ community, and so that gave them some type of representation that they hadn’t seen maybe in the middle of America that they had been seeing on coasts for years now,” Mitchell said.