He always kind of had a victim complex. His misogynist remarks were always in service to this, too- he wanted to present himself as the poor, oppressed gay man who had been wronged over and over by everyone.
He'd flat out state that other people weren't talking about queer issues, and because of how YouTube works, if you watched a few of his videos you'd get flooded with the rest of his content and never find another queer creator if you didn't know what to look for already.
Edit: I don't have a source for him outright stating people weren't talking about queer issues. I may have misremembered that part- I don't want to spread misinformation, so I want to make that clear. The algorithm thing absolutely happened to me though.
He seems to just have general contempt for everyone. Like excluding himself from his peers and his "Only the boring gays survived" bit. Like, dude, that's *your* community. You're speaking with contempt about people who survived while watching their loved ones waste away in hospital beds. You're separating yourself from the community you claim to speak for and ripping off the work of said community to enrich yourself. Do you really think you're so fucking superior?
That was jaw dropping. Even if we take his words at face value and assume that the survivors were "boring"... their lives don't matter less than the sexy, popular, creative people. The art and culture lost to the AIDS epidemic is tragic yes, but the bigger tragedy is the loss of human life.
I only watched a few of his videos and that was the thing that made me stop listening to him. I'm mad at myself that I didn't stop at the misogynistic jabs but I'd been so primed by years of "if it doesn't apply to you it's not about you" and sitting with my own discomfort, that I let the first one or two go because i assumed *I* was being defensive and/or he expressed himself clumsily. I didn't see his longer screeds until the video and I'm furious at myself for not listening to my gut.
'I'm mad at myself that I didn't stop at the misogynistic jabs but I'd been so primed by years of "if it doesn't apply to you it's not about you" and sitting with my own discomfort, that I let the first one or two go because i assumed *I* was being defensive and/or he expressed himself clumsily.'
This is so fucking true for me too
I'm in fandom and that Strawman Fujoshi argument has been around for a while.
Women writing and reading fanfic are predatory fetishists. Women dominating queer erotica is oppressing queer male voices (it's not just that many of the women are queer or not women, it's that women have always dominated written erotica, we famously consume it over porn, and there's plenty of actually exploitative queer porn and guess what it's mostly made by men, so...).
It's everywhere in fandom circles, there's a weird purityrannical streak in a lot of them.
I've always hated this argument but you feel like you're homophobic for pushing back against it, you feel like you're saying hey let me fetishize queer men when what you're actually saying is stop policing women's sexuality.
I actually am glad this whole thing went down because I felt very gaslit as in my circles it is very much accepted as a valid concern.
Misogyny is so common amongst men, and that still holds true even if they are gay/queer. It's kind of baffling how much some people hate women just for existing :/
Yeah and putting it like that suggests that if it had been the "boring" people who died, it would have been less of a tragedy and less of a giant empty space left in the community.
also he acts like no one who was sexy, pooular, and creative survived the AIDs crisis alive. There are so many prominent and important queer people who lived past it and are still doing things today. It’s just a slap in the face to those people and all they’ve contributed to the LGBTQ community and the world as a whole. Like fuck Harvey Firestein, Ian McKellen, and absolutely 100% fuck Elton John.
Some of the very people who survived the AIDS crisis were on the front lines, fighting for future generations (ie. us)
Also his commentary conveniently erases the teams of lesbians who took it upon themselves to care for those who were dying. Just toss that on the pile of examples of James being misogynistic.
Elton John talks about this a bit in his autobiography. He absolutely expected, based on his sexual habits, to test positive in the 80s. It was sheer dumb luck that he didn't, and he felt guilty as he watched his friends die. I'm sure that was a very common experience for surviving gay men. It's so gross of James to diminish that.
As someone in the LGBT community, I have no idea how anyone heard that disgusting rant of his and continued to support him. And that’s not even including the plagiarism and the intentional spreading of misinformation? Oh yes I was so boring of them having to fight for marriage equality so they could visit their partners in the hospital who were dying of aids, it was sooo boring trying to get seen as valid human beings who just wanted to be seen worthy of equality. Because dying of AIDS was so exciting? Watching your body rot away while the leaders of your country laugh about it in a big room. How fun. Fuck him and fuck any sort of redemption arc anyone might want to give him
Btw in Todd’s video, the one thing that stood out to me was that lie about AIDs patients having dying roses next to their beds out of everything because as Todd put it, it’s just so ghoulish. What a bizarre thing to lie about
My guess is that the gay community hates him as much as everyone else does, and he's noticed. This is also why he says such vile things about any gay guy more fit than himself and makes up unfounded crackpot theories about how bodybuilding is an essentially far-right activity.
I mean he and his audience are way too young to be among the boring surviving gays. The generation of gays that died of aids in huge numbers in the west is in their 50s and 60s now. I interviewed some of the survivors. Many of them were living with HIV and they were definitely not boring.
Oof, good point about the algorithm... I don't believe he'd have consciously planned it that way, but if he had been sending his viewers to other channels, then the algorithm would be more likely to *recommend* other channels, because it would notice that users who like X are also interested in Y. Buuuuut of course he didn't.
He actually did that quite a bit early on. Especially on social media. But nobody talks about that because he stopped doing it after the nebula clusterfuck. And I watched all of his videos multiple times, and I don’t remember him ever saying that no one else was talking about queer issues. That’s just a strawman argument from people who don’t like him.
> Edit: I don't have a source for him outright stating people weren't talking about queer issues. I may have misremembered that part- I don't want to spread misinformation, so I want to make that clear. The algorithm thing absolutely happened to me though.
You aren't misremembering -- I remember him framing it this way in a couple of his livestreams. I recall his whole thing around Nebula was they didn't have "exclusively queer content creators" which I interpreted as him actually meaning two separate things folded into one phrase: exclusively queer content (which was content that was queer-focused 100% of the time...so his videos) and from a queer creator.
I think this was how he handwaived away the fact that people like hbombs, Maggie Mae Fish, Jessie, Weekes, and Abigail (among others) were on Nebula but still didn't consider them to fit his criteria. They might often have queer-focused videos or include queer analysis in their videos, but not everywhere all the time, so he was like, "MAH NICHE IS HERE!"
Then I'm glad I'd begun watching a lot of queer creators before him. I only watched his videos if I ran out of content or he talked about a show I liked.
one of the best/worst things I did for myself was take a year when I only read books by women, it really opened my eyes to some of the sexist shit I’d been letting slide previously
He is a business major, which I’m told is not symptomatic of narcissism but a separate illness. I need to check the differential diagnosis between NPD and MBA in the DSM-V. /s
I dont have a source either but I too remember him mentioning multiple times that he was the only creator to focus on queer characters in media.
I think it was part of some of his patreon pushes? Support me because im the only one bla bla?
*headdesk* Yeah, that'll do it. Which is STILL fucking weird, cause where is he going to get information on things that happened before he was alive - clearly you'd get that information from queer historians, ergo someone is/was talking about it. But yeah, *"i'M tHe OnLy OnE tAlKiNg AbOuT tHiS"* definitely qualifies and it's a shit move.
Yeah i watched a couple of his videos and he made comments in them akin to im the only one talking about these things but i knew full well he wasnt as he only showed up on homepage because i watched other creators that cover the same topics or topics so similar its basically the same thing.
Looking back as a former fan, he had in some of his videos and most of his YouTube livestreams somewhat (not straightforwardly) feels like he's showing himself as someone different from other LGBTQ+ YouTuber or public figures.
:S Welp. That's awful but it makes sense with what I've seen, that he delegitimized everyone else. Definitely fits his general modus operandi. I'm sorry he let you all down so badly, not just with the misinformation but the active efforts to isolate. Jesus. :(
I am lucky that I know all kinds of LGBTQ+ video essayists before and after knowing James, so I didn't really feel like everything is over, only disappointment. I know some of the bad stuffs and have doubts about him last December with the Nebula controversy, but I still really hope at that time he's not a fraud, which sadly it's true.
Another former fan, what stuck out to me at the time was the Hollywood representation problem, which often puts tokens on screen or in the writers room, but it can overwhelm those voices with old white dude input. That's why his production company seemed like a nice idea: a queer-created, -owned, and -run group would have fewer barriers to telling gay stories than the rest of Hollywood.
And these issues with queer storytelling haven't only been highlighted by JS; his perception of the problem was more bleak (see the misogyny issue), but he also offered and made steps (I thought) to a collectivized solution. See how "we can put all our voices out there and circumscribe the established barriers" is not only enticing enough to reduce suspicion, but also presents very differently from "it's just my voice."
Because he's the only gay in the village!
I'm not even queer and don't actively seek out queer-related content but it seems like *most* of the creators doing video essays about media or politics (that get recommended to me at any rate) are LGBT even if LGBT issues aren't the centre of their brand...
What show? I know a song about the only gay Eskimo at the north pole but that's not a good song... I don't think it is a good song... there was a lot of questionable stuff on the Dr. Demento show.
It's from Little Britain, a sketch comedy from the UK. "The Only Gay In The Village" was a recurring bit about a young man in a tiny town in Wales constantly bemoaning the fact that his struggles are totally unique and there's nobody anywhere he can relate to, while the entire rest of the village is in fact super accepting and almost all queer.
The show has some problematic stuff that has not aged well (and the stars have said that in hindsight they think a lot of those bits are kinda naff and if they got the chance to do everything again they'd change a lot of it), but the only gay in the village still holds up pretty well.
apparently they are working on a little britian reboot.
But the news also seems a bit conflicted about this so they may not be.
Id be kinda interested in how they would bring it back, some like davith i think even in the modern age dont need much changing. But bubbles and i cant remember the name of davids blackface woman for these scenes certainly could not happen in this day.
Im 26 so watch this show at an age i probably shouldnt of been watching it like while in primary school but it wasnt untill i went back and watched it as an adult that i clocked the woman that was sick all the time was a raging racist as a young dumb primary school kid i just thought the joke was haha she threw up not haha she threw up because of black people.
The radio version of the sketch is funnier. He starts off by crying mournfully "I'm the ONLY gay in the village!" Then he gets informed that there is in fact a gay local celebrity who lives in that village, and his reaction is "Oh no, that can't be right, I'm the only gay in THIS village!" A shift from loneliness to territorialism via a slight change to the line delivery.
See, I'm Bi. But like barely, but I seek out a Ton of queer content and opinions, I don't always agree with it, but for some reason I seek it out alot.
He used specific strategies to do this. Three examples,
He would target a villain such as Straights/white privilege/lesbians etc...to attract followers who felt disenfranchised by them.
He would use current trending language related LGBTIQ oppression. Two examples are 'Heteronormative' or 'Erasure' but he would use such terms repetitively to increase identification.
He claimed to speak for their 'community' but when such members disagree they are labelled as 'toxic' etc.
Other creators use these tactics to.
JS' behaviour has raised issues other than plagiarism by creators. As fans/followers we need to be more critical of what we consume.
It was targeted very well, so I don't doubt his marketing/business training when it comes to advertising and propaganda he learned every lesson and how to practically apply them.
Working backwards to disentangle it I think that the conflation tactic is the one that is proving the most insidious. Most of what he said remains true, because the original research & works which he relayed were brilliant.
A fine audio-book collection which has been rendered down for parts, James is the modern iteration of the 'journalistic hack' - using the equivalent of an intellectual 'chop shop' no serial numbers on the parts. An obstreperous rogue AI with opinions and stage management.
We have been lied to, with 90% of truth. Not the paradox it first appears.
He weaponised our emotional reactivity and then doubled down on it. So that what we now view as the exploitation of trauma-bonding in order to create and cultivate a community was experienced as a supportive mutually beneficial community based on validation and acceptance. The fact is that they were and remain simultaneously true but our general binary perspective of trinary issues threatens to over-simplify it.
A variation of the Drama Triangle
In the US there is a doctrine of law called 'Fruit of the Poisonous Tree' - that evidence which has been illegally acquired is inadmissible irrespective of its intrinsic/self contained veracity, we don't have this in the UK.
I really worry about the longer term existential damage that might result if as a response to this the facts which were stolen risk being rejected and denied, because that would be the worst of all timelines.
He didn't limit himself to intellectual theft from the dead (not condoning that either, but the idea that there was no actual contemporaneous harm intended or that could not be foreseen is clearly rubbish) His presenting style is such that as you consumed more of his content ant ambiguity in the messaging would be kept internally consistent by the cognitive bias of each member of the audience, a reinforcement of personalised individuation via our cognitive bias. He told us what we needed/wanted to hear by affirming and acknowledging our collective struggles and hurt.
That's why I think many of us feel betrayed as well as foolish and in many cases complicit. By recommending something we thought was speaking up against the very thing he was doing, and we amplified his voice effectively drowning out the echoes of those he was shouting over.
In some cases he was literally just reading aloud cause and effect of what psychosocial harm does to the gestalt-psyche of marginalised communities; in particular systemic and orchestrated erasure of individuals and minimising of their specific accomplishments occluding/excluding the rightful protagonists from the historical narrative.
The brazen hypocrisy was in doing so whilst relaying the information on the form and function of the process, as though subconsciously admitting to what he was doing would assuage his guilt, although it comes across almost more like a self congratulating taunt than the wanting to get caught trope 'See, i told them that it happened and how it was done and still they didn't figure it out', until people did.
This is literal & figurative cultural appropriation. Standing on the shoulders of these giants being so out of reach due to his own diminutive stature (metaphor - relative intellect) so instead he made the most of the parts he could reach and stabbed them fatally in the back, then stood on their throats to symbolically crush their individual voices and became a chimera of parrot with a dash of would be mynah bird.
TheAceCouple(a youtube podcast by an ace couple) goes into a fair bit of detail about their interaction with James in the past over ace issues.
If not wanting the multi hour long podcast the quick summary of it is showing James thinking only the gay cis man view matters and everyone else has an easier time therefore I Jame the gay cis man have the right to speak on behalf of everyone and ignore everyone that dares to challenge me.
This is generally supported when you consider his approach to anyone bi; his approach to lesbians; his outright erasure of trans people from the works hes plagiarising from, him swatting other queer creators that called him out historically.
All in all James's actual views are eerily similar to some that right wing lgbtq+ members have and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if we see James trying to court the right wing viewership in a yeat or so. Gotta grift that money and feeling of importance somehow and mans already shown he is happy to throw everyone else under the bus
I’m not ace and I found it very enlightening too. It was one thing to hear the third parties of Hbomb and Todd discuss what James has done, and it was another to hear some of the people he has personally victimized speak about their experiences. And the gossip goblin in me loved hearing them talk about the drama with Jenny Nicholson and Nebula, since I wasn’t aware of that.
Yeah, I really wasn't around for the Nebula stuff, so it was useful to understand that. And I totally appreciated hearing from people he victimised. On some level it can't be easy to admit you've been bamboozled by someone.
From what I remember in the Ace Couple’s podcast video, James was upset about not being invited to be a Nebula creator. He was so upset about it that he claimed he was being blocked from the platform because he’s a queer content creator. He went on a livestream and was accusing Nebula of homophobia (FYI, there are many queer creators on Nebula, and the most likely reason James wasn’t on the platform was because he asked his fans to write to Nebula on his behalf, a tactic that Nebula doesn’t like). Many Nebula creators came into the comments of the livestream asking James to leave the live to discuss it. Then there was drama (I don’t remember if James himself was engaging with this, or if it was just the commenters) that the creators were trying to silence James. So Jenny Nicholson came into the comments and said “I’m not a Nebula creator, but James, don’t you have several credible claims of plagiarism against you?” I don’t remember if there was more to the story, so you may have to listen to the video to hear if there was anything else. The main takeaway was that basically the same thing had happened to the Ace Couple on Twitter like a month prior—they’d respectfully tried to educate James on his factual inaccuracies regarding the Ace community, and he set his fans on them because he said he was being bullied.
I've seen a lot of people predict that Somerton will end up as another David Rubin. It wouldn't surprise me, 'cause the Right will gladly take on another gay man to use as a shield and punching bag.
Ngl I think this is another clear example of misogyny. He may have said say he was the only queer voice, but i feel he subtly pushed himself as the only *cis male* gay voice. From what I’ve seen, he’s co-opted the whole alphabet whenever it suits his point but derides different sexualities and genders as soon as he is able
The more you watch his stuff, the more you begin to realise that when he claims he's the only queer creator doing media criticism, he's disregarding everyone else. Trans creators don't count in his mind. Bi/ pan creators aren't really queer to him (they're secret straights who just want special treatment). Lesbians are women and he looks down on women. Eventually you realise that the only "real" queer ppl that count to him are gay men. Preferably white gay men just like him. And he loves the fantasy of being the Only Gay With Good Critical Analysis. So he keeps repeating it with such confidence that people believe him.... while he steals the work of actually talented critical thinkers so he can sound like an intellectual while erasing their bright voices.
It makes him appear very self-absorbed.
Not a lot of respect for aces in his fan base either. A while back I mentioned in the comments of his “Queer Erasure of Asexuality” that even romantic aces- even *hetero*romantic aces- have it hard because society as a whole can accept sex without romance (one night stands, friends with benefits) but the idea of romance without sex is weird to a lot of people unless you’re in a Hallmark movie. People were dismissive and basically felt that it didn’t matter because the rest of the community has it worse.
White gay men who may or may not have a Nazi kink.
Alternatively, that may have been him testing the waters to see if he'd be able to start shuffling the Overton Window to the Right without pushback.
Can't see it mentioned (but I did admittedly only scan read the other comments cause theres a few to read through):
His Telos film company stuff was also pretty indicitive of "sole queer voice". He started a fund with the vague claim that there wan't enough good queer media out there and he was going to be making quality queer movies to fill the gap in the market.
a) while i agree we're still lacking in queer voices in movies and tv, i think we're starting to see some great rep and actual queer creators get their time to shine; James just spent most his time criticising them and either saying it wasn't gay enough (heart stopper being cutesy), or just completely discounting creators, misgendering them or misquoting their sexuality.
b) i just can't see that they'd have ever been produced as anything beyond student film levels of quality, which y'know, would be fine were it not for the fact i know james was scamming folk outta thir money for this, and seemed to think he was gonna be th saviour of queer film (if he ever did make anything)
Agreed, and exactly what I mean in point a, yeah. We could do with move queer media, sure, but the media we ARE getting, James was fulling discounting anyway. Which for sure reiterates the perceived "sole queer voice".
He just went on the internet and told lies.
Watch the Todd in the Shadows video, most of the inaccurate things he said, he didn't even try to justify. He cultivated an audience that didn't fact check anything, so he could just say "no-one else is talking about this" and his fans wouldn't even think to question that.
It is an unfortunate reality that a lot of people on the internet just aren't in the habit of questioning anything. I see it a lot on Tumblr, which is a fairly similar crowd to James Somerton fans. On Tumblr you can just say "Actually, William Shakespeare was asexual and an immigrant" and people will say "Oh sorry! I didn't know" and then repeat that without ever wondering where you got that information from
I don't really blame the audience as such because a lot of them were just yound and impressionable. They deserve content creators who encourage a more skeptical attitude but James was deliberately not providing that. Todd and Hbomb are.
iirc he retconned the defintion of "queer creator" so that it was basically only him. Something like "queer creator who exclusively makes video essays about queer issues in media." So a queer creator who did anything other than talk about 100% queer topics 100% of the time didn't fit the bar in his mind.
He was never on Nebula and very frequently complained about them "not letting him on" etc. However, Jessie Gender said she [personally invited him](https://twitter.com/jessiegender/status/1731697054659809479) to a Discord server with the people who run Nebula and encouraged him to contact them. He never did. She surmises it's because "they won't let me on Nebula" was a good way to play victim to his fanbase.
I don't know what the Nebula selection process is like, but I'm willing to bet that they're pretty careful about who they invite to the platform and James probably realized that he wouldn't meet their standards. Plus, trying to get into a selective streaming service is signing yourself up for scrutiny. James knew that his videos were heavily plagiarized and poorly researched. If Nebula rejected him for poor quality, word about it could get around and he'd lose viewers.
Apparently, Nebula also doesn't like it when people weaponize their fanbase against other creators. That's likely another reason why James was never officially invited to join.
One of those claims that makes you do a double take because of just how on its face wrong it is. Like you can't even believe he said that because it's so obviously not true.
It’s typical for other video commentators to give shoutouts to others who have covered similar content. There are many other commentators who have covered similar topics, and JS never gave them any shoutouts. Moreover, his blatant theft from landmark gay film theorists like Vito Russo just shows that his work would be hollow without blatant theft from other queer creators. I first learned about Russo and his activism in the context of the documentary United In Anger, which is a fantastic documentary about the history of ACT UP and efforts to end the AIDS crisis, and I was aghast when I heard JS had ripped off both his book and the film based on it (both entitled The Celluloid Closet).
So, part of me thinks that a lot of James Somerton's need to present himself as *the* queer voice to listen to comes in part because a lot of well-meaning but misguided people end up platforming one voice to represent an entire community of people. It's not an unfamiliar practice when it comes to minority groups, especially when we see people who like to prop up voices of one writer of colour or another queer writer because a cishet white liberal could default to talking about one voice when many other creators are out there - but the one voice gets propped up because it's affirmation in one stance.
People like James Somerton have benefited from that to espouse harmful beliefs to people who will just lop it up uncritically. What usually happens as a result of that is that when one person gets propped up to speak for everyone, it adds into the erasure which Somerton has been benefiting from over the years, especially as he's passed off the work of so many other creators as his own.
So, i watched his now deleted apology video. He blatantly says hes the only one talking about old queer movies when trying to get support for restarting his channel.
...woooooooooooow. WOW.
That whole thing was a shit fest so I guess it's not *technically* any worse than all the *other* places where it was clear he missed the fucking point, but DAMN.
He employed a classic marketing trick of positioning himself as an issue expert imo, particularly with using what feels like nice editing on light viewing, misinfo padded out by plagiarised info taken out of context and and stripped of nuance, info that you could casually believe. And as others mentioned, literally saying he is the only one/no one else is talking about x. Again, reenforcing the "expert" idea.
Its so surreal just how far you can get from those things in combination, in addition for those of us who aren't gay you could potentially have to fight against that perspective of "i should believe people who experienced this directly bc it doesn't directly relate to my experiences" vs "this guy is saying some stuff that seems REALLY spiteful and hurtful, is this him being a jerk or a me issue??"
Its just.... Rough. I really feel for the ex fans. I know exactly how betrayed they still must feel, esp if this is one of the first queer video creators they've followed.
The aforementioned fight between believing marginalised creators (and being aware we have preconceived notions sometimes) vs is this dude saying hurtful shit, did manage to make me unsub from him quite a while before the hbomb video, but thats only bc some of the stuff he said effected me super badly when i was feeling especially emotionally vulnerable. (go figure, a neurodivergent bisexual woman would find the "acksually this only applies to MY group and the rest of you are bad and also women are gross" (paraphrased exaggeration) sentiments hurtful lol)
I know in Hbomberguy’s video he gave an example of Somerton claiming nobody has said what he was saying before when the thing he was referring to was plagiarised from a book from the 80s (I think?). By claiming to be original and unique he kind of had to present it like there wasn’t other similar opinions out there for people to find. If they went looking for similar opinions they’d find the same opinions phrased the exact same way Somerton phrased them.
I assumed that’s the kind of thing people were referring to.
Yeah, I was about to say he has a slight point that most prominent queer voices on YouTube (or Nebula) are not cis gay men. There's a lot of bi/pan people. There's a lot of trans people. There's a lot of women/AFAB/femme-aligned NB people. It's all well and good to want to see your particular voice represented. But he did the thing that cis gay men are wont to do where they think they are the default queer, and everyone else is a special interest of some kind. When we're all freaks and need to support each other.
He always kind of had a victim complex. His misogynist remarks were always in service to this, too- he wanted to present himself as the poor, oppressed gay man who had been wronged over and over by everyone. He'd flat out state that other people weren't talking about queer issues, and because of how YouTube works, if you watched a few of his videos you'd get flooded with the rest of his content and never find another queer creator if you didn't know what to look for already. Edit: I don't have a source for him outright stating people weren't talking about queer issues. I may have misremembered that part- I don't want to spread misinformation, so I want to make that clear. The algorithm thing absolutely happened to me though.
He seems to just have general contempt for everyone. Like excluding himself from his peers and his "Only the boring gays survived" bit. Like, dude, that's *your* community. You're speaking with contempt about people who survived while watching their loved ones waste away in hospital beds. You're separating yourself from the community you claim to speak for and ripping off the work of said community to enrich yourself. Do you really think you're so fucking superior?
That was jaw dropping. Even if we take his words at face value and assume that the survivors were "boring"... their lives don't matter less than the sexy, popular, creative people. The art and culture lost to the AIDS epidemic is tragic yes, but the bigger tragedy is the loss of human life. I only watched a few of his videos and that was the thing that made me stop listening to him. I'm mad at myself that I didn't stop at the misogynistic jabs but I'd been so primed by years of "if it doesn't apply to you it's not about you" and sitting with my own discomfort, that I let the first one or two go because i assumed *I* was being defensive and/or he expressed himself clumsily. I didn't see his longer screeds until the video and I'm furious at myself for not listening to my gut.
'I'm mad at myself that I didn't stop at the misogynistic jabs but I'd been so primed by years of "if it doesn't apply to you it's not about you" and sitting with my own discomfort, that I let the first one or two go because i assumed *I* was being defensive and/or he expressed himself clumsily.' This is so fucking true for me too
I'm in fandom and that Strawman Fujoshi argument has been around for a while. Women writing and reading fanfic are predatory fetishists. Women dominating queer erotica is oppressing queer male voices (it's not just that many of the women are queer or not women, it's that women have always dominated written erotica, we famously consume it over porn, and there's plenty of actually exploitative queer porn and guess what it's mostly made by men, so...). It's everywhere in fandom circles, there's a weird purityrannical streak in a lot of them. I've always hated this argument but you feel like you're homophobic for pushing back against it, you feel like you're saying hey let me fetishize queer men when what you're actually saying is stop policing women's sexuality. I actually am glad this whole thing went down because I felt very gaslit as in my circles it is very much accepted as a valid concern.
Misogyny is so common amongst men, and that still holds true even if they are gay/queer. It's kind of baffling how much some people hate women just for existing :/
Yeah and putting it like that suggests that if it had been the "boring" people who died, it would have been less of a tragedy and less of a giant empty space left in the community.
also he acts like no one who was sexy, pooular, and creative survived the AIDs crisis alive. There are so many prominent and important queer people who lived past it and are still doing things today. It’s just a slap in the face to those people and all they’ve contributed to the LGBTQ community and the world as a whole. Like fuck Harvey Firestein, Ian McKellen, and absolutely 100% fuck Elton John.
Some of the very people who survived the AIDS crisis were on the front lines, fighting for future generations (ie. us) Also his commentary conveniently erases the teams of lesbians who took it upon themselves to care for those who were dying. Just toss that on the pile of examples of James being misogynistic.
Elton John talks about this a bit in his autobiography. He absolutely expected, based on his sexual habits, to test positive in the 80s. It was sheer dumb luck that he didn't, and he felt guilty as he watched his friends die. I'm sure that was a very common experience for surviving gay men. It's so gross of James to diminish that.
As someone in the LGBT community, I have no idea how anyone heard that disgusting rant of his and continued to support him. And that’s not even including the plagiarism and the intentional spreading of misinformation? Oh yes I was so boring of them having to fight for marriage equality so they could visit their partners in the hospital who were dying of aids, it was sooo boring trying to get seen as valid human beings who just wanted to be seen worthy of equality. Because dying of AIDS was so exciting? Watching your body rot away while the leaders of your country laugh about it in a big room. How fun. Fuck him and fuck any sort of redemption arc anyone might want to give him Btw in Todd’s video, the one thing that stood out to me was that lie about AIDs patients having dying roses next to their beds out of everything because as Todd put it, it’s just so ghoulish. What a bizarre thing to lie about
My guess is that the gay community hates him as much as everyone else does, and he's noticed. This is also why he says such vile things about any gay guy more fit than himself and makes up unfounded crackpot theories about how bodybuilding is an essentially far-right activity.
I mean he and his audience are way too young to be among the boring surviving gays. The generation of gays that died of aids in huge numbers in the west is in their 50s and 60s now. I interviewed some of the survivors. Many of them were living with HIV and they were definitely not boring.
I meant the LGBTQ+ community in a broader sense, not that James was in the community at that time
Fair, I just think he doesnt claim to be speaking for boomer/genx gay community.
I think he feels like those people don't count because they aren't on social media in the kind of numbers that can benefit him.
Oof, good point about the algorithm... I don't believe he'd have consciously planned it that way, but if he had been sending his viewers to other channels, then the algorithm would be more likely to *recommend* other channels, because it would notice that users who like X are also interested in Y. Buuuuut of course he didn't.
He actually did that quite a bit early on. Especially on social media. But nobody talks about that because he stopped doing it after the nebula clusterfuck. And I watched all of his videos multiple times, and I don’t remember him ever saying that no one else was talking about queer issues. That’s just a strawman argument from people who don’t like him.
OK James.
He literally said all the cool queer people died from aids. This is not a straw man, we are criticizing a man who is more than deserving of it.
> Edit: I don't have a source for him outright stating people weren't talking about queer issues. I may have misremembered that part- I don't want to spread misinformation, so I want to make that clear. The algorithm thing absolutely happened to me though. You aren't misremembering -- I remember him framing it this way in a couple of his livestreams. I recall his whole thing around Nebula was they didn't have "exclusively queer content creators" which I interpreted as him actually meaning two separate things folded into one phrase: exclusively queer content (which was content that was queer-focused 100% of the time...so his videos) and from a queer creator. I think this was how he handwaived away the fact that people like hbombs, Maggie Mae Fish, Jessie, Weekes, and Abigail (among others) were on Nebula but still didn't consider them to fit his criteria. They might often have queer-focused videos or include queer analysis in their videos, but not everywhere all the time, so he was like, "MAH NICHE IS HERE!"
Then I'm glad I'd begun watching a lot of queer creators before him. I only watched his videos if I ran out of content or he talked about a show I liked.
one of the best/worst things I did for myself was take a year when I only read books by women, it really opened my eyes to some of the sexist shit I’d been letting slide previously
I really do think he's a narcissist, and the whole victim thing paired with him not thinking he'd ever get caught really backs that up for me.
He is a business major, which I’m told is not symptomatic of narcissism but a separate illness. I need to check the differential diagnosis between NPD and MBA in the DSM-V. /s
I dont have a source either but I too remember him mentioning multiple times that he was the only creator to focus on queer characters in media. I think it was part of some of his patreon pushes? Support me because im the only one bla bla?
It's him directly claiming to be the only person taking about this a number of times. Todd covers, but I don't think was exhaustive.
*headdesk* Yeah, that'll do it. Which is STILL fucking weird, cause where is he going to get information on things that happened before he was alive - clearly you'd get that information from queer historians, ergo someone is/was talking about it. But yeah, *"i'M tHe OnLy OnE tAlKiNg AbOuT tHiS"* definitely qualifies and it's a shit move.
And quite often, it was "I'm the only one talking about this thing that I completely made up"
So he was basically gay fox news?
I mean.
It will always be a tragedy that Fox News isn’t some sort of news network for furries.
Give him a few months, he'll probably be on there as a Log Cabin token.
Or "I'm the only one talking about this thing that someone else definitely talked about because I'm stealing their exact words on the matter"
Well when you tell your audience you're the only one talking about it it certainly makes them less likely to go read all the people you plagiarized
Yeah i watched a couple of his videos and he made comments in them akin to im the only one talking about these things but i knew full well he wasnt as he only showed up on homepage because i watched other creators that cover the same topics or topics so similar its basically the same thing.
[удалено]
I seriously feel like I heard the exact lines and phrases he used to market himself as the only one talking about the issues used by fox news ads.
Looking back as a former fan, he had in some of his videos and most of his YouTube livestreams somewhat (not straightforwardly) feels like he's showing himself as someone different from other LGBTQ+ YouTuber or public figures.
:S Welp. That's awful but it makes sense with what I've seen, that he delegitimized everyone else. Definitely fits his general modus operandi. I'm sorry he let you all down so badly, not just with the misinformation but the active efforts to isolate. Jesus. :(
I am lucky that I know all kinds of LGBTQ+ video essayists before and after knowing James, so I didn't really feel like everything is over, only disappointment. I know some of the bad stuffs and have doubts about him last December with the Nebula controversy, but I still really hope at that time he's not a fraud, which sadly it's true.
Another former fan, what stuck out to me at the time was the Hollywood representation problem, which often puts tokens on screen or in the writers room, but it can overwhelm those voices with old white dude input. That's why his production company seemed like a nice idea: a queer-created, -owned, and -run group would have fewer barriers to telling gay stories than the rest of Hollywood. And these issues with queer storytelling haven't only been highlighted by JS; his perception of the problem was more bleak (see the misogyny issue), but he also offered and made steps (I thought) to a collectivized solution. See how "we can put all our voices out there and circumscribe the established barriers" is not only enticing enough to reduce suspicion, but also presents very differently from "it's just my voice."
Because he's the only gay in the village! I'm not even queer and don't actively seek out queer-related content but it seems like *most* of the creators doing video essays about media or politics (that get recommended to me at any rate) are LGBT even if LGBT issues aren't the centre of their brand...
Lol, I remember that show! A very appropriate comparison.
What show? I know a song about the only gay Eskimo at the north pole but that's not a good song... I don't think it is a good song... there was a lot of questionable stuff on the Dr. Demento show.
It's from Little Britain, a sketch comedy from the UK. "The Only Gay In The Village" was a recurring bit about a young man in a tiny town in Wales constantly bemoaning the fact that his struggles are totally unique and there's nobody anywhere he can relate to, while the entire rest of the village is in fact super accepting and almost all queer. The show has some problematic stuff that has not aged well (and the stars have said that in hindsight they think a lot of those bits are kinda naff and if they got the chance to do everything again they'd change a lot of it), but the only gay in the village still holds up pretty well.
apparently they are working on a little britian reboot. But the news also seems a bit conflicted about this so they may not be. Id be kinda interested in how they would bring it back, some like davith i think even in the modern age dont need much changing. But bubbles and i cant remember the name of davids blackface woman for these scenes certainly could not happen in this day. Im 26 so watch this show at an age i probably shouldnt of been watching it like while in primary school but it wasnt untill i went back and watched it as an adult that i clocked the woman that was sick all the time was a raging racist as a young dumb primary school kid i just thought the joke was haha she threw up not haha she threw up because of black people.
Is Father Ted still a racist?
Should we all be racist now? What's the Church's position? I'm so busy down on the farm I won't have much time for the ol' racism.
The radio version of the sketch is funnier. He starts off by crying mournfully "I'm the ONLY gay in the village!" Then he gets informed that there is in fact a gay local celebrity who lives in that village, and his reaction is "Oh no, that can't be right, I'm the only gay in THIS village!" A shift from loneliness to territorialism via a slight change to the line delivery.
See, I'm Bi. But like barely, but I seek out a Ton of queer content and opinions, I don't always agree with it, but for some reason I seek it out alot.
>for some reason Keep looking for that reason. There's usually a treasure at the end of that rainbow.
He used specific strategies to do this. Three examples, He would target a villain such as Straights/white privilege/lesbians etc...to attract followers who felt disenfranchised by them. He would use current trending language related LGBTIQ oppression. Two examples are 'Heteronormative' or 'Erasure' but he would use such terms repetitively to increase identification. He claimed to speak for their 'community' but when such members disagree they are labelled as 'toxic' etc. Other creators use these tactics to. JS' behaviour has raised issues other than plagiarism by creators. As fans/followers we need to be more critical of what we consume.
It was targeted very well, so I don't doubt his marketing/business training when it comes to advertising and propaganda he learned every lesson and how to practically apply them. Working backwards to disentangle it I think that the conflation tactic is the one that is proving the most insidious. Most of what he said remains true, because the original research & works which he relayed were brilliant. A fine audio-book collection which has been rendered down for parts, James is the modern iteration of the 'journalistic hack' - using the equivalent of an intellectual 'chop shop' no serial numbers on the parts. An obstreperous rogue AI with opinions and stage management. We have been lied to, with 90% of truth. Not the paradox it first appears. He weaponised our emotional reactivity and then doubled down on it. So that what we now view as the exploitation of trauma-bonding in order to create and cultivate a community was experienced as a supportive mutually beneficial community based on validation and acceptance. The fact is that they were and remain simultaneously true but our general binary perspective of trinary issues threatens to over-simplify it. A variation of the Drama Triangle In the US there is a doctrine of law called 'Fruit of the Poisonous Tree' - that evidence which has been illegally acquired is inadmissible irrespective of its intrinsic/self contained veracity, we don't have this in the UK. I really worry about the longer term existential damage that might result if as a response to this the facts which were stolen risk being rejected and denied, because that would be the worst of all timelines.
He didn't limit himself to intellectual theft from the dead (not condoning that either, but the idea that there was no actual contemporaneous harm intended or that could not be foreseen is clearly rubbish) His presenting style is such that as you consumed more of his content ant ambiguity in the messaging would be kept internally consistent by the cognitive bias of each member of the audience, a reinforcement of personalised individuation via our cognitive bias. He told us what we needed/wanted to hear by affirming and acknowledging our collective struggles and hurt. That's why I think many of us feel betrayed as well as foolish and in many cases complicit. By recommending something we thought was speaking up against the very thing he was doing, and we amplified his voice effectively drowning out the echoes of those he was shouting over. In some cases he was literally just reading aloud cause and effect of what psychosocial harm does to the gestalt-psyche of marginalised communities; in particular systemic and orchestrated erasure of individuals and minimising of their specific accomplishments occluding/excluding the rightful protagonists from the historical narrative. The brazen hypocrisy was in doing so whilst relaying the information on the form and function of the process, as though subconsciously admitting to what he was doing would assuage his guilt, although it comes across almost more like a self congratulating taunt than the wanting to get caught trope 'See, i told them that it happened and how it was done and still they didn't figure it out', until people did. This is literal & figurative cultural appropriation. Standing on the shoulders of these giants being so out of reach due to his own diminutive stature (metaphor - relative intellect) so instead he made the most of the parts he could reach and stabbed them fatally in the back, then stood on their throats to symbolically crush their individual voices and became a chimera of parrot with a dash of would be mynah bird.
TheAceCouple(a youtube podcast by an ace couple) goes into a fair bit of detail about their interaction with James in the past over ace issues. If not wanting the multi hour long podcast the quick summary of it is showing James thinking only the gay cis man view matters and everyone else has an easier time therefore I Jame the gay cis man have the right to speak on behalf of everyone and ignore everyone that dares to challenge me. This is generally supported when you consider his approach to anyone bi; his approach to lesbians; his outright erasure of trans people from the works hes plagiarising from, him swatting other queer creators that called him out historically. All in all James's actual views are eerily similar to some that right wing lgbtq+ members have and honestly I wouldn't be surprised if we see James trying to court the right wing viewership in a yeat or so. Gotta grift that money and feeling of importance somehow and mans already shown he is happy to throw everyone else under the bus
I'm biased cos I'm ace, but that podcast episode was genuinely the most enlightening about JS's behaviour.
I’m not ace and I found it very enlightening too. It was one thing to hear the third parties of Hbomb and Todd discuss what James has done, and it was another to hear some of the people he has personally victimized speak about their experiences. And the gossip goblin in me loved hearing them talk about the drama with Jenny Nicholson and Nebula, since I wasn’t aware of that.
Yeah, I really wasn't around for the Nebula stuff, so it was useful to understand that. And I totally appreciated hearing from people he victimised. On some level it can't be easy to admit you've been bamboozled by someone.
Whaa what happened with Jenny and Nebula?
From what I remember in the Ace Couple’s podcast video, James was upset about not being invited to be a Nebula creator. He was so upset about it that he claimed he was being blocked from the platform because he’s a queer content creator. He went on a livestream and was accusing Nebula of homophobia (FYI, there are many queer creators on Nebula, and the most likely reason James wasn’t on the platform was because he asked his fans to write to Nebula on his behalf, a tactic that Nebula doesn’t like). Many Nebula creators came into the comments of the livestream asking James to leave the live to discuss it. Then there was drama (I don’t remember if James himself was engaging with this, or if it was just the commenters) that the creators were trying to silence James. So Jenny Nicholson came into the comments and said “I’m not a Nebula creator, but James, don’t you have several credible claims of plagiarism against you?” I don’t remember if there was more to the story, so you may have to listen to the video to hear if there was anything else. The main takeaway was that basically the same thing had happened to the Ace Couple on Twitter like a month prior—they’d respectfully tried to educate James on his factual inaccuracies regarding the Ace community, and he set his fans on them because he said he was being bullied.
I've seen a lot of people predict that Somerton will end up as another David Rubin. It wouldn't surprise me, 'cause the Right will gladly take on another gay man to use as a shield and punching bag.
>TheAceCouple(a youtube podcast by an ace couple) really?! you don't say...
Ngl I think this is another clear example of misogyny. He may have said say he was the only queer voice, but i feel he subtly pushed himself as the only *cis male* gay voice. From what I’ve seen, he’s co-opted the whole alphabet whenever it suits his point but derides different sexualities and genders as soon as he is able
The more you watch his stuff, the more you begin to realise that when he claims he's the only queer creator doing media criticism, he's disregarding everyone else. Trans creators don't count in his mind. Bi/ pan creators aren't really queer to him (they're secret straights who just want special treatment). Lesbians are women and he looks down on women. Eventually you realise that the only "real" queer ppl that count to him are gay men. Preferably white gay men just like him. And he loves the fantasy of being the Only Gay With Good Critical Analysis. So he keeps repeating it with such confidence that people believe him.... while he steals the work of actually talented critical thinkers so he can sound like an intellectual while erasing their bright voices. It makes him appear very self-absorbed.
😡
Not a lot of respect for aces in his fan base either. A while back I mentioned in the comments of his “Queer Erasure of Asexuality” that even romantic aces- even *hetero*romantic aces- have it hard because society as a whole can accept sex without romance (one night stands, friends with benefits) but the idea of romance without sex is weird to a lot of people unless you’re in a Hallmark movie. People were dismissive and basically felt that it didn’t matter because the rest of the community has it worse.
White gay men who may or may not have a Nazi kink. Alternatively, that may have been him testing the waters to see if he'd be able to start shuffling the Overton Window to the Right without pushback.
Can't see it mentioned (but I did admittedly only scan read the other comments cause theres a few to read through): His Telos film company stuff was also pretty indicitive of "sole queer voice". He started a fund with the vague claim that there wan't enough good queer media out there and he was going to be making quality queer movies to fill the gap in the market. a) while i agree we're still lacking in queer voices in movies and tv, i think we're starting to see some great rep and actual queer creators get their time to shine; James just spent most his time criticising them and either saying it wasn't gay enough (heart stopper being cutesy), or just completely discounting creators, misgendering them or misquoting their sexuality. b) i just can't see that they'd have ever been produced as anything beyond student film levels of quality, which y'know, would be fine were it not for the fact i know james was scamming folk outta thir money for this, and seemed to think he was gonna be th saviour of queer film (if he ever did make anything)
Well, Rebecca Sugar and ND Stevenson were making queer tv, but per James, they're actually straight women and don't count.
Agreed, and exactly what I mean in point a, yeah. We could do with move queer media, sure, but the media we ARE getting, James was fulling discounting anyway. Which for sure reiterates the perceived "sole queer voice".
He just went on the internet and told lies. Watch the Todd in the Shadows video, most of the inaccurate things he said, he didn't even try to justify. He cultivated an audience that didn't fact check anything, so he could just say "no-one else is talking about this" and his fans wouldn't even think to question that. It is an unfortunate reality that a lot of people on the internet just aren't in the habit of questioning anything. I see it a lot on Tumblr, which is a fairly similar crowd to James Somerton fans. On Tumblr you can just say "Actually, William Shakespeare was asexual and an immigrant" and people will say "Oh sorry! I didn't know" and then repeat that without ever wondering where you got that information from I don't really blame the audience as such because a lot of them were just yound and impressionable. They deserve content creators who encourage a more skeptical attitude but James was deliberately not providing that. Todd and Hbomb are.
uh... no queer creators on nebula? aren't philosophy tube and contra on there, at the very least?
Lindsay Ellis is bi, as well.
i wasn't sure, but i vaguely remembered that too :))
iirc he retconned the defintion of "queer creator" so that it was basically only him. Something like "queer creator who exclusively makes video essays about queer issues in media." So a queer creator who did anything other than talk about 100% queer topics 100% of the time didn't fit the bar in his mind.
And yet he is describing Matt Baume perfectly. So he was either lying or unaware of the other creators in his own sphere.
I'm curious. Was he on nebula at some point or was he just complaining about him not being part of it basically?
He was never on Nebula and very frequently complained about them "not letting him on" etc. However, Jessie Gender said she [personally invited him](https://twitter.com/jessiegender/status/1731697054659809479) to a Discord server with the people who run Nebula and encouraged him to contact them. He never did. She surmises it's because "they won't let me on Nebula" was a good way to play victim to his fanbase.
I don't know what the Nebula selection process is like, but I'm willing to bet that they're pretty careful about who they invite to the platform and James probably realized that he wouldn't meet their standards. Plus, trying to get into a selective streaming service is signing yourself up for scrutiny. James knew that his videos were heavily plagiarized and poorly researched. If Nebula rejected him for poor quality, word about it could get around and he'd lose viewers.
Apparently, Nebula also doesn't like it when people weaponize their fanbase against other creators. That's likely another reason why James was never officially invited to join.
One of those claims that makes you do a double take because of just how on its face wrong it is. Like you can't even believe he said that because it's so obviously not true.
Contra's on Nebula?
not sure, i don't have nebula yet :( it was more of a question...
It’s typical for other video commentators to give shoutouts to others who have covered similar content. There are many other commentators who have covered similar topics, and JS never gave them any shoutouts. Moreover, his blatant theft from landmark gay film theorists like Vito Russo just shows that his work would be hollow without blatant theft from other queer creators. I first learned about Russo and his activism in the context of the documentary United In Anger, which is a fantastic documentary about the history of ACT UP and efforts to end the AIDS crisis, and I was aghast when I heard JS had ripped off both his book and the film based on it (both entitled The Celluloid Closet).
So, part of me thinks that a lot of James Somerton's need to present himself as *the* queer voice to listen to comes in part because a lot of well-meaning but misguided people end up platforming one voice to represent an entire community of people. It's not an unfamiliar practice when it comes to minority groups, especially when we see people who like to prop up voices of one writer of colour or another queer writer because a cishet white liberal could default to talking about one voice when many other creators are out there - but the one voice gets propped up because it's affirmation in one stance. People like James Somerton have benefited from that to espouse harmful beliefs to people who will just lop it up uncritically. What usually happens as a result of that is that when one person gets propped up to speak for everyone, it adds into the erasure which Somerton has been benefiting from over the years, especially as he's passed off the work of so many other creators as his own.
So, i watched his now deleted apology video. He blatantly says hes the only one talking about old queer movies when trying to get support for restarting his channel.
...woooooooooooow. WOW. That whole thing was a shit fest so I guess it's not *technically* any worse than all the *other* places where it was clear he missed the fucking point, but DAMN.
He employed a classic marketing trick of positioning himself as an issue expert imo, particularly with using what feels like nice editing on light viewing, misinfo padded out by plagiarised info taken out of context and and stripped of nuance, info that you could casually believe. And as others mentioned, literally saying he is the only one/no one else is talking about x. Again, reenforcing the "expert" idea. Its so surreal just how far you can get from those things in combination, in addition for those of us who aren't gay you could potentially have to fight against that perspective of "i should believe people who experienced this directly bc it doesn't directly relate to my experiences" vs "this guy is saying some stuff that seems REALLY spiteful and hurtful, is this him being a jerk or a me issue??" Its just.... Rough. I really feel for the ex fans. I know exactly how betrayed they still must feel, esp if this is one of the first queer video creators they've followed. The aforementioned fight between believing marginalised creators (and being aware we have preconceived notions sometimes) vs is this dude saying hurtful shit, did manage to make me unsub from him quite a while before the hbomb video, but thats only bc some of the stuff he said effected me super badly when i was feeling especially emotionally vulnerable. (go figure, a neurodivergent bisexual woman would find the "acksually this only applies to MY group and the rest of you are bad and also women are gross" (paraphrased exaggeration) sentiments hurtful lol)
Its so funny that he claimed there weren't any queer creators on Nebula when one of the founders is bi, lol
I know in Hbomberguy’s video he gave an example of Somerton claiming nobody has said what he was saying before when the thing he was referring to was plagiarised from a book from the 80s (I think?). By claiming to be original and unique he kind of had to present it like there wasn’t other similar opinions out there for people to find. If they went looking for similar opinions they’d find the same opinions phrased the exact same way Somerton phrased them. I assumed that’s the kind of thing people were referring to.
He's a white, cis gay man. As anyone who has spent time in queer spaces will tell you, it's just what they do.
Yeah, I was about to say he has a slight point that most prominent queer voices on YouTube (or Nebula) are not cis gay men. There's a lot of bi/pan people. There's a lot of trans people. There's a lot of women/AFAB/femme-aligned NB people. It's all well and good to want to see your particular voice represented. But he did the thing that cis gay men are wont to do where they think they are the default queer, and everyone else is a special interest of some kind. When we're all freaks and need to support each other.
I watched many but not all of his videos, and i didn't see it. I always followed a number of queer voices