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queerbting · 5 months

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ok, i know i'm a couple days late to this... but i listened to hbomberguy's video on james somerton and....... man.

i only really watched 2-3 videos of somerton's dating back 1-2 years ago, and he had long-since fallen out of my youtube recommended, but i think it's important to chronicle why i (and potentially other, especially casually-viewing, queer people) believed him, and how insidious that trust-based belief was/is. for context, i'm gen z, and the videos of his i watched were (paraphrasing, based on memory) on the "rich"/complex/intertwined history of queerness and vampires (+ the monstrous in literature and film), the connection of current unrealistic body standards among gay men to an ideal which started with the "hyper-perfect bodies" of nazi soldiers, and one last video on the tie between queer perfectionism and self-harm in film that i do not remember as well. regardless.

i.... am unsure how much my experience of queerness, especially when i was child/teenager, aligns with other people's experiences, but the majority of the media/social environments i was in, despite how non and/or loving they were, were decidedly non-queer. i was the first currently-living relative in my family to be openly queer/explore queerness as a teenager, and that meant i had to explore what queerness meant/was, on my own. i had a few queer friends as a teenager, but most of us were still coming to terms with our identities and/or had not fully formulated who we were, yet. we're much more open with each other now than we were back then. in short, that mostly meant going online and trying to find and connect with other queer people online, even if i didn't realize that's what i was reaching out for at the time. there were no queer elders around me, or if they were, i did not know they were there. i, as well as the other queer people around me, were effectively isolated from these parts of ourselves irl.

in those circumstances i think it's fairly normative to look for other sources of information, then. as i got older, the queer and queer-aligned people in my corner grew, but i was still used to the format of outsourcing knowledge from queer elders online and when i was lucky enough, in person. i had fundamentally accepted that i did not know a lot about the community i found myself apart of, or at least that i would never know as much as i thought i did (especially when it came to intersectional identities/experiences involving queerness). i had to get used to being wrong, and/or learning about perspectives that i had never even thought of/considered before due to the inherently limited nature of my own experiences.

so, when i stumbled across a video of james somerton's detailing the deep, intertwined history between queer people and vampires as depicted in literature and film, i assumed this was just another part of queer history that i had not heard about/been a part of. i think the lack of transparently cited material, in a way, made me feel like these were novel, true-to-the-queer-experience observations and/or real queer histories that had deliberately not been passed on by wider society, a history that was passed down verbally inside the queer community in spite of those which intended to suppress it. it's naive, looking back on it now (specifically how i took his narrative of queer people at face value), but i don't know how else i could have viewed it given the information/level of emotional open-ness i had at the time.

i thought of the body image video similarly— james somerton was in some ways, was a queer elder, or at least someone who i had established in my mind as more well-versed in "true" queer history/culture than i was due to the vampire video. i had never experienced life as a fat, white gay man from canada growing up with the social pressures of staying in the closet/disassociating from being perceived as queer due to issues of direct social safety. i had never downloaded grindr or seen what gay male social-sexual subcultures were like. how was i not to know that these experiences somerton described, this through-line to a history long past, were not genuine? the nazis were horrible, so why couldn't it be true that some of their aesthetic/social ideals passed on to our own negative performances of gender identity, especially in relation to unattainable masculinity?

(note: im paraphrasing my understanding of his videos here in an intentionally simplistic black/white good/bad manner, but at the time, that's what they meant to me. his videos took advantage, in part, of my lack of knowledge and reinforced/restructured concepts that were harmful and/or blatantly untrue, yet seemed socially plausible to me due to my own pre-existing moral biases)

i was watching other queer youtubers at the time, and (luckily) ended up sticking with them for much longer than i did somerton, but not insignificant portions of somerton's ideas still stuck in my mind as something "true" to the queer-historical canon. i was not immune to his lies, plagiarism, or propaganda. even when he used it to subtly bash other people, including women and other queer identities. i just assumed he knew better about the intersection of social queerness in film/specific historical contexts, and used my personal feelings of queer-communal inferiority/imbalance of information to squash the parts of myself that squirmed with discomfort at some of the things he was saying. maybe women (whether they were queer or not) did actively contribute to the suppression of queer men, and could be automatic bad actors from this point of view? maybe current beliefs on body image and fatphobia in queer male spaces did derive from n*zi propaganda absorbed by american/allied soldiers. i don't know.

my lack of knowledge surrounding queer history/identity in those specific instances caused me to dig my own shallow grave. it feels unsettling to look back on. after looking at hbomber's video, i think some of my own internalized misogyny and biphobia, even back when i was identifying as bi, and my subsequent distancing from those two facets of my identity, were in part influenced by media like the videos created by james somerton. and regardless of how i feel now (as a person who often feels more aligned with being perceived as queer/nonbinary) that's really..... fucked up.

because regardless of how i identify and feel today, knowing that part of my perception of self, as well as my perspective on queer people, queer community, and queer history comes from a person who so blatantly rips off, demeans, and misrepresents queer people and women? it feels..... really awful in a way that i can tell hasn't fully settled in my stomach yet.

and i can't help but wonder how many other young adult queer people he convinced as well, even in small ways. i feel like i was searching for understanding and acceptance, belonging in a community i didn't fully understand but wanted to align myself with, and instead i was, in part, taught to subtly mistrust and hate myself and the people around me. to insidiously dismiss and demean queer/straight women and bi people, in the way he did. to give my dignity up, to squash the internal, wary voice in my head in favor to white cis men like him, and remember that they, ultimately, know best/the most of anyone else. to trust their word like it is an untapped facet of academia, or an inherent truth of my own community— of my own identity as a bi person, a queer person, and as a woman. (and arguably my identity as an indigenous person, as it is wrapped in so much of how i love, what i believe it means to love, and how we engage in community)

i flip-flop between the differences for myself when it comes to queerness and bi-ness (queerness and lesbian-ness, as well), then between womanhood and queer expressions of gender (including and especially nonbinary/lesbian expressions of gender), and to think that a portion of what i've been internally wrestling with and trying to figure out for myself has been based off of straight up.... lies and disdain? based off of the hacked-up and stolen works of other queer people, intentionally cut of their personal unique contexts to better suit his own identity as a canadian white gay cis man who felt snubbed by women in high school?

i can't fully articulate how awful that is to realize for both myself and in consideration of the people i love, in all of its overt and subtle forms of influence.

.....and this is all with me only really watching 2 videos from the guy, arguably 3. what is it like for people who has been watching somerton's videos/keeping up with them more religiously ?? i don't know. i just know that is/has been harmful, even in subtle ways, and i wanted to record and chronicle this viewpoint, somehow. idk if anyone will see this post let alone read it due to how long it has ended up being but i hope it is helpful.

i think hbomberguy was entirely right in pointing out the directly harmful effects somerton's videos/actions have had on lgbt creators, i just couldn't also help but think of the negative impact his videos will/have had on younger lgbt people, and the way it influences the way we engage with queerness itself. good night

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