In it's simplest use for animation, jQuery maintains a separate animation queue for each element so the only way to use a single queue to control multiple elements would be to put your own custom functions into the queue that knew which element they were to operate on and that would likely not be simpler than what you have already.
The simplest and default use of the animation queue is to sequence animation operations on the same object. You can put your own custom functions into the animation queue, which is occasionally useful, but by the time you've done that, you won't have something simpler than the code you've already presented.
It might be possible to use the jQuery .deferred
functionality instead, but again it's not clear to me that that would be any simpler than what you already have either.