I’ve Been Meaning to Make This Video for a Long Time Now: Coming Out to YouTube Jonathan Alexander and Elizabeth Losh University of California, Irvine

Rhetorics of Divides and Access: Mary Gray “What are the sexual and gender possibilities in places where the operative assumption is that one has never met a stranger? And what difference does the internet's increasing presence make to young people negotiating their visibility in small towns that offer few, if any, local reflections of their identities?”

How Offline Matters: Mary Gray “ During my research, I found LGBT youth doing drag at regional Wal-Marts and holding queercore concerts at Methodist skateboard parks. I saw their allies holding informational talks about gay teens at small county libraries and a complicated web of new media use deployed by them all... to counter the erasure they face in both popular media and the agendas of national gay and lesbian advocacy groups.”

Formal vs. Informal Learning: Alex Juhasz

Television vs. YouTube

GayGod’s FAQ

Explaining the Ground Rules ”Okay so the best time to come out is when you are a little older and independent and on your own, because when you are dependent on your parents they can take away privileges. Like let’s say you have a car or a cell phone, and it’s under their name, they can take it away from you.”

Who Controls Communication ”I know from experience that when I came out of the closet, my mom could took away my computer, which meant my life basically, because I was on the computer all the time talking to my friends,you know going on MySpace, all that fun stuff. But she took it away from me. Because she could. Because she thought it would teach me a lesson.”

Background Noise “WARNING: a lil cursing.. and music can b a lil loud.. sorry! if you cant hear much.. parents was about..=S.”

Anatomy and Destiny “Biologically I am female. Clearly... Female but yeah. I do have my girly moments once in a blue moon. But I really don’t feel female. At all.

Online Research “I mean, I thought I could swap between both genders of male and female, but you know cause I might be gender queer. Which is I’m still learning the concept of meaning... gender queer. Because I’ve been hearing a lot about it lately especially on YouTube. It’s on my mind I kind of am thinking if I am possibly gender queer.”

Something Missing “I know I’ve done this before. Em. Probably the most of you is like tired of watching all these coming out videos. But...now that I’ve watched my coming out video again, it’s like there is something missing there. What I mean is I didn’t talk about my coming out thing, my coming out story. Because it was like me talking about me coming out to my parents, and they already knew.”

Something Redundant “This is going to be like the most edited video of all time. It’s going to be pretty long and boring. And it’s just pretty much a revision of one of my older videos, ‘It’s Okay to be Gay.’”

How VHS was Different and the Same: Lucas Hilderbrand on Joanie4Jackie

“Hello, this is John. I’m doing this video because last week these videos really helped me in my circumstances. I’m gay, and I came out on the weekend. I had come out once before and that was to a friend on St. Patrick’s Day this year. For anybody that’s watching that knows me that I haven’t told I guess this will be a shock to you. I don’t know. Just let me know if you see this, so we can talk about it.”

Jumping on the Bagwagon “Hi. Uh. It’s Mano. Uh. I’ve just been looking at videos. You know, the coming out stories and that. And uh I thought just thought I’d jump on the bagwagon, bandwagon, and uh tell my coming out story, if I have one. I haven’t really thought about this. I thought I’d just make a video.”

GDProphetXVII

Building the Archive “So since a lot of people asked me how to come out and all that I figured it might be good if maybe we started like a video archive of coming out stories, of stories where we came out to our families, to our friends, everything, but also stories of people coming out to us and how we have been allies to others.”

Building the Archive “Because that’s a really important aspect of it all too, and so if you could video respond to this your coming out story, your ally story, anything you want regarding coming out, and then maybe hopefully one day all these videos might help someone come out for themselves and if it does then we’ve all done good.”

Zero Comments “Okay. So. Okay. Um. Best song ever. I’m coming out by Diana Ross. Okay so I thought I would start a YouTube video response chain thing. Um. I want Your stories of coming out either if your bisexual or lesbian or gay or whatever Coming out stories. Please let’s share and be happy! whew!”

Parodying the Genre

Disclaimer and Postscript “*** Note this video was not meant to offend any people of any sexual orientation it was just a joke***” “Post a comment to let me know if I was actually believable! I thought I was pretty convincing!”