The Ever-Evolving Art of the Coming-Out Video

On YouTube, the personal moment has transformed from bare-bones confessional to something unabashedly public.
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On YouTube, the personal moment has transformed from bare-bones confessional to something unabashedly public.Hotlittlepotato

About halfway through the nearly 5-minute-long YouTube video, the camera cuts between shots of Elle Mills' friends, each of them sitting at a table with a pad of paper and some colored pencils in front of them. “I’m gonna explain to you my crush, and you have to draw out what you think they look like,” Mills says from behind the camera. “So here are the attributes: nice hazel eyes, has tattoos, kind heart, enjoys roller coasters, good taste in music, talented, and charming.”

They comment as they draw—“I know exactly who this is”; “What color is hazel?”—and after a few moments, each of the friends shows their own sketch to the camera.

“Now I’m gonna show you what my crush actually looks like,” Mills says. You can hear the anticipation in her voice. She pauses. “I’m nervous.”

“Is it me?” one friend asks sarcastically.

From behind the camera, Mills shows her friends a photograph. Her crush is a woman—and they all react, well, exactly how you’d hope. Shrieks of excitement, tears, smiles, hugs. “You can’t be gay!" one teen boy exclaims. "I’m gay.”

Mills has well over a million subscribers on YouTube, where she talks about high-school life and indulges in stunts like swapping her phones with her teacher's. But her coming-out extravaganza, which she posted eight months ago, is the most-viewed ever: 3.6 million people have watched the heartwarming video. Some of those, undoubtedly, were among the more than 17 million who watched makeup vlogger Ingrid Nilsen's own coming-out video on the platform.

While a number of athletes, politicians, and entertainers had made public announcements about their sexuality in the past, it was comedian Ellen DeGeneres—who came out in a series of hugely public interviews and whose character came out in a sitcom episode in 1997—who turned coming out into a cultural moment. At the time, many speculated that DeGeneres was jeopardizing her career, but 20 years later, it’s clear that her forthrightness fundamentally changed what coming out could look like for LGBTQ people.

So, too, has social media. Whether it’s through a Facebook post or blog entry, countless people are using the internet as their vehicle to come out to loved ones—either as a substitute to coming out in person, or to precede a sometimes-difficult conversation. But YouTube has turned what used to be a private moment into one that is unabashedly, self-awarely public.

Even in this vast landscape, Mills’ video is in a category entirely of its own. It’s not just her sharing something personal with her audience, it’s also her packaging her story: there's a soundtrack, interviews, her own commentary. Yet, that acts in concert with something else. In the midst of the supportive words and soundtrack of classic romantic songs, the video includes a clip of Mills sitting on the floor, talking to the camera and crying. “I’m scared that my relationships with the people in my life right now are going to be different," she says, "that people are going to look at me differently.”

When many LGBTQ people come out online, they’re not just coming out to their audience of strangers, they’re also coming out to at least some of their family and friends, and that comes with its own set of fears and concerns. For Marina Watanabe, a 25-year-old feminist YouTuber and social media associate at the online magazine Everyday Feminism, making a coming-out video provided an alternative to sitting down with friends and family to have an unnatural-feeling conversation about something that, to her, wasn’t really a big deal. “The reality of coming out does not match the reality of being a queer person," she says in her video. "One is so much more daunting and scary than the other one when the other is just like ‘Eh, just how I am.’”