Queer Intentions by Amelia Abraham

Author:Amelia Abraham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

chapter five

NOW YOU SEE ME

I was discovering ‘coming out videos’ late in life, or at least, later than everyone else, but after my summer of Prides, I fell down the rabbit hole. They’d been there for a decade, these YouTube clips of LGBTQ+ vloggers opening up about their sexuality online. I’d dismissed them as irrelevant to me: too saccharine, too earnest. I had gone through the process of coming out and ‘coming to terms’; why would I want to watch other people do so?

Now I was eating my words.

I got started with Rose and Rosie, two attractive British vloggers who were married, lived in Hertfordshire, and made videos where they bickered, teased one another, phoned up their exes and sometimes made out on camera for their fans. This formula had – perhaps unsurprisingly given the girl-on-girl content – helped them to accumulate 145 million views on Rose’s YouTube channel and about 30 million on Rosie’s.

I told Emily about them with the excitement of someone who had discovered some new, untrodden pocket of the Internet. She was shocked that I hadn’t heard of them before.

‘Yes, Rose and Rosie. Emily and Amelia . . . we could have made a fortune by now,’ she said, as though I had deprived her of the right to become a YouTube sensation.

There was a time when I would have responded to that comment with, ‘No one is interested in the boring ins and outs of our prematurely middle-aged lesbian life,’ but having scrolled through the comments under Rose and Rosie’s videos, I could see that people clearly were.

‘These TWO FUCkerS are The REAson I REIlizaD I WAS gaY AND afTER WATCHING THIS I REMEBER WHY,’ wrote one fan, under a compilation video of Rose and Rosie that was created by yet another fan.

Rose Ellen Dix and Roseanne Elizabeth Spaughton had come out on camera separately, the first as a lesbian and the other as bisexual. They met through a mutual friend, and then started vlogging as a couple. They had announced their engagement on YouTube, posted footage of their wedding on YouTube and, more recently, begun sharing the details of their attempts to have a baby. If I had presumed this type of YouTube content was aimed exclusively at a teenage audience, they soon proved me wrong: one episode detailed their search for a sperm donor, another discussed IVF. Watching these, I was actually learning something, and kind of enraptured by seeing into another lesbian couple’s domestic set-up. It was like what I had experienced when I went to visit Patty, only broadcast direct to my home: a glimpse into the future that was cheerier than those I’d grown up watching in lesbian films, where someone usually died at the end.

Rose and Rosie’s coming out videos led me to others: I discovered the American twin models, the ‘Rhodes Bros’, two twinkie angels whose video showing them come out to their dad down the phone put a lump in my throat. It had 24 million views and counting.

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