ANALYSIS: What do Troye Sivan, Gigi Gorgeous, Tom Daley and Dodie have in common? They all came out on YouTube. But the platform is no longer as central to queer and trans narratives\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dec. 2 marked an anniversary that few of us likely remember despite its broader importance. It was the day when\u201410 years ago\u2014the Olympic diver Tom Daley<\/a> uploaded a personal video to YouTube. The video, which has garnered more than 13 million views, shows Daley reclining in bed; facing the camera, he announces that he is finally ready to talk publicly about his relationships. \u201cI met someone,\u201d he begins, \u201cand that someone is a guy.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Daley was not the first elite athlete to come out, nor the first person to post their coming out story to YouTube. The latter honour is often credited<\/a> to the Montreal-based account \u201cLife in Translation<\/a>,\u201d who came out as trans in 2006, shortly after the inception of the platform. But Daley\u2019s upload was hugely influential, popularizing new conventions of coming out in the Digital Age and indicating the extent to which the Web 2.0\u2014with its capacity to theoretically allow anyone to enter the chat\u2014provided queer folks, famous or not, greater control over their narratives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coming out has traditionally meant, as the theorist Michel Foucault<\/a> famously observed, the ability for queerness \u201cto speak in its own behalf \u2026 to demand that its legitimacy or \u2018naturality\u2019 be acknowledged.\u201d As these narratives moved online, the opportunity to <\/em>speak on one\u2019s own behalf grew. This often took a similar look, even a similar script to what\u2019s seen and heard in Daley\u2019s video\u2014intimate confessions in which the speaker sombrely stares down the camera as they recount their family\u2019s reactions, their own conflicting desires, a growing self-acceptance, a sense of internalized difference partnered with requests that they be viewed as the same person that they\u2019ve always been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For many viewers, these new opportunities equated to new forms of representation and increased access to others\u2019 knowledge and experiences. As coming out narratives proliferated, many journalists and researchers acknowledged the expanding corpus of coming out videos as an established \u201cgenre<\/a>\u201d on the platform. In the comment sections found beneath the videos, viewers carried on entire conversations as new communities arose. Many even used these comment sections as a means of testing out their own emerging identities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to providing a new means of coming out, however, YouTube videos also showed their viewers how to respond (or how not <\/em>to respond) to another\u2019s narrative. Videos like that of the Rhodes Bros.<\/a>, where vloggers Aaron and Austin Rhodes captured their father\u2019s reaction to their joint coming out as gay, depicted how a supportive family member might react. A 2014 upload titled \u201cComing Out to My Conservative Christian Dad on Camera<\/a>,\u201d on the other hand, plays out much as one might expect. As Huffington Post<\/em><\/a> writer Alexandra Temblador <\/strong>wrote, the YouTube trend of capturing others\u2019 reactions acted as a visual reminder that one\u2019s response could go viral, becoming a kind of \u201ccheck\u201d to all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Google Trends shows that YouTube searches for \u201ccoming out\u201d peaked in popularity around 2014 worldwide. This peak accounts for multiple videos that obtained millions of views each. A number of early and prominent YouTubers fit this curve. Ingrid Nilsen<\/a>, Shane Dawson<\/a> and Connor Franta<\/a>, for example, all uploaded coming out videos to the site around this time. The most popular upload, however, belongs to Joey Graceffa<\/a>, who creatively chose to record his own song with an accompanying music video in 2015. The video, \u201cDon\u2019t Wait,\u201d featured a kiss between the vlogger and his then boyfriend as an innovative way to come out to his YouTube fan base, setting a new precedent for how coming out online would continue to evolve. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Interestingly, the 2014 peak roughly coincides with the time when YouTube quietly dropped its long-running slogan to \u201cBroadcast Yourself<\/a>.\u201d The change wasn\u2019t publicly acknowledged to any great extent, but it was likely\u2014at least in part\u2014a response to critics who argued that the slogan misrepresented how YouTube actually works. Sure, everybody could <\/em>obtain an audience through the site, but that didn\u2019t mean that everyone would. You could broadcast yourself, but who were you broadcasting to? When queer folks come out to others IRL, there is, unfortunately, always a chance that their message might be ignored\u2014cast aside as if nothing were said\u2014but this becomes all the more likely when the message is sent into the void of the internet. Only a select few YouTube coming out videos ever achieve widespread popularity, and this remains true on other social media platforms as well. For while several examples exist of relatively unknown users who rose to prominence on the site after uploading their coming out narratives, many of YouTube\u2019s most-viewed coming out videos were created by users who had already achieved some level of fame\u2014whether through earlier vlogging activity or by some other means (like winning Olympic gold, as in Daley\u2019s case). Furthermore, the videos that often become most popular are those uploaded by cis, white, gay men. Does YouTube offer a more democratic platform then? Or is it only inclusive to some?<\/p>\n\n\n\n More recently, other popular coming out videos have followed Graceffa\u2019s lead, using the platform to come out in creative, even lavish, ways. In 2019, for example, YouTuber Daniel Howell received over 12 million views on his 45-minute meta-commentary of a coming out video titled \u201cBasically I\u2019m Gay<\/a>.\u201d The same year, the Try Guys\u2019 Eugene Lee Yang uploaded a dance video,\u201cI\u2019m Gay<\/a>,\u201d showcasing his own narrative through beautifully executed choreography. Howell\u2019s and Yang\u2019s videos also act as something of a swan song. Coming out narratives continue to be uploaded to the platform, but queer folks generally seem to be migrating elsewhere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Consider the celebrities who came out in 2023. Many, like, Sex Education<\/em>\u2019s Ncuti Gatwa<\/a> and The Last of Us<\/em> star Bella Ramsey<\/a>, opted to make their queer identities public through mainstream articles published by traditional media outlets\u2014an option that most of us don\u2019t have access to. Others preferred to use social media, straying from YouTube as their platform of choice. Stranger Things<\/em>\u2019 Noah Schnapp<\/a> posted a video to TikTok video, for instance. Adore Delano<\/a> of Drag Race <\/em>fame used Instagram to tell fans she\u2019s trans. And the Czech footballer Jakub Jankto<\/a> took to X to say, \u201cI no longer want to hide myself.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n YouTube has changed how we come out; there\u2019s no denying that. But the digital landscape continues to change as well. New networks and sites arise, offering queer folks more and more spaces to tell their narratives. While YouTube is no longer the go-to site for these messages, its legacy for how we do (or don\u2019t) broadcast ourselves lives on. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ANALYSIS: What do Troye Sivan, Gigi Gorgeous, Tom Daley and Dodie have in common? They all came out on YouTube. 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