A correction: I say that Nick nuked the Discord server but I've heard it was actually James. This was an assumption I shouldn't have made (ironic, considering the topic of this video). One very difficult thing about UA-cam: It is impossible to make corrections. Another correction: I say medieval peasants did witch-hunts but I'm told that the times of witchhunts was only a tiny bit of the tail end of the medieval era and mostly into the early modern period.
Now I don’t know what to think. 😅 Actually. It appears that James has been passing the blame for lots of things on to Nick. So maybe he’s used to it and won’t notice. He doesn’t seem to watch or research anything anyway.
@@KwesiMangata Can you explain that first part? I live here and haven't heard us being big on defamation cases. I'm not aware of any recent defamation cases, but the Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard case wasn't restricted or had any sort of restrictions on it being reported. Or are you talking about UK cases of defamation?
"Women who are attracted to a famous actor playing a serial killer are disgusting. Anyway here's a whole insane rant on how sexy and gay the nazis were."
Can we also acknowledge how Hbomberguy only found tiny fragments of James' script that wasn't plagiarized. So you're telling me the non-plagiarized part is made up gay Nazis, mysogyny, and just MISINFORMATION HE MADE UP?
I always noticed that hypocrisy within people like James. In their heads, when straight people (specifically women in James' case) have concerning and messed up attractions, is seen as such and deserving of (deserved) criticizing; when gay people do the same, instead is seen as liberating and antisystem. It's so annoying to see this phenomenon over and over.
Seriously 'normal' gays and lesbians falling for hateganda towards bis, aces and trans people when the bigots who whisper those words in their ears to make them feel included until they're no longer useful is sad. There is no club to fit it. That's the point of the LGBT. The *BT*+ part is very relevant.
I think it’s more that Korrasami was tacked on at the end as fan service since Korra and Asami have like no connection or chemistry throughout the whole show until that hand-hold moment
@@TulpechaidoplaysMC But the clips we see of his video here show that James thought Korrasami was planned from the beginning. So it's still just James being unable to ackowledge bisexuality.
@@TulpechaidoplaysMCHuh? They started building Korra and Asami's chemistry in season 3 and practically started Korra's arc in season 4 by, to my recollection (I haven't seen it since it first aired sorry if I'm doing a James Somerton right now), the only person's letters she would respond to WERE ASAMI'S.
Because he's one of many people in the LGBT community that don't believe bisexuals are valid. If a bisexual starts dating someone of the opposite sex, they just lied about being gay, and vice versa Bisexual erasure is massive problem
It’s a bit creepy how he switches from boringly reading out a script to being all sassy and with words dripping venom when talking about straight women.
@@tobyeasterbrook8117 true, but it's not like he's writing from the perspective of a fictional character who just happens to be a misogynist. these might be words for a script, but they're still his words. even when they're not, he often finds a way to interpret the works he's plagiarizing to suit his personal narrative about women, & that's still worth paying attention to. i'm pretty sure hbomberguy said something along the lines of "putting the words straight & white in there doesn't mean you're not doing misogyny." idk, i guess that's just important to keep in mind.
I wonder if people can tell when the script is just words on a screen for a youtuber, and when they actually care, because I kinda feel like I can, maybe because I've watched so much of it, but there's this very specific "it's just words for me" voice they do
The implication that Somerton, the turtleneck-wearing content regurgitator, considers himself one of the non-boring, wild, artsy gays and not one of the boring, assimilationist gays is, uh, buckwild.
The fact he has the gall to say “look it up it’s true” and then you look it up and it isn’t true is just mind-blowing to me. Glad this loser is finally getting exposed.
Hitler called it the "Big Lie". The strategy is to tell a bald-faced lie about a subject that demands reverence, causing everyone to assume it's true because a decent person would never lie about it.
They say that so that you, the viewer, doubt yourself so that you don’t actually look it up, and believe him because he has the confidence to back it up.
One thing I haven't really heard mentioned in this whole debacle is that a lot of the things he bitches about are decades old, and at this point, a whole generation of academics have been studying these debates and are very aware of them. Academia has really changed because of it. Like, you can get a PhD in queer studies. It's not like it's all Judith Butler across the board, but in many of these videos, he's ranting against stuff from the eighties that was settled long ago
@@OsirisLord honestly I think it's more that he needs "nobody is talking about this" to market himself. It's the "no queer creators on nebula" thing, he has to project this image that he's this innovative forward thinker bringing up the topics no one else is discussing. And that is definitely part of his smoke screen for plagiarism, obviously. If you're the only person talking about queer issues then you obviously arent just copy and pasting the third search result off of Google into your script, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think he knows his videos were bad, they were dry and boring, and if his audience knows there are people who've said all this before in more interesting ways, why watch him? I say this because it's exactly what happened with me lol. I watched a handful of his videos, realized how dry they were and how little new information they were bringing to the table for me, and just stopped watching him on favor of more entertaining channels with more to say.
All this stuff of "Marvel tried so hard to hide this queer character," "Nickelodeon fought tooth and nail to repress this queer character" is very bizarre. They don't have to fight, they just have to say no. The writers have to fight but Marvel and Nickelodeon do not. Also, comics have been gay for like forever. 2005 is wayyyyy too fucking late to keep queers out of comics.
Yeah it’s wild. Like why the fuck would they greenlight projects that they fully intend to keep on the downlow or cancel early, when they can just say no?
i think the general public is very unaware of how progressive comics have been for decades atp. when i first got into comics, I was surprised how there was pretty much always a gay character/side plot along with other social issues addressed.. not always well but at least earnestly. now not to spread misinformation, but i do speculate that the disney marvel films have perpetuated this idea of a conservative utopia. captain marvel is not making superheros "woke", they ARE woke. always have been
The funniest thing about that list of Dahmer ships is that I genuinely cannot tell which ones are morbid crackfics and which are genuinely serious. The Chainsaw Man one is probably a joke about Part 1's ending, but I have no clue about the other fics.
His borderline fanfic-level romanticization of Italy as an anything-goes gay paradise is hysterical if you think about it for more than a second. Ah yes Italy, home of the Catholic church, notorious for it's sexual liberation.
😂 you mean that place that was also famous for Savonarola? The guy who was obsessed with self harm and famous for the Bonfire of Vanities where they burned everything that was fun, like art, literature, music and eventually some people? So much free love.
Yeah, i could maybe see it for the posh young brits going to the old equivalent of resorts being able to be shielded from alot of the consequences people would face then as rich tourists from a powerful country. But for your average Italian under strong catholic mores and machismo? Not to mention the vast regional difference from the more conservative and rural southern italy (italy is a young country) where the social expectation to marry your rapist still survived into the 1970s.
For some reason this makes me think of that Simpsons bit where Marge is afraid that her family'll convert to Catholicism and she imagines Protestant heaven as rich and white and Catholic heaven as Mexican Irish and gay
exactly what I thought. A lot of the historical bullshit Somerton claims comes off as a fetish/kink thing to me, like he is trying to write fanfic with real history and claim it as fact. The "nazi's looked so hot the american soldiers were jealous" is def one that stood out, but also when he claimed the whole weird thing about how "the nazis were BRIMMING with homosexuals" and how "so many young men were being converted to homosexuality when they spent time in Italy that the other european nations were starting to get worried and stop sending their sons there". These all just come off as really sexualized wishful thinking? It's really weird
As a pro-am historian who's always had a WW2 fixation, that entire section made my blood pressure rise the further along it went. It's not just _bad history,_ it's straight up uncritically parroting the Nazis' own propaganda. He might as well have had Nazi propaganda posters up behind him as it went along. As point of fact, the exact OPPOSITE was usually observed as true, for American soldiers in the late war. US soldiers were the best-fed and best-conditioned troops in the war at that point as the USA had the most and best food resources, evidenced by how they were outright pumping food into the British Empire to keep it from collapsing. The Soviets would have been the second, and it wasn't a close second. While it's just as anecdotal as anything Somerton's saying here and I have just as many sources handy (which is to say, none, though in my case I'm recollecting ones I've read in the past and simply don't have on hand), there are accounts from both German and Japanese POVs -- often post-occupation civilians -- commenting on how the GIs seemed like impossible giants.
@@InchonDMI’d even argue Todd went overboard talking about how jacked the Soviets were Like a lot of examples he used were from the 70s-80s and they were just as much propaganda as the aryan ubermench Until Kruschevs corn reforms most people in the Union were still scrawny from the famines and war The US meanwhile, while yeah we didn’t have funions, our agricultural sector went through the roof from wartime subsidies, and unlike the Soviets there were no panzers in Ohio so they could just make infinite Oats, so almost every GI went into battle with a full stomach so they could build the kind of mass Somerton claims they didn’t have
Even Uncharted 4 made the point in its narrative about historical pirates that their greed and pride ultimately killed all of the pirates in Libertalia. While they didn't mention Avery's involvement in the slave trade, they made the point that Avery was only viewed as a pirate of the people in Britain and its colonies because he murdered and stole from Muslims. The closest historical pirate you have to a Robin Hood type is Black Sam Bellamy and he is very much an exception to the rest of the Golden Age Pirates in his conduct.
@@BigAmericanGirlFan My only actual source is one piece, so this was very insightful. For example, I learned where the manga gets the name Bellamy from
I've heard from Jamaicans that Caribbean perspectives on pirates are rather positive as they were immensely important for the history of this region. They usually don't call them pirates but buccaneers from what's been told to me
But pirates in One Piece ARE fucking scumbags with a few notable exceptions. The Strawhats' enemies are composed of equal parts corrupt authorities and other pirates.
I'm an older gay dude and I lived through AIDS and hearing Somerton blithely accuse the AIDS survivors of being "the boring ones" and that gay marriage was about "big weddings" is infuriating. This guy comes in accusing people who fought and died for the right he enjoys of being "boring" assimilationists.. the absolute gall of this man
I feel like these big expose videos always have one thing that makes the person go from more than “internet pest” into genuine monster. That line is definitely James’s it’s the same level of ghoulish as that clip of hasan laughing at that cop bleeding out after being accidentally shot by her partner.
It's very clear that he misses the days that being an out gay person made you an edgy revolutionary. Because he has no personality he's devastated that the time that being out and gay could sustain your clout is gone, and so all he has left is to put those people down so he can suppress his envy of them, or rather of the ways he thinks he'd have it easy were he them.
The impression I get from the excerpts here and in the hbomber vid give me an impression that he only considers a particular subset of gay men human. Anyone outside of that, gay men that feel differently than him, straight men, gay women and especially straight women are subhumans. Maybe even some trans people, that seems less clear. I'm not about to watch his channel to confirm though.
I can't believe straight white women held poor James at gunpoint and made him plagiarize a ton of stuff and then make up a bunch of bullshit to present it as historical facts 😭
Wait wait wait... Sommerton said that boycotts against Disney over "gay days" never materialized? Dude. DUDE. THEY ABSOLUTELY DID. MY FAMILY STOPPED GOING TO DISNEYLAND OVER THAT. The American Family Institute held that boycott for A DECADE.
My family did this too! They wouldn't even let us watch Disney movies on old DVDs we had since they thought it would somehow send money directly to gay days. It was insane lol. Somerton is... Exercising creative liberties.
I remember my grandparents having pamphlets about how Disney was trying to make kids gay with movies like Mulan and characters like Timon in Lion King and they also referenced "gay days". My grandparents tried to convince my dad to stop taking us but he liked the park more than being consistently homophobic I guess
@@mischr13 It's so funny how right wingers today get angry at people speculating about the sexuality of fictional characters when they were doing it in the first place
19:49 "a huge swath of fans made up *mostly of women*, BUT, to my delightful surprise, a lot of gay men, as well" It's almost hard to believe how openly mysoginistic he is. Even when women agree with him, he still doesn't like them LOL
Who do you think created fandoms JAMES? Who do you think started fan zines JAMES? Who do you think created the term ‘Mary Sue’ based off the repetitive characters of fan fiction in said fan zines JAMES?? WHO DO YOU THINK FIRST POPULARIZED GAY SLASH FAN FICTION JAMES?!
@@erinsweeney3326I need to know JAMES? How did you split the points up? Oh wait...this isn't RDC World's channel. This is Todd in the Shadows channel. Never mind. Carry on.
"The boring gays are the ones that survived, " no, James, the ones that survived were either terrified out of their fucking minds and still live with PTSD, lucky enough to be informed by grassroots gay orgs like ACT UP on how to combat HIV, or were just plain lucky to not catch an illness that was killing their friends, families, lovers, and communities.
Yeah and some of them are actually still writers, Russell T Davies is one of them who lived through the AIDS crisis and saw all his friends die of AIDS. Yet he is a prolific gay screenwriter and really to me, he is probably a big inspiration for me as a screenwriter because every series he has written for TV has had Queer characters and I definitely aspire to write Queer characters in all of my screenplays and make them important parts of the story, no just mention their sexuality, no they going to have a full on boyfriend that they kiss goodbye from work and they go out on dates with for an episode if I'm writing a show.
AIDS wasn't a force of "Bury Your Gays," taking the hot sexy creative gays that get around and leaving behind the losers. It hurt everyone. Big names, small names, neighbors down the street, people struggling with addictions, people with blood diseases or needing transfusions. This isn't dramatic fiction, this is a heartbreaking reality. Heck, the US's guidelines for donating blood are still affected by the AIDS crisis (unless that got changed and I missed it)
maybe james should say that to sir elton john and see how he reacts. he was just as s3xually active as freddie mercury yet miraculously never got hiv. it was just about a random chance of whether you got hiv or not
@@georgemitchell1394Elton John's credited his survival largely because he largely watched other people rather than doing it himself, if I'm remembering his NPR interview correctly. So yeah, totally active, but far from boring
His claim that 90s activists only cared about marriage equality was because they were boring and assimilationist really peeved me. You know why marriage equality was such a big deal in the wake of the AIDS crisis?? Because if your long-term romantic partner was dying in the hospital, you weren't legally next of kin and you had no rights to visitation or claiming their body. This could result in the body of your loved one ending up in the hands of their homophobic/transphobic/abusive parents, where you would not be allowed to attend the funeral. This is why marriage equality mattered not just to assimilationist wealthy white gays but to the whole community, especially when queer rights were still in such jeopardy. Marriage equality seems a lot less important in the 21st century now that the threat of death isn't looming so heavily, but there was a very good reason why it was important to queer activists in the 90s. EDIT: I'm glad this comment resonated with so many people. Please understand that I only listed a few of the concerns that made marriage equality such a big deal. Being able to direct medical care when your partner is incapacitated, being able to keep your partner's possessions/property when they pass, and having custody of a child you raised with your partner are just a few other examples of why it was so important. Be sure to learn your queer history, kids!! Also it's worth recognizing that even in the modern day we don't have full marriage equality in the US for disabled people, although there is some legislation on its way that may change that if it passes! Look up the SSI savings penalty elimination act for more information on why disabled people don't have full marriage equality right now.
You also can't access a life partners health insurance, or make healthcare decisions when they're incapacitated. The legal rights granted to spouses are quite a big deal, to dismiss that as assimilation is truly beyond ignorant. It's just another lie imo.
I don't know how it was in the US but in my country the right to visit somebody during the pandemic was also tied to your family status so this definitely would have been a major problem pre marriage equality
@@melanieg.9092i think it was the same in the uk, you had to prove some kind of relation to the person and that was usually thru being family or being legally married/in a civil partnership with them
as a disabled bisexual in a relationship with another disabled bisexual I feel this so deeply. it's not quite as tragic, but disabled people still don't have total marriage equality & still face these issues. & the active fight for gay marriage equality helped progress it just like the fight for disabled rights has helped the gay rights movement. we go hand in hand.
Did James seriously cite Cats as an example of like, normal totally straight boring media? Because... I've seen Cats, and I'm not sure how you can sit through the cat orgy dance and come away thinking that this is normal hetero fluff
only a couple of elements are, but even then, it's not so much fascism as it was white progressives thinking that eugenics was a good idea to entertain back in the late 1800s, plus a lack of understanding about how certain diseases worked
It angers me too because there are absolutely issues with the modern fitness movement, but it's just that everyone wants you to have the body of a super mutant. I just wanna fucking loose weight man.
His complaint on finding gay marriage boring really pissed me off. There's an art piece in a museum by John Boskovich that's just a box fan in plexiglass. That fan was the only thing he had from his long term partner who had died of AIDS. His partner's family didn't approve of their relationship so they cleared out his apartment without telling him and only left behind the box fan. It was the only object he had left from his partner. It's probably the only static art piece that's ever made me cry. Of course people were going to fight for marriage equality after many queer people were denied a say in their partner's medical care, watched them die and have a relationship ripped out of existence and covered up, and many were probably barred from attending their partner's funeral. It's boring to James because he's privileged and already has the right, but to those who lost everything, they fought to make sure no future gays would have to suffer a loss in the way they did. And this guy has the gall to call them boring because they survived an epidemic that likely killed many of their friends, family, and lovers. Why was he ever popular after saying that? What a smug ass.
@@kaeminchaAbsolutely. I hated contemporary art until I read about the piece and it moved me so much that it expanded the emotions I could feel from art. I hope to see it one day in the LA MOCA, the piece is called "Electric Fan (Feel it Motherfuckers)" and there are slots in the plexiglass for you to feel the breeze from it. I'd really like to feel it.
Marriage isn't for me, i have my opinions on it. But that doesn't mean I don't know the importance of it to others. Especially for queer ppl who has been fighting for the right to marry for decades. And thank you for sharing that story about the art piece. And i never knew that Somerton said how boring gays survived the AIDs crisis. That's such a vile thing to say!!
What's the piece called, and what museum is it in? That story legitimately made me tear up, and getting more mad with James for being such a fucking weasel.
And the idea that gay/queer/trans people who wanted the legal right to marry were just boring losers trying to fit in and not like… people trying to not be treated like second class citizens being denied a right that others have.
Somerton has also said that Hitchcock's first movie about gay people is Rope (1948), when it is very, very famously Rebecca (1940), which also literally won Best Picture- it's Hitchcock's ONLY film to win Best Picture- but it's about lesbians instead of gay men so he just sort of... erases it lmao- there's some very odd but distinct patterns to his behavior
Rebecca was also based on a Daphne de Maurier novel, who was... uh, her labels were complicated and show a greater overlap in the idea of gender identity and sexuality than we usually have today, but she may have been bisexual (she may have had relationships with women but it's not confirmed. Also bisexual could mean "having two genders" back in the day). She seems to have thought of herself as having conflicting masculine and feminine energy that drove her toward different wants and desires. So... yeah, probably somewhere in the LGBT umbrella, hard to pin down where when our terms have shifted and she's not here to tell us. All that to say, more (probable) bi erasure yay
@@acecat2798 Also I am no literature expert but based on what you said here. It could have also been possible trans or nonbinary erasure to an extent. Or just erasure of anyone if the lgbtq community who isn't gay. Which he kinda did a lot.
Fun fact: Daphne du Maurier also wrote the short story that became Hitchcock's The Birds (1962), he frequently returned to her works and their underlying themes of what at the time was considered "sexual deviance" and "deviance" in general (as he did with Robert Bloch's novel Psycho) but in an abstract way that was palatable for audiences and censors. Her short story Don't Look Now was also turned into a famous horror movie in the 1970s, though not directed by Hitchcock.
Rebecca isn't about lesbians. The head housekeeper clearly adored Rebecca and her romantic love became the catalyst for her psychological torture of the new Mrs. de Winter, but the movie and story is by no means about lesbians. It's entirely about the (het) marriage of Max and his new bride, and how Rebecca's presence still haunts them.
@@cthulhuhoops I meant that in Rope, the villains are gay men, while in Rebecca, the villain (Mrs. Danvers) is very heavily implied to have a romantic lesbian attachment to Rebecca, and though it’s only hinted at (like Rebecca’s incestuous relationship with her cousin), and we don’t know if Rebecca actually acted on it or was toying with Mrs. Danvers, the theme is very clear in the film. It’s not a positive portrayal of lesbians any more than Rope is a positive portrayal of gay men, but it’s sort of indisputable that Mrs. Danvers, at least, is the chief villain aside from the unseen Rebecca, and a lesbian. I will say that my phrasing that it was “about lesbians” was a reductive take that could’ve used some added nuance, I just figured I was getting my basic point across, that Somerton ignored or didn’t do enough research before making an incorrect claim about Hitchcock’s filmography.
His british accent doesn't help either, a British accent already has a bit of smugness even the more blue collar working folks up North, but he is so fucking smug it makes him more punchable, like man I want to uppercut him
It's why I never watched his videos. The character he plays has such a hoity-toity, patronizing tone, and his delivery is so boring. Miserable! Knowing what I know now, though, that all goes from "a bit annoying" to "freaking insidious"
@jemiu9525 I find a lot of less skilled leftist creators seem to have this kind of problem. Where their delivery is meant to come across as witty or irreverent, but it ends up feeling kinda patronizing and full of itself. It seems like a difficult balance of tone to hit, and James failed it miserably.
Hell, Elton John's had two charting hits in the last two years. Sure, they were both covers of old songs but it's pretty obvious one of the least boring gays is still out there and relevant. There's tons more, but that's just a very damn obvious example.
as holistically wrong as he was in that segment, james bitching about the "boring gays" while being a business major and "marketing expert" is extremely funny to me. self-awareness? who's that??
I'm a WWII historian, and much of what James Somerton said about Nazi Germany and the war itself is misleading, and flat out wrong, this is why we have misconceptions of America's favourite decade. First - although Japan attacked the US, it was Nazi Germany who declared war on the US on 12 December, just as the fires of Pearl Harbor were being extinguished, second - the US was already engaged with Europe through the Lend-Lease Act, Nazi Germany saw this as a threat, and further strained relations between the nations, finally - Nazi Germany and Japan were in the same alliance: the Axis Powers, Fascist Italy was involved too, James fell prey to popular narrative that this was _only_ a German and Japanese war, this was the nature of military alliances, including the ones prior to the Second World War, however, Germany was the bigger threat, so it was agreed between the Allies, that Third Reich had to be defeated first. One other thing Somerton gets wrong about this time, was the believe that Nazi fitness made Americans jealous to the point they needed prove their manliness, most Americans did not give a damn about Europe, they were very supportive of the isolationist sentiment, plus, average Americans were not even aware of what Nazi Germany was doing, this was not the Space Age, where information could be broadcasted in real time via satellites, communication was a lot cruder and slower in the 40s, moreover, Americans were more concerned with their immediate needs in the midst of the Great Depression, they were more worried about putting food on the table, than what a tinpot dictator was doing in Europe. By the way, the Nazi bodybuilders that Somerton cites, most would be killed in action against the allies, Germany had to rebuild its athletics after the war, and it was split between east and west, but just like the US, both Germanys had to retrofit their athletics to _not_ resemble the Third Reich, in addition, most German recruits were scrawny and malnourished teens or old folks, all the fit Ubermensch were killed long before Normandy, in fact, a lot of German civilians remarked on how fit and big American GIs were, and felt foolish and insignificant fighting against such a superpower. In conclusion, I find it super creepy on how Somerton fetishes the Waffen SS, it borders on Wehraboo territory, he was so much in love for the big strong Aryans, he was writing fanfiction about cosying up with one, and invented his own fantasy that Americans lusted for the same enemy, and that the war was born on envy and jealousy, this is the narrative that is shaped by Wehraboos, and it's vile that Somerton could warp it into making the SS into being a gay based organisation, the very group that would send people like Somerton to the death camps, remember - the LGBT were included in the Holocaust, so it is disgusting to listen to Somerton lavish one of the worst crimes against humanity in such a creepy way.
Thank you for the comment. I’d only add that the European Axis declarations of war were likely also intended to discredit the Roosevelt administration that had, apparently, made both grave intelligence and diplomatic failures in a matter of days. It’s incredible just how wrong Japan and the Axis powers in Europe were about how ordinary Americans would respond. Plus by declaring war on the US, Germany hoped Japan would join its war against the USSR
@@briangronberg6507my history classes always characterized us citizens as being up and arms after pearl harbor, practically lining up down the block to sign up and join the war.
@@rosehirstius Eh, I'm studying to be a 19th century US historian myself, so I don't want to steer too far out of my lane. My impression though was that the US was not as isolationist in the 1940s as it was in the early 1900 to 1910s. However, the US certainly was not nearly as interventionist as it was post WWII, and FDR had to spin the war as one of necessity and self-interest in order to maintain broad support. Full disclosure, the last book on the matter I've read was Warfare State, by James Sparrow, so any 20th century historians feel free to tell me where I got it wrong, or who else talks about it more. I'm happy to throw a couple more books on my reading list for comps XP
imagine doing enough plagiarism to make up the bulk of a four-hour video essay from a video essayist and still doing enough completely different harmful and stupid garbage to become the subject of a separate two-hour video essay from a MUSIC CRITIC.
@@OGseoulite HBomberGuy just dropped a four hour video essay on this subject and now Todd dropped a two hour video essay on this subject. Todd is a music critic.
I have to wonder what the hell is going on in his head. Does he... hate himself? Like, I know he just attempted suicide, but... if I hated that I was gay (for the record: I'm bi), I would hide it, not make my entire career about it.
@@mwkcope He says he tried to off himself on his apology video. So who knows if it's true or if he just said it to garner sympathy? From what I know about him, I'm betting it's bullshit.
I was thinking that when he kept trying to make it seem like everyone in the SS and at the top of the Nazi party was gay. Does he want people to think gay people did the holocaust or something lmao?
As a Howard Ashman Gay™️, the misinformation about him being exploited by Disney really rubs me the wrong way. Growing up queer, Catholic, and EXTREMELY sheltered, it actually gave me a lot of hope to learn that not only was a gay man responsible for so many of my childhood favorites, but that he was out and accepted by his colleagues. It showed me that the world was bigger than my immediate less-tolerant surroundings and made me optimistic about my own future. There is more than enough homophobia in the world to cherry pick for youtube, so why would you INVENT an anecdote that obscures a rare moment of empowerment for us??
Oh the people who worked with him adored him. I know Paige O'Hara the voice of Belle and she still raveers the man, and she's a hardcore catholic woman from Florida. Howard was beyond talented and it still pains me he isn't still writing Broadway ballads.
@@missybarbour6885 In a just world he'd have as many Oscar's as Menken and they'd have done a special song for Wish to celebrate over 30 years of writing music for Disney. But alas, that is just a dream we all must wake up from.
Disney made a whole documentary for him, and it's filled to the brim with people singing Howard's praises, along with a section in "Waking Sleeping Beauty." Roy Disney called him "Another Walt," which is extremely high praise! Disney set up a studio in New York because he so wanted to keep working while going through treatment for AIDS.
@@pinkcupcake4717 Oh its clear Don Hahn worships the ground he walked over. Can't say I blame him. That man could rhyme like no other. I look at something like the Mob Song in BATB and marvel. Sally forth, tally ho, grab your sword, grab your bow, praise the lord and here we go is just magnificent.
I like how during James' rant about Korra, it never occurs to James that Korra dating a bunch of men and then ending up being gay could just be the natural progression a teenager goes through as they discover their sexuality. I guess this is what happens when you just steal all of your content from other sources, you can't use critical thinking skills anymore.
@@thedudewhomadethisvideo someone pointed out on Twitter that he was planning a Evangelion themed video for a year and it was set to come out this month but last month before bomb's video came out James admitted to having not watched it at all or knowing where to start
Or that Bisexual people exist. Though given how he implicitly accused Leah Albertalli of being straigh years after she came out as bisexual, I suspect he might hold some unsavory opinions about bisexuals.
@@thedudewhomadethisvideo That matches up well for Korra considering his only case for Mako x Prince Wu was a ripped AMV he used. Like he didn't even say anything about why there was a hinting there, just stated "it was a will they won't they" implying he found the AMV and just assumed he now knew the whole story.
I mean I can believe it. The reason it didn't freak me out when I first heard it was 1. I didn't know it was essentially the only original content in the Dahmer video 2. One of my gay friends had a girl do this to him in high school and found it very hurtful. So I do sympathize to some extent. But as Harris says in his video, "Why are you making fanfic about her and not going to therapy?"
One of the most heart-wrenching panels I’ve ever had to listen to was an older queer woman discussing how she was going to a funeral every three days during the height of the AIDs epidemic. How she was practically outed as a Lesbian due to her constant attendance to these funerals. To say that only the “boring gays” survived is not only horrific to say, but does a disservice to the community that Somerton now profits off of.
it also completely ignores the fact that lesbians are a huge part of the gay community (duh) and majorly involved in gay rights activism, and were at relatively low risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. obviously that's not to say no queer women died of AIDS, but the rates of sexual transmission were much lower between cis women, so to say "all the cool activists and artists died during the AIDS crisis" sort of gives away that you think all the cool activists and artists were men.
I'm really disappointed with how much effort into his visual presentation he puts into his videos. It gives you the impression of authenticity and later for some reason of generalizing all LGBTQ+ as egocentrics 😢
Not to mention ignorant of the role lesbians and sapphics at the time played in the community. It’s pretty well known that they organized donations and informal care teams for gay men in their communities. But sure! Fuck the people that survived, that lived to tell the stories of people that were killed by proxy through a virus.
Love when people refer to 1937-1943 as Disney's "golden age" when Pinocchio and Fantasia were box office bombs in their initial release and Dumbo only made a profit because of the low budget.
The only explanation I can think of as to why Somerton thought that is maybe he looked up the lifetime gross, (which has become pretty high do to regular midnight showings over the years), and assumed that was the initial gross when it came out.
I’m dying at some of these just dumb observations. “The boring gays” like…. What? Who writes that downs reads it, then edits a video with it in there without checking themselves.
@wintersonnet I just now heard about that after seeing Tipster's reaction to James' recent "apology" video (Tipster saved the video before it was taken down, so he's decent source since it's got most of the video). After seeing that, I absolutely believe he had the same attitude toward ace people that he's had toward women/bi people/pan people/queer women and Nick was his fall guy/shield for it. Gross and I'm glad Nick got out. Ace people already get sh*t on from certain people in the queer community who have an attitude similar to James. It's always both gross and disheartening to hear it from other queer people.
I love how "straight women" are siultaneously overly sexualizing and fetishizing gay men but also they're prudes who are up in arms about gay sex on screen! Which is it???
At this point, I'm not even sure if he's gay. He looks like he just hate women so much that he just filtered his identity into the gay category by process of elimination He'd be a right wing pundit, but that involves having a woman in the kitchen and that's just too much female presence in the house to him.
If only there was an ideology that portrayed its perceived enemies as both weak and powerful. I'm not saying he's part of that, but drawing from their playbook is a huge red flag. Plus it being misogyny.
It's so weird. He swings from saying straight women fetishize gay men to saying that straight women hate Yuri on Ice because it's gay? And then he said that straight women supposedly fetishize Dahmer because he was a gay serial killer, but then also claimed that straight women fetishize Ted Bundy, who wasn't gay. So ...
"Flipping the script on the older single woman preying on a young girl to the even more toxic image of an older gay man preying on a teenage boy." Why is it "even more toxic"? Why can't they both just bad?
It would have made more sense if he said an older single woman preying on a young boy, even as recent as a few years ago that isn't taken seriously as much as gay man pedophilia.
it is sickening how one can dismiss lgbt people who lived through AIDS, watched their friends and lovers pass away while those in power did absolutely nothing, as “boring”. how can someone be that willfully ignorant is beyond me. disgusting.
George Michael singing Somebody to Love at the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert while his secret boyfriend was dying of AIDS is one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever listened to
Willful ignorance is far too kind of a description. Malice is more fitting. Ironic he said such nonsense given how he's basically one of the rich gays that wouldn't have needed to worry about anything Whether him or Nick wrote that crime against empathy, it's _soaked_ in deep self-loathing
The way I've gone from "James Somerton is a lying hack" to "James Somerton is a literal detriment to Queer History" in the span of a few hours is actually really staggering. I had never heard of this guy before this weekend and now I'm checking in with all of my fellow queer friends to see how much of these lies have permeated our mindsets. Thank you for making this, Todd. Thank you so much. Edit: I guess a lot of people felt this one. Somerton nuking everything but his channel tells us everything we need to know.
Same here. Its crazy. I wonder just how much damage he has done. How many young queer women or transmasc people he's caused doubt and self hatred in. It boils my blood
This is so accurate, and it honestly makes me sick. He seems to only care if an issue directly involves his specific part of the community (cisgender gay men) and twists things so the larger oppression of the queer community only targets that specific thing
The "Nickelodeon hated the idea of Legend of Korra because they didn't want a queer female protagonist of color" clip drives me so crazy, partially because literally everything he says is wrong (as Todd lays out), but also because while Legend of Korra isn't perfect, the fact that the writers didn't originally intend for Korra to be bisexual but instead just… gradually realized that was the way her character/relationship with Asami was developing, and *went with it*, has always been one of the most important aspects of the show & their relationship to me. Per Bryan Konietzko (from a tumblr post a couple days after the finale): "Was Korrasami “endgame,” meaning, did we plan it from the start of the series? No, but nothing other than Korra’s spiritual arc was. […] That’s how writing works the vast majority of the time. You give these characters life and then they tell you what they want to do." There are countless examples of showrunners/writers responding to unintentional queer subtext with denial or derision and mockery, and although there's been an ever-increasing number of explicitly queer characters/relationships in children's media (thanks in no small part to the ground TLOK broke!) in the years since TLOK aired, a queer relationship being allowed to "organically blossom" (as Bryan Konietzko describes in that same post) without having been intentional from the start is *still* rare even today, nearly a decade later. Like many of James Somerton's lies, claiming that Korra was *always* supposed to be queer but the studio *hated* that and *forced* the writers to keep her in the closet for the first couple seasons isn't just false, it's actively erasing an important part of an important moment in queer history.
It pissed me off how James' video about Disney and LGBT never once mentioned Andi Mack, a Disney Channel sitcom where one of the main characters was openly gay
The whole "the boring gays wanted to marry" is truly vile because the reason people pushed so hard for marriage equality is because they wanted the right to visit their partners in the hospital as they were dying of aids, have a right to their body instead of potential homophobic/abusive family that would forbid them of attending the funeral.
reading stories from people who were there for the AIDs crisis is heart wrenching. of being torn from your loved one, having to sit on a hospital couch while they died, their family who never accepted them for who they were rips them away and forbids them to attend the funeral or grave. the idea that these people, these survivors, were “boring gays who want assimilation” literally makes my stomach feel sour. it’s such a fucked up thing to say, i hope somerton realizes that, in some way.
A former uni teacher (now friend) of mine told me how, when his partner died of AIDS, the lack of legal recognition allowed his partner's family to deny him any visit. They also refused to let him grab anything from their flat, and burned most of his their son's belongings (clothes ; furnitures ; pictures...) ; as most people back then viewed AIDS as some sort of new Black Death. I wonder how he'd feel about being called boring for his pro-marriage activism.
There's a tiny nuggest of truth to Somerton's complaint about marriage equality causing something of a rift between white, middle-class gay people and most of the rest of the alphabet soup (but particularly trans people of color) on the subject of priorities. A non-zero amount of what was supposed to be high-profile queer activism during the 00's focused predominantly on marriage, with the struggles of trans people being backgrounded. And some people were rightly pissed about that. It was a common subject of discussion in queer spaces at the time. And I'd say it was an argument well worth having, given that the queer community now seems to be more unified and less exclusionary. We're doing better. Somerton, naturally, misunderstood all of this because he didn't care enough to do the work.
As a Holocaust historian what’s truly gross is the way Somerton flattens evidence around sex between men in the SS and the Hitler Youth into homosexuality when much of the evidence I have encountered in nearly a decade of education and work in the field is about abuse. What we think may have been pervasive in the Hitler Youth among the adult leaders was the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of children and teenagers. What we have evidence for in the SS, evidence we had to work extremely hard to find because nearly all the victims were murdered and those who weren’t experienced deep internalized shame, was the sexual abuse and sexualized abuse of men and boys, including Jewish men and boys. That isn’t “homosexuality being common in the SS” it’s the SS committing sexual violence as a tactic of genocide regardless of the gender of the victim.
Follow up: for clarification of the phrase “sexualized abuse” I’m referring to ways the Nazis targeted Jewish men and boys in gendered ways without necessarily ever touching them. For example men and boys suspected of being Jews in hiding were often forced to publicly strip to prove whether or not they were circumcised.
to put it another way, the Hitler Youth's sex problem wasn't a gay one, it was a pedophilia one. The Hitler Youth was about as gay-friendly as the Catholic Church.
@@IsaacMayerCreativeWorks yeah as soon as James mentioned the Hitler Youth, I immediately thought of Scout's Honor, the doc on netflix about abuse in boy scouts of america. HY, being a youth organisation, probably had the same issue of sexual abuse that the boy scouts did (the doc mentions that even the first ever scouting troupe in English in the early 20th century had a sexual abuse problem)
A gay man simplifying child abuse as "homosexual acts" is downright disgusting to me, when you consider how many homophobes use pedophilia as an excuse to attack the queer community.
His obsession with how “svelte” and “sexy” the nazis were and his idea that every nazi soldier looked like the ideal ubermench is implying so much about Somerton’s taste that makes me very uncomfortable
the bit about Jeffrey Dahmer is, ironically, an extremely unprogressive rewrite of history. If he wanted to talk about Dahmer and the "hate mobs" surrounding his killings, he should have discussed the reason his specific targets were chosen. Dahmer targeted NON-WHITE gay men because he knew the police would not care enough to search for them, an intersectional issue that persists to this day. LGBT people, especially black and Asian people of color, have consistently been treated horribly by the police system. THAT is something that *I* have researched, because *I* was actually interested in knowing more about Dahmer. Look at that, an interesting and actually accurate piece of information around which one could craft a video essay. It's too bad lying about your own community is so much more fun.
The cops gave Konerak Sinthasomphone back to Dahmer after a neighbor (herself black) spotted the drugged fourteen year old boy after he’d escaped Dahmer’s apartment. Dahmer told them some bs and they let him take this bloody, drugged, child back into his apartment where Dahmer murdered him. So he was right. Cops didn’t care at all.
asia is a large continent home to many dense populations, so I'd hazard a guess that we show up higher on those statistical rankings due to sheer volume alone. as for native american/first nations men, though: in the USA, they're just as likely to die from police violence as black men are. we queer asians are still treated poorly by law enforcement and the greater online queer community, but it would be a disservice to claim that trauma for ourselves.
My uncle was a US Army sergeant who landed in Normandy on D-Day + 2, fought for his life in the Battle of the Bulge where he received a bronze star, and saw the aftermath of the camps; he wasn't an actual camp liberator so he didn't see the absolute worst of it, but he saw the Dachau main camp about a week post-liberation, fought over a couple of the sub-camps, and was one of the people helping to hunt down Nazis hiding, fleeing, or attempting to start an insurgency via the local population, for which he earned a second bronze star. Just remembering how my uncle reacted to anything German - nothing dramatic, but it was clear he still had PTSD 50+ years later, as did most of the men at his unit reunions - it's blatantly obvious even just from that personal experience that James's weird Nazi fetish is something he's projecting onto the past.
"They saw the Holocaust, James." That's such a brutal line. Perfectly demonstrates what is wrong with that line of thinking while also being full of contempt
My grandpa was in the navy during the war, he served on the USS Tuscaloosa He was in the Mediterranean, supported the D-day invasion, and followed the pacific fleet He rarely spoke of his experience in the war, but when he did he’d only mention the horror of seeing a ship just like his get hit by a kamikaze bombing and seeing dozens of men the same age as him running off the deck as they screamed from the fire He never once mentioned the body types of the enemy
@seanmcloughlin5983 no, literally; that video was the one and only one I ever entertained from this chinless Canadian, and I didn't make it past that part with how peeved I was. My own grandfather was apart of the colonial British troops, and I can fucking guarantee that was the last thing on his 18 year old mind. It's just such a gross conclusion to ever come up with, and I can't imagine why he would go out of his way to just make shit up like that when there is actual pieces of scholarly work that explore pretty interesting psychological conclusions to the Nazis and their propaganda/uniforms. It's just ridiculous.
Yeah that one pissed me off the most. Has he never met a combat vet? Or even heard one speak? Nobody’s paying attention to the fucking looks of the enemy. You’re not gonna find an Afghanistan vet talking about the cool t shirt a Taliban fighter was wearing. They were too busy focusing on seeing their friends limbs get blown off their bodies by an IED. No GIs from the European front gave a fuck about the boyish good looks of the “aryan super soldiers”. They were trying their hardest to ignore the sounds of screaming and death rattled all around them. Go talk to an ally from the European front and the images that are burned into their mind is the sight of walking Jewish skeletons that had been starved beyond recognition. Their fellow soldiers that had been disfigured to the point they didn’t look human. It’s disgusting that he would say those things. They weren’t focused on trying to get into nazi shape when they returned from the war, they were fighting with the urge to blow their brains out from the immutable memories. (Not to mention it’s really weird that he essentially just spewed out the Nazi’s own propaganda about how handsome their pure Aryan soldiers were. Like he’s literally saying the things about these soldiers that Hitler was trying to convince the world of)
As someone who’s been on the receiving end of this mindset, Somerton’s queer elitism is what really gets me. He’s not one of those “boring gays”, he’s not a “stereotype” like in the queer media he hates (insert misogynistic/bi-erasing comment here), he’s not the “gay best friend”, he’s ✨different✨ and ✨so much better.✨ Everything he says feels motivated by pure spite and bitterness, just like the people who spend hours complaining on TikTok about which identities are and aren’t “valid” and participating in petty in-fighting.
As a fat person working on nutrition, personal fitness, and healthy weight loss, I've been morbidly fascinated by the obsession fat activists and HAES influencers have with victimhood and their use of social justice language as a shield. Seems like James was just parroting their bizarre talking points
I would be sorta understanding if it came from Americans mouth, because their education system is famously bad, but apparently he is Canadian :/ How can someone be so willfully stupid?
@@helen.faunway you're doing awesome for yourself! And yes seeing James parrot those ahistorical/unscientific talking points was what I saw that made me never watch anything from him again. I think a lot of influencers on the left (both grifters and genuine people honestly) tend to accept that BS as being part of the progressive movement just because they want to be seen as having the nice view and they don't want to do the deep drive into the scientific research and history that debunks all of fat acceptance.
I wrote a paper on the Nazis in college. Todd is right. Rohm was killed because Hitler was getting rid of the competition and consolidating power. The idea that it was because he was fat is not only ahistorical, but the real reasons are fairly well known. It took a lot of hubris to make that claim.
James: "cuz you will literally refuse to see us if you don't" James Somerton famously calling a ton of bisexual people and non-binary people "straight white women" lmao.
Not to mention the trans masc folks also roped into that label lol I completely lost it when I originally watched his shipping or his Killing Stalking video for that very reason
Literally my thought too. I love how this guy seems to thinks that the Queer Culture means exclusively whatever cis gay dudes (and sometimes lesbians, if he can be bothered to remember they exist) do, consume and make. The disdain he shows towards fandom truly says it all to me, as that's one of the queerest space i've ever been in. It's also traditionally full of bi\pan\sapphic women, as well as trans and nb folks, a lot of them afab. In my two decades of being in fandom, i've become weary of anyone who shits on "straight women" engaging with queer media; it's often just an excuse to be misogynistic, and a way to also de-legitimize transformative and fandom work. So yeah fuck that guy. We deserve better than to be erased by some shithead with a nazi kink.
@@mclev9375 Ah, but don't forget, according to him, lesbians don't actually count 'cause they're soft and nice and the straight public like them. Just look at how many lesbians there are in media! /s
@@mclev9375 I kept getting recommended that Killing Stalking video and I never clicked on it because I knew it was going to bemoan fujoshis and BL and say old untrue shit how fujoshis are all straight women who fetishize gay men and blah blah blah
I think I actually found a lie in this video that Todd didnt notice lol. James says that Joey Stefano "created a hit clothing line" but I can only find references to Joey Stefano themed apparel that had been made after his death to celebrate him. If anyone knows if he did or not, please let me know because I said out loud "Woah that's sick" upon hearing that, only to Google and realise that I may have been duped by one James Somerton.
Ya I think he's getting that from this line in "The Tragic Story of Local Porn Star Joey Stefano" from Philly Mag: "Line of Joey Stefano-branded apparel? Just ask the former Spruce Street Video employee about his signature Stefano sweatpants, created to commemorate Joey’s appearance at the 1992 PrideDay Parade." Which I think is meant to be a joke? Like a single video store employee made some sweatpants for himself to wear, not an actual clothing line. Or maybe they were meant to be inspired by whatever Stefano was wearing on the set they talk about on pg.33 of Wonderbread and Ecstasy (which you can find online by looking for the title + "archive"): "Watching Stefano wander the set that afternoon, Colbert began to think that directing him, in fact, might not be quite as enjoyable as, say, performing with him. In a pair of sweatpants that accentuated the positive, he was fairly irresistible. Though Colbert had a scene to shoot in a matter of minutes, he reasoned that a warm-up would not be out of order, and soon he and Stefano were in each other’s arms-giving an impromptu audition, as it turned out, for LaRue, who happened upon them. “That’s hot! That’s hot!” Colbert remembers LaRue saying. “If you can do that, I’ll use you both in a scene next week!” " Can't find anything else about a clothing line in there, and the only mention of a gay pride parade is from a video Stefano shot called More of a Man, where the final scene is Stefano getting plowed on a flower float in a gay pride parade (pg. 74 of Wonderbread and Ecstasy): "The video that resulted was a hefty improvement on the average gay porn title. It concerns the gradual process of Vito’s accepting his sexuality, ending with his symbolic deflowering-he’d already been deflowered a few times during the course of the story, but it’s the thought that counts-inside a float at the gay pride parade" Haha sooo definitely another one to add to the tally!
@@hanklestank Thank you for this, that's kind of incredible that he saw the bare mention of someone wearing some commemorative sweatpants and stretched "hit clothing line", amazing
According to James, only the “boring” gays survived the AIDS epidemic. John Waters hasn’t died of AIDS… so he must be tame and boring. How insightful, James.
The term “boring gays” isn’t just disgusting to the survivors but super victim blaming to the deceased, that their deaths weren’t because of government negligence to an epidemic but the very normal thing of gay sex which was so wild it killed them. It’s almost like he’s jealous that he didn’t live in a time of constant loss and panic.
If I remember correctly he had one video where he spent a decent amount of time basically moaning about how nobody wanted to fuck him for the longest time because he's fat, so I wouldn't be surprised if at least part of his view of the AIDS epidemic is clouded by jealousy of the "fun gays" who got to fuck everyone all the time (unlike him). He tries to present himself as a crusader for gay rights but I note an undercurrent of resentment in his words - of both the "fun gays" (who got to have all the fun but in his mind paid a price for it) and the "boring gays" (who probably remind him too much of himself). And since this and HBombs video already established that he's lying through his teeth, I'm not surprised that he's presenting the AIDS epidemic inaccurately as well.
to the degree that it's a self fulfilling prophecy that if you kick young people out on the street and force them to congregate in emergency families of choice, you get some wild times as the young raise the young, it's a little true that gay people were "wild" - more like abandoned and feral and determined to exist, more like determined to make the crime fit the time, yes, we did sometimes become what (bi punk icon) mike ness called "the kids of the black hole" in those days. but in the isolated cases and pockets where it was true, it wasn't because gay, it was because repressed, because vulnerable, because clandestine, the same thing you see in the stereotype of the "preacher's kid" or ex-fundie people going off the rails in their 20s. And people now forget that HIV/aids can have *YEARS,* not weeks or days or months but YEARS of asymptomatic transmissibility, long enough to meet, fall in love, and separate in "tame," normative, ways. They also forget how much more common and how much more ironclad closeting was in those days, where people would blame all the other ways to get HIV publicly. It was a dark fucking thing. And Ronald Reagan stood up there and gawped about a house on a hill.
The whole "boring gay" thing feeds into a whole bunch of straight stereotypes that gays are "supposed to be" a certain way: namely flamboyant, super promiscuous, entertaining, wild artists etc. It's an old fashioned holdover from when only the most flamboyant, DGAF artist type people could actually afford to be out of the closet.
He acts like a lot of those same types of deaths and things aren't happening today either... Growing up in Detroit, my experience was never a great one. STDs seem to be everywhere and help hard to come by. I remember almost letting myself transition, only to scramble back into the closet after my closest friend, also trans, was stabbed to death, thrown from a car, and run over repeatedly... I only mention my experience because when I finally had the means to move to Grand Rapids, I noticed how different things were and how much easier it was feel safe and find dependable help and resources. There are so many people in places that really suck for queers or specific queer identities. I feel like instead of helping, he just sits on his ass and romanticizes a time when no queer was safe - or victim blames anyone who survived those times. It's fucking gross.
We all agree that Reagan was awful and that the government should have done more to spread awareness or at least not stigmatize people who had aids, but considering that there wasn't any effective medication that could treat or suppress AIDS at the time, what more could the government have done other than basically tell gay men to stop fucking randos or shut down the gay bath houses? Because that solution would also be considered homophobic.
as the survivor of a hardcore middle school dracula obsession, hearing the phrase "francis ford coppola's incredibly faithful retelling of the story" awoke some sort of primordial rage in me
There's always hope for a carmilla-style youtube vlog dracula! (Lizzie Bennett diaries is probably a better example). There are some great lower budget options for a great dracula
@@gregdeandrea1450 Maybe I'm weird, but I'd LOVE to see a modern Dracula story where the first 30 minutes is a dude scrolling through found footage and newspaper clippings, before getting into the meat and potatoes of the main story.
He can't. At least not until a better auteur messes up and has to apologize for it. THEN, James can just copy it, half-assedly, and present it as his own.
"if i make it up, i will be the first one to talk about it". kind of like me when i was a kid with an uncontrolled imagination AND I was taught to lie by my parental figures. i'd make up problems to complain about to feel special. in my case the actual problems were to scary to confront, in his i still think it's because of the views
That’s something that James does a lot. He once said that people didn’t understand the interpretations in the “Evil Queens” video (which is 99.9% stolen) but once he explained it to them, they came around to seeing it his way.
I don't understand how he missed the entire Victorian fascination with strongmen and President Theodore Roosevelt's "vigorous lifestyle" that included cold baths and exercise. America's obsession with healthy muscular bodies predates the 1940s by a lot. The Nazi thing is just so weird.
And claiming fitness culture stems from the Nazis is wrong. There was huge German subculture revolving physical fitness and nature since the late 19th century, and many of it included communists who cared more about promoting working class health rather than the Aryan ubermensh body. A lot of it still continued under East Germany. Giving it ALL to the nazis is ahistorical, they just embraced the more racist right-wing elements of a larger older and diverse movement.
"The naughty gays who were sleeping around" "living lives worth telling stories about" "the boring ones". I am incandescent with rage. My 'adopted' aunt had a best friend that my sister and I called "Blue Jeans" (Eugene was too difficult and he wore jeans and a white T-shirt like it was a uniform). They were the only two of their friend group of 13 who were still alive in the 90s. He didn't have family. He never got married. He lived the rest of his life absolutely messed up at living through hell and losing nearly everyone he ever cared about in his adult life. Everyone who lived through that was scarred (including straight women who were socially part of the community, James). Not getting AIDS didn't save anyone from the pain of everyone you knew dropping like flies, of going to funerals being the most common way you saw friends, of being terrified of who you were going to lose next, of being terrified if you were next, of dealing with the huge anti gay sentiment.... How has this guy who decided to talk about gay stuff for a living managed to avoid reading or watching anything about that era?? And to come up with such terrible, dismissive views of people who lived through that time is so offensive
Exactly this. My uncle and his longtime partner were hugely popular in the Boulder CO gay scene, but neither of them got AIDS, and it still didn't save them. Uncle John struggled with depression and alcoholism throughout the 90s and 00s, largely because of losing almost all of his friends to AIDS, and lost his partner to his alcoholism and then died of liver failure in 2006. So, no, the survivors of the epidemic weren't the ones who weren't active in the gay social scene, and no, those who died of the disease were not the epidemic's only victims.
My uncle died of HIV soon after I was born in the mid 90's. I am named after him and my Mom says I remind her of him whenever I smile. I wish I could have gotten to know him more...
James needs to remember sex ed where he hopefully was taught that one single exposure to HIV can already infect you. No "sleeping around" needed. I've met someone who caught it at their first sexual encounter ever. They were a virgin before but it really only takes one time. Thankfully we live in a time where treatment is available unlike when it first started spreading.
his open misogyny, calling bi women straight or lesbians and misgendering the creators of She-Ra and Steven Universe, saying that only “boring” people survived the AIDS crisis, praising nzis for being jacked and gorge for SO long is all too disturbing
There's a very specific issue that *really* grated on me watching clips of him talking about Yuri on Ice and Love Simon and other bits where he accused “white women” of “fetishisizing gay men/gay relationships” etc. I know he's not the first person to make this argument (and I mean, I watched the Hbomberguy video so of course he isn't). I was around for the heyday of Tumblr and un-nuanced shaming of hypothetical “teen girls” into yaoi. And frankly I never asked for some self-appointed twit to bring those days back. I'm a trans woman. I didn't come out to myself until *well* into my adulthood. I'm also pretty sapphic-leaning. And you know what didn't do my emotional or social health any good at all? Shamedly repressing any thoughts, desires, or interests I had in WLW relationships under the pretext that it was “fetishisizing” for a “man” to be excessively interested in that sort of thing. The idea that any of the “women” interested in male relationships might not, in fact, be women didn't come up in any of the segments of James's videos that I watched. Certainly, do cishets ever “fetishize” gays in media, or write pandering stories, etc? Sure. Can you always tell at a glance which fans or creators are doing what? Not with any great reliability. You have aesthetic judgements and… vibes, basically, and not much else a lot of the time. Does James acknowledge any of this ambiguity in the full videos? I dunno. To be *completely* fair to the guy, I haven't watched any of his actual vids. And I don't plan to. If you've seen his stuff, let me know if he ever did! Frankly, given his aforementioned misgendering of ND Stevenson and Rebecca Sugar - not to mention his *abominable* treatment of the author Becky Albertalli - I am inclined to give him precisely zero benefit of doubt.
@@Eviel1nexactly what came to my mind too!! As a gay trans man myself, there’s something to be said about “straight cis girls” who are into BL and end up discovering that they arent cis nor straight.
and he jacked that “only ‘boring’ people survived the AIDS crisis” line from Fran Lebowitz EDIT: saw the full context of that statement, and I can now definitely say he completely missed the point of what Fran was saying bc she was talking about losing a discerning audience, not abt… assimilationist politics or whatever the fuck EDIT EDIT: Todd mentions what I said in the earlier edit lmao
Just how terrible do you have to be for a _music critic_ whose works have always stayed in their area of expertise to make a one-off facts-laden 1.5 hour long takedown of you and your work just because their integrity wouldn't let them do otherwise? Mega respect, Todd.
I've seen this video several times now and the most obviously false claim out of all of them is the one about straight women being outraged by sex in "Red, White, and Royal Blue." You'd think someone claiming to be so knowledgeable on queer culture and history would know what a fujoshi is.
In James’ mind, “straight women”( I believe he means all women whenever he says this) are able to simultaneously fetishize gay men and disgusted at the thought of them kissing
to be fair, a vast majority of fujoshi i know are/eventually discover themselves to be some level of queer. i feel like the stereotype of fujoshi all being completely cishet women is a bit flawed. in fact, a huge amount of the trans men i know say that being a fujoshi as a teen is what helped them eventually discover their gender identity. then again, i don't have a lot of friends who are completely cishet so take that for what you will lol. also, i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with cishet women being fujoshi; so long as they treat real gay men with respect, i'm fine with them existing & doing what makes them happy.
@@lynn4840here's another transmasc agreeing for anecdotal evidence lol. IMO a lot of fujoshis are just "straight cis women fetishizing gay men" rhetoric is just yet again more misogyny.
@@lynn4840 fujoshi, as long as they are actual allies, are vital to getting more and better gay representation, so more power to them. In capitalism we can't really expect to win this fight for queer rights on our own. It has to be profitable, so needs a bigger market.
I'm a lesbian history major and a writing tutor, so every single thing about JS pisses me off. On my second watch of this video, what made me most mad was how similar JS sounds to some of my tutees. Most university level writing requires some amount of historical context to convey to your reader that you understand the origins and implications of what you're writing about. Sometimes, I get tutees who attempt to do this but fall back on popular misconceptions of history. When JS just spouts bullshit about what he assumes to be how it was "back then," I see the consequences of the popular idea of history being a constant march towards progress (with the antithesis being that everyone "back then" was a bigot in every way imaginable). For example, I just took a class about gender in premodern Europe. If JS had to talk out of his ass, he'd probably say something like, "people in the middle ages ostracized and killed gay people because Christianity only permitted relations between a man and a woman." And while that isn't entirely false, there's so much complexity that is lost. Love between men and women was thought of in terms and ideas that don't at all match up to our modern day conceptions. Their existence comes down to us in poems, in legal documents, in hagiographies, and artworks. I can see myself in a seventh century nun while also acknowledging that we live in extraordinarily different cultures, and that's the beauty of history. One reason why watching JS is so exhausting is that his treatment of lgbt history is so negative. In his imaginary version of history, gay and trans people never get to be happy. The straights always have the power in the end. While it is important to highlight the dynamics of systematic oppression, it feels so gross to not have faith in our ancestors.
His odd pessimistic worldview is also a bit gross to me because it reminds me of how male influencers often call their audience ugly/beta/etc and then push themselves (and their products) as the answer to solving that and their problems. This trend of pessimism from leftist influencers kinda hits the same way for me, positing that acceptance will never come and can never be achieved. So we must always be mad at The Man and Society and always consider ourselves victims. It's poisonous to the mind and causes people to not bother to emancipate themselves.
About historicity--I'm so confused by the claim that "early English" writings warned parents about "catholic boys" in Rome. The phrase early english implies that these writings would have been pre protestant revolution, and so these english parents would have also been catholic?? words mean things
@@ambrose745Would have been useful if JS clarified “early” in relation to which timeframe. Not having watched the video, it might be missing context or so.
The “gay male body image was invented by Nazis” thing pisses me off so bad because any self-respecting gay media nerd should know that J.C. Leyendecker, a gay man, basically forged the American male beauty standard from the 1910s-1930s with his illustrations for major magazine publications. He was one of the most influential American commercial illustrators of the early 20th century, his work predates the proliferation of Nazi propaganda, and he was very, VERY gay.
(Laura Mellin) The whole body image thing was started by “scientific” whites trying to prove how their bodies were the best, to excuse their poor treatment of everyone else. It’s as old as colonialism. But the modern obsession with fitness started in the early 1900s, based on the more youthful fashions that required tans and fancy sports clothes. It’s complicated, but COMPLETELY pre-dates Nazis.
AND he based his male drawings off his lover. 'Couple Descending Staircase' is literally my favourite illustration of his. I stare at it in an unhealthy way so often. Its so wlw/mlm solidarity to me
by making a lot of content regularly, I guess, it usually makes youtube to push your stuff up in recommendations like, when creators, queer or not, actually care about their video essays, it usually takes them some time to make videos, the ones I personally watch post new videos once a month, three months, six months, a year sometimes (hi hbomb). just because it takes a lot of effort and time when you don't half-ass it.
He really is just a downright misogynist. Hbomb made the joke "what girl hurt you in high school James" but I legitimately think he had some kind of bad experience when he was younger and now just hates women. You can see how he's super blunt and barely interested when reading his (completely plagiarised) scripts, but once he goes off on a tangent about women he becomes animated and excited. Just so, so strange. Not to mention the whole "Nazis were so sexy it made Americans jealous" thing, like, dear god.
His weird hatred of heartstopper is so insane. Half the time he’s mad about how cute it is and the other half it’s cause it’s boring. He also thinks call me by your name sucks because “it’s boring”. Yes the romance movie is slow. It’s a romance movie not John fucking wick.
I'm sure he just knee jerkily hates it because he assumed the author was a straight white woman with "kawaii ideas about gays" and for having no sex over anything more substantial...
There was a video he had where Somerton talked about queer movies. He seemed to have a particular preference for darker gay movies over cutesy kawaii romance or straights interpretation of gays like Imitation Game. He said the Imitation Game even ignored much of Alan Turing's sexuality.
@@kingofthegundam7974call me by your name was directed by a gay man based on a book written by another gay man. It’s a gay movie. James is just the only homophobic gay person.
@@AugAug989The author of Call me by your name is a straight (and quite problematic) literary professor I'm afraid. But the director and screenwriter are both gay cis men and the screenwriter prominently worked on Maurice. There are reasons to critique it but surely not because it's "boring".
@@mexistential It's especially infuriating when he's a proven plagiarist. He's literally reading the thoughts and opinions of others and presenting it as his own while being completely deadpan.
@@groundbreaker91 yeah i saw the hbomberguy video as well. A lot of people lie (ex anyone at PragerU) or even steal material (other essayists in the video), but rarely do they add a quiver in their voice that sounds like they’re at the end of their rope. The fake emotion on top of the lying makes it more annoying and weird (to me).
“They saw the holocaust, James.” New life goal unlocked: never say something so profoundly wrong and uninformed that the above brutal response can be used to completely slap me into the shadow realm.
Exactly. I can understand being critical of the Chinese government. But he doesn't even distinguish the Chinese government from the Chinese people, which he does with nearly ever other country he mentions. He just repeats "China" like it's a boogieman or something. Like... who cares if a movie in China did well. Why should that show "fudged numbers". I don't understand why a silly blockbuster movie doing well needs to be a mass conspiracy. Especially considering it's one of the most populated countries. It's ridiculous.
@@resentfulshrimp8044 the theories ppl have about China are funny bc they often contradict each other. one of the most common things i hear is some variation of "the government control every single thing they do" but then they also say they change the numbers of this movie to make it more successful. why would they need to do that? just send all the people to see the movie lol
"I didn't go through Nokia's quarterly reports looking for their 'burying utopian technology' budget" is legit one of the funniest sentences I've heard in a very long time
Like Nokia the company most known for making crappy phones and one bulletproof phone in the 2000s have the resources to make a utopia when they have been shitting and pissing themselves since the iPhone came out and they're still using hardware from the early 2010s
man, imagine surviving the mass extinction of your entire community and the deaths of most of your loved ones only for some canadian plagiarist to say 'you lived because you were boring'
I’d be furious. While I’m not gay myself, I find that a disgusting thing to say. At best it’s downplaying a massive crisis and at worst it spits in the face of both victims and survivors. I really don’t understand how he could say something like that and keep it in the video, and sound smug while doing so…
@@rokamayono8590to be fair, he pretty much always finds a way to sound smug. 🤪I didn’t notice at first, since the contents that he plagiarized are good content, but there is this tone that he’s holier than thou, rather than just earnest.
My uncle lived through the aids crisis and saying he survived because he’s boring is so insulting. Yeah he should have lived a more exciting life and never met his husband never met his nieces and nephews. He should have been more adventurous and died before I was born. Fuck you james
@@katieowlpower it's all I could see when I got served one of his videos. the smarm that drips from his voice, the disapproving, snarky tone.. I hated him, I have no idea how this many people were fond of him in any way but I understand a lot of people were seeing him blend in to a larger group of video essayists in their content. I am being more mindful of my content now :/
Isn't it ironic how he accused straight women of being obsessed with gay men and their kawaii cutesy ideas of gay men but then he projected his fantasies on WW2 soldiers, which were largely teenage boys or very young men just trying to survive?
@@archlinuxuser 1. Not only the Nazis and not only German soldiers. 2. So if they're Nazis then it's okay to sexualize teenage boys? 3. As a person whose country was ravaged by the Nazis during this war, not everyone joined willingly - and not everyone was actually a Nazi.
And James claimed that the Americans aren't jealous of the Soviets because they are wearing winter coats, implying that the Russians aren't fit enough, despite the fact that the Soviet Russians have no shame of being jacked.
Also OMG gays in the 90s were fighting for things like marriage rights so they could do such "boring" things as visit their loved ones in the hospital when they were sick. Weird that this would be important to gay people who had seen friends and lovers die in record numbers. Also, not every gay person is an artist. Assuming that an essential part of the gay experience is being an artist is SO WEIRD. We're everything, we do everything.
absolutely! even though JS goes off about the "boring gays", they were still impacted by the AIDS crisis as well, even if they had a desk job. he paints gay people as some kind of monolith of people who are either awesome and fucking and making cool stuff or boring office slogs. no matter if you were a "boring" gay or not, if you were queer during that time you were probably impacted by the crisis by friends, family or community members regardless if you were having sex or not
James Somerton is like the adult manifestation of me writing an essay in third grade about The Taming of the Shrew, which as we all know is a horror film about hordes of shrews attacking humans. (I have absolutely no idea where I got that!)
there was actually a horror film about giant shrews attacking humans. I can't remember what it was called, though. The shrews were dogs with rugs draped over them
@@hannahlewis7910 "The Killer Shrews", a 1959 black-and-white movie about an isolated island where researchers accidentally create a species of cannibalistic shrews the size of dogs. However, the shrews end up devouring everything on the island and the survivors have to hide in metal garbage cans. If anyone wants to watch the movie, I would strongly recommend watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 edit of it. It's uploaded on UA-cam, and Joel and the bots make it a LOT easier to watch.
James REEKS of privilege. I’m so serious. Being gay doesn’t absolve you of the fact that you are extremely privileged. I GASPED audibly when he said that the queer folk who survived the AIDS crisis were “the boring ones.” James gives strong shaming, transphobic, misogynistic vibes that just get more and more rancid. Even putting aside the plagiarism, he SUCKS. I’ve never been a fan, and hell I didn’t even know much about him before this whole scandal since I tend to stick to smaller queer creators. But I just keep getting more and more horrified the more I hear.
That's actually exactly what I said to my partner when we were watching the big HBomberguy video. I said, "James seems like the most privileged kind of gay."
You nailed something I never liked about James but I never really managed to articulate. He seems like the kind of guy to make a tweet about how bad JK Rowling is, only to then go onto /lgbt/ and post some shit about how they should drop the T from LGBT
As a pan man who has visited a concentration camp, I can definitely attest that nobody who sees holocaust shit is going back home thinking "wow those Nazis were hot". What the actual fuck.
"Art Became Ghostbusters and cats in the '80's." "art became Vanilla Ice and Space Jam in the 90's" "art became Blink-182 and Shrek in the 2000's" "art became Frozen and The Avengers in the 2010's"
Instead of trying to be an off brand version of Contrapoints, this guy should have just focused on writing alternate history fiction from an LGBTQ lens.
@@Frip36 The point here isn't that _all_ of western history is homophobic. It's that homophobia has been present in some form throughout all of western history. It's like how racism is intertwined with US history. Obviously, not every single historical event that occured was racist, but you could name any time period point out some form of racism that was going on in the US at that time.
@@Frip36that’s like saying culturally most people prefer apples therefore they will be hateful to those who prefer oranges. having a preference doesn’t mean you traumatize a group of people who have existed since at least 101th century BCE.
@Frip36 what are you talking about? That's like saying a place has a strong cultural preference to a certain race so they aren't racist. No one argues that homophobia is an irrational fear, it's hate.
So a note about the Yuri on Ice misinformation, as a huge fan of the show who has read A LOT of staff interviews: As stated here the whole "censored for timeslot" stuff is not only a blatant lie but also a layered lie. Apart from YOI airing quite late at night (as most anime that isn't aimed at children does) there is no "law" about what timeslots are allowed to show same-sex kisses. There is, however, network censorship in terms of what certain TV networks will allow at certain timeslots, which is why most anime does end up airing late at night, but it is very unlikely that this is the reason the famous kiss scene was "censored", which in itself is debatable. Ironically, the staff have aluded to walking dangerously close to the "not allowed on TV" line, but not in regards to the gay romance but about a scene in episode 1 in which one of the main characters appears butt naked. HOWEVER, the director Sayo Yamamoto stated very literally in an interview that there was pushback during production from "various places" (she doesn't specify if this is from the animation studio or if it was coming from any of the companies in the production committee) specifically in regards to "that scene" (again she doesn't specify but she's talking about episode 7 in that interview, where the kiss scene takes place); according to her account, she had to fight very hard to get that scene through, so there was indeed backstage meddling in regards to that particular scene, just not at all related to what Somerton was claiming, which i'm gonna assume he just blindly regurgitated from twitter conspiracy theories. Another thing of note is that there have been publicly known attempts from the production committee (namely Avex, which is the distribution company) to tone down the queer subtext in the series, but most of them have been post-fact. One of the most infamous incidents was regarding a poster in one of the official guidebooks in which Yuri Katsuki wasn't wearing the wedding ring he and Victor exchanged in episode 10. The artist got a lot of criticism when the previews of the poster were first published and she claimed she did initially add the ring but the publisher asked her to remove it. The public outcry was big enough that they were forced to add it back. A lesser known incident, but imo more damning, involves a convention in Thailand that held a panel with some staff members (I don't remember who exactly was present at this convention, I believe it was Noriko Ito and Tadashi Hiramatsu but I may be wrong) in which they showed the audience a concept illustration of the aforementioned wedding rings, which revealed a closeup of the design including a snowflake engraving on the inside. When asked why this illustration wasn't included in the concept art book that had been released a short time prior, the staff members confessed they didn't know and were surprised to find out it wasn't included, since they had assumed it would. It shows a deliberate effort by some entity involved in the marketing and publishing of the series promotional materials to erase the very transparent queer themes in the show, possibly because (and this may be the only thing Somerton got right) they wanted to market it as a figure skating series, a sport that is wildly popular in Japan, and probably presumed it wouldn't be successful if it was perceived as BL. Either that or they're just homophobic, which I think is plausible considering how these two incidents took place AFTER the show had already become a massive hit. As a bonus example of how little Somerton knew about the topics he was discussing, he refers to "the creator" when the show was very famously a collaborative effort between two women: director Sayo Yamamoto and artist Mitsuro Kubo. While the concept for the series was Yamamoto's brainchild, they spoke at length about developing it together and I believe they always appeared at conventions together as the creatorS of the show. I never watched his YOI video in full but I'm gonna assume this was one of those he "didn't really want to make and only did it because patreons asked for it", that he refered to in his now deleted shitty apology video, since from thw few clips I've seen he was completely clueless about it.
@@geekygecko1849honestly im a firm believer that hes not an anime fan but he did vids on them to appeal to their fandoms. which like i usually wouldn't care about but hes actively spreading misinformation so
Been seeing a lot of comments (rightfully) pointing out the misogyny, erasure of bisexuality and hypocrisy, but I also want to point out how Somerton completely discredits the achievements of Chinese cinema by chalking it up to government manipulation and ignoring how Japanese modes of storytelling have their own genre conventions in favor of "subtle Eastern storytelling"
James' remark that "boring gays" were the only ones who survived the AIDS crisis made me feel physically sick. How do you sleep at night knowing you have so little sympathy/remorse for an event that historically scarred a community you claim to speak for? Disgusting doesn't even begin to cover it.
yeah, I don't know how tf that just slipped by some people, because in any other community, he would be fucking spat on for a comment like that. imagine saying some shit like that about the Holocaust, or any other genocidal event on the level of the AIDS crisis, you'd have the shit smacked out of you before you put your stupid fucking turtleneck on. like he doesn't even have to lie, YET HE DOES. he actually kinda disgusts me, like I'm not gay, but this is just a basic human decency thing. cause HIV doesn't fucking discriminate. he's saying that gays who fuck were the only ones who died, when that is so not true. HIV killed *everyone*, gays, non-gays, drug addicts, and blood transfusion patients. it was an STD that affected gays more than others, but it was by no means a uniquely gay affliction, let alone a uniquely sex-having gay affliction. like forgive me, but shouldn't he be for all kinds of gays, not just the "fun" ones?
I read another comment that said James is the epitomy of "You're gay because you like men, I'm gay because I hate women. We are not the same.", and given not just the weird misogyny but other weird shit he says about the LGBTQ+ community... I can't help but wonder how accurate that comment was.
@@GreekDudeYiannis As Hbomb said as well he has in the past misgendered AFAB trans and non-binary creators and lumped them in with "those damned women", whether that's intentional or not, at best it shows a clear lack of care for getting the facts right, at worst it's a clear lack of respect for trans and non-binary identities
I'm thinking about one thing hbomberguy said- about how James markets loneliness. He stole other queer people's essays, removed their names, pretended he made it all himself, then told his young audience "Look at how alone we are. The queer community is fighting and we are losing. So many people still hate us." So that he could be looked at as a hero. A comfort.
I think part of the reason he portrays himself as a lone voice in the sea of straight creators is that he didn't want his - mostly young and not very well-read when it comes to other content creators - audience realising how much he stole and how much he made up.
I'm gen Z just now going to college and just recently starting to seek a deep media and academic literacy and little knowledge of queer history. I was intruduced to him with non of those things I presume a lot of us did and that really makes it easy to plagrising things we will not get to reading any time soon
@@cup_of_tea755 It is just bizarre to me to hear that anyone is portraying themselves like than when the canonical “Breadtube” people are Hbomb, Contrapoints, Philosophy Tube, and Lindsay Ellis.
As a former "straight woman that wanted to be a good ally" watcher of his, I feel like he used the cishet fem-ally guilt and anxieties to his own advantage. Like, all the times he blamed straight girls and women for being homophobic or fetishizing or both, it made me feel guilty and my fears validated and I never even considered that he made stuff up because of it.
There's a certain irony in a guy who talks about one-hit wonders so often having, like, possibly his most successful video of all time be something entirely unrelated in topic, format, ETC to his normal content.
I'm the VP of Questionable Content Investigations at Gay Corp and I assure you that the CEO is considering it. Also you're due for a promotion to middle management so you can work less but longer hours for about the same pay
guy is a narcissist, so there's that. he just hoped it would never catch up to him. but he got too big and the evidence was starting to pile up to the point that other creators could not ignore it
I mean its like extra harmful too when, inbetween his lies and random tangents to complain about women, all the actual pro-LGBT rhetoric he espouses is stolen wholesale from smaller queer content creators, article writers, and authors, before he writes those creators off as "straight people making content to pander to gays" or "boring gays who survived AIDs(???)," and then tries to shift the blame for his plagiarism onto his co-writer. It's so ridiculous that he's gotten away with it so long after many people have called it out, and as hbomberguy said, it's so messed up that James implies he's the only queer content creator while he steals from and denigrates the work of *real queer content creators.*
for point 24, the audacity of this man saying that the fight for marriage equality was so rich gays could have "big gay weddings" when it was actually about how the partners of people dying from aids had none of the rights that a spouse of a dying person would normally have - visitation, making medical decisions, being included in wills, etc. this is a well known aspect of the fight for marriage equality, ESPECIALLY in the 90s, and for somerton to say it was a bunch of "boring gays" not in the community....it's sickening
The way his delivery changes from dry, dead eyed talking at the camera to excited and just so happy to talk about sticking it to some imaginary straight women is so off putting
Sorry, but this makes me so mad! Historically, seemingly mundane stuff like marriage or military service are big issues because they are both symbolic and legal acts. Marriages carries a huge amount of legal baggage, including such things that might have been important to AIDS crisis gays like being consulted and contacted by their partner's doctor, being allowed to visit them in the hospital, being able to inherit shared wealth despite a hostile or estranged family--not to mention basic rights of divorce, financial treatment by banks etc, ability to adopt children, etc etc. Military service is closely tied with the creation of the United States and with citizenship. Women, Black people, and others used military service long before the 90s to show their suitability for equality in the US since the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and then again in the the World Wars. The desegregation of the US military predates the desegregation of the south for godsakes. These aren't BORING positions, these are part of a WELL-UNDERSTOOD playbook for civil rights broadly, not just for gays.
I guess practical, legal/bureaucratic things that are actually helpful to the greatest amount of people day-to-day, can often be boring? The older I get, tbh, the more I appreciate attentive, deliberate, hardworking, competent, "boring" people.
@@4nn4heven if it isn't a good thing (I agree with you, it isn't, serving empire is bad), the main thing about access to military service which is interesting is that it's one of the few ways to build up enough wealth to become middle class if you're poor. It isn't liberation by any sense of the imagination but it is economic enfranchisement.
Here's something interesting: in his video, hbomberguy talks about how Somerton's video about Disney and the gay community was almost entirely plagiarized on the book Tinker Belles and Evil Queens by Sean Griffin (Somerton later claimed his video was "based on" the book). So when you mentioned some inaccuracies in the facts, I was wondering if those inaccuracies were also present in the book and... no. The part where Griffin mentions Howard Ashman's death and the Oscars ceremony, he only says this: "While protesters outside the 1991 Academy Awards pointed out the homophobia of The Silence of the Lambs, which would win Best Picture, that same night Disney had been nominated for Best Picture for their animated version of Beauty and the Beast. The studio had used the release of the film to honor the talent of lyricist Howard Ashman, an openly gay man who had helped resurrect Disney’s animated features and who had recently died as a result of AIDS. At the Academy Awards, when Ashman posthumously won an Oscar with Alan Menken for Best Song, Ashman’s partner Bill Lauch came to the podium to accept the award." (p.99) Somerton, under the guise of activism, discredits the actual queer sources he uses for his videos by mixing them with falsehood (his claims that Disney exploited Ashman's death). I'm glad his whole platform is gone now. Anyways, read the original book if you can, it's a much better resource and from what I've read so far is super interesting!!
A correction: I say that Nick nuked the Discord server but I've heard it was actually James. This was an assumption I shouldn't have made (ironic, considering the topic of this video). One very difficult thing about UA-cam: It is impossible to make corrections.
Another correction: I say medieval peasants did witch-hunts but I'm told that the times of witchhunts was only a tiny bit of the tail end of the medieval era and mostly into the early modern period.
That's still more diligence than the target(s) of this video has demonstrated to this day
also I agree with what you said in your Top 10 worst of 2023
Not sure if you're aware Todd, but you're Top ten Worst of 2023 video is blocked in the UK!
Now I don’t know what to think. 😅 Actually. It appears that James has been passing the blame for lots of things on to Nick. So maybe he’s used to it and won’t notice. He doesn’t seem to watch or research anything anyway.
@@kielaurieI hear UK is big on defamation cases. They’re very strict on that kind of stuff so I can see a video like that being blocked
@@KwesiMangata Can you explain that first part? I live here and haven't heard us being big on defamation cases. I'm not aware of any recent defamation cases, but the Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard case wasn't restricted or had any sort of restrictions on it being reported. Or are you talking about UK cases of defamation?
"Women who are attracted to a famous actor playing a serial killer are disgusting. Anyway here's a whole insane rant on how sexy and gay the nazis were."
"Dahmer? Gross...try Hitler and have some class" - James, apparently ???
Nazis = not sexy
Murloc Tinyfin = sexy
Can we also acknowledge how Hbomberguy only found tiny fragments of James' script that wasn't plagiarized. So you're telling me the non-plagiarized part is made up gay Nazis, mysogyny, and just MISINFORMATION HE MADE UP?
I always noticed that hypocrisy within people like James. In their heads, when straight people (specifically women in James' case) have concerning and messed up attractions, is seen as such and deserving of (deserved) criticizing; when gay people do the same, instead is seen as liberating and antisystem. It's so annoying to see this phenomenon over and over.
also "straight women are all obsessed with gay sex and that's gross" but also "straight women are all disgusted by gay sex and that's gross"
Take a shot every time James calls a bi woman lesbian or straight
the amount of omissions/examples shown within this and Hbomb's video reeks of bi erasure
alcohol poisoning.
what did my liver ever do to you?!
Hopital
Seriously 'normal' gays and lesbians falling for hateganda towards bis, aces and trans people when the bigots who whisper those words in their ears to make them feel included until they're no longer useful is sad. There is no club to fit it. That's the point of the LGBT. The *BT*+ part is very relevant.
"It's suppressing Korra's queerness to give her romance subplots with men" How is James just PHYSICALLY INCAPABLE of perceiving bisexuals
I think it’s more that Korrasami was tacked on at the end as fan service since Korra and Asami have like no connection or chemistry throughout the whole show until that hand-hold moment
@@TulpechaidoplaysMC But the clips we see of his video here show that James thought Korrasami was planned from the beginning. So it's still just James being unable to ackowledge bisexuality.
@@saintsomnia8030he hates women so much he is willing to ignore them unless its relevant for his point
@@TulpechaidoplaysMCHuh? They started building Korra and Asami's chemistry in season 3 and practically started Korra's arc in season 4 by, to my recollection (I haven't seen it since it first aired sorry if I'm doing a James Somerton right now), the only person's letters she would respond to WERE ASAMI'S.
Because he's one of many people in the LGBT community that don't believe bisexuals are valid. If a bisexual starts dating someone of the opposite sex, they just lied about being gay, and vice versa
Bisexual erasure is massive problem
It’s a bit creepy how he switches from boringly reading out a script to being all sassy and with words dripping venom when talking about straight women.
right 😭 it's the only time he seems to perk up and start paying attention to what he's saying, like he genuinely loves hating women
It's because those are the only parts he writes himself so those are the only parts he's invested in telling
@@tobyeasterbrook8117 true, but it's not like he's writing from the perspective of a fictional character who just happens to be a misogynist. these might be words for a script, but they're still his words. even when they're not, he often finds a way to interpret the works he's plagiarizing to suit his personal narrative about women, & that's still worth paying attention to.
i'm pretty sure hbomberguy said something along the lines of "putting the words straight & white in there doesn't mean you're not doing misogyny." idk, i guess that's just important to keep in mind.
I wonder if people can tell when the script is just words on a screen for a youtuber, and when they actually care, because I kinda feel like I can, maybe because I've watched so much of it, but there's this very specific "it's just words for me" voice they do
Oh, yeah that's nothing new. Gay men are known to be *_extremely_* misogynistic.
The implication that Somerton, the turtleneck-wearing content regurgitator, considers himself one of the non-boring, wild, artsy gays and not one of the boring, assimilationist gays is, uh, buckwild.
...does he wear turtlenecks to try and look more 'artsy'?
the misinformation tone and cadence 😣😣😣
@@damien678 I don't wanna body shame the guy but I assumed its because he wanted to hide the way his neck looks.
i don't think it's swollen or bloated, he's just fat.
@@Discojericho Well if you don't wanna body shame the guy then don't do it?
The fact he has the gall to say “look it up it’s true” and then you look it up and it isn’t true is just mind-blowing to me. Glad this loser is finally getting exposed.
Reminds me of the JonTron thing "look it up, I have to get some water"
@@mickmickymick6927 lmao
Hitler called it the "Big Lie". The strategy is to tell a bald-faced lie about a subject that demands reverence, causing everyone to assume it's true because a decent person would never lie about it.
They say that so that you, the viewer, doubt yourself so that you don’t actually look it up, and believe him because he has the confidence to back it up.
“It turns out if something is easy to check, no one actually does!”
James's disdain for academia probably stems from the fact that they require you to cite your sources lmfao
That and you can get kicked out for plagiarizing.
One thing I haven't really heard mentioned in this whole debacle is that a lot of the things he bitches about are decades old, and at this point, a whole generation of academics have been studying these debates and are very aware of them. Academia has really changed because of it. Like, you can get a PhD in queer studies. It's not like it's all Judith Butler across the board, but in many of these videos, he's ranting against stuff from the eighties that was settled long ago
@@Maxurai2222 well yeah because the sources he plagiarized from are also that old.
@@OsirisLord honestly I think it's more that he needs "nobody is talking about this" to market himself. It's the "no queer creators on nebula" thing, he has to project this image that he's this innovative forward thinker bringing up the topics no one else is discussing.
And that is definitely part of his smoke screen for plagiarism, obviously. If you're the only person talking about queer issues then you obviously arent just copy and pasting the third search result off of Google into your script, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think he knows his videos were bad, they were dry and boring, and if his audience knows there are people who've said all this before in more interesting ways, why watch him? I say this because it's exactly what happened with me lol. I watched a handful of his videos, realized how dry they were and how little new information they were bringing to the table for me, and just stopped watching him on favor of more entertaining channels with more to say.
@@Ezekiel_AlliumHe lacks the generative spark, the Promethean Fire.
All this stuff of "Marvel tried so hard to hide this queer character," "Nickelodeon fought tooth and nail to repress this queer character" is very bizarre. They don't have to fight, they just have to say no. The writers have to fight but Marvel and Nickelodeon do not. Also, comics have been gay for like forever. 2005 is wayyyyy too fucking late to keep queers out of comics.
Yeah it’s wild. Like why the fuck would they greenlight projects that they fully intend to keep on the downlow or cancel early, when they can just say no?
Thiiiiiis
i think the general public is very unaware of how progressive comics have been for decades atp. when i first got into comics, I was surprised how there was pretty much always a gay character/side plot along with other social issues addressed.. not always well but at least earnestly. now not to spread misinformation, but i do speculate that the disney marvel films have perpetuated this idea of a conservative utopia. captain marvel is not making superheros "woke", they ARE woke. always have been
The fact that Todd willingly subjected himself to Jeffrey Dahmer fanfiction just to make this video is honestly commendable.
Yeah, i was almost begging him for stop.
The people's music critic
so fucking brave tbh
"I admit that I slack off when making these videos, but I wanted to get this one right."
The funniest thing about that list of Dahmer ships is that I genuinely cannot tell which ones are morbid crackfics and which are genuinely serious. The Chainsaw Man one is probably a joke about Part 1's ending, but I have no clue about the other fics.
His borderline fanfic-level romanticization of Italy as an anything-goes gay paradise is hysterical if you think about it for more than a second. Ah yes Italy, home of the Catholic church, notorious for it's sexual liberation.
😂 you mean that place that was also famous for Savonarola? The guy who was obsessed with self harm and famous for the Bonfire of Vanities where they burned everything that was fun, like art, literature, music and eventually some people? So much free love.
Yeah, i could maybe see it for the posh young brits going to the old equivalent of resorts being able to be shielded from alot of the consequences people would face then as rich tourists from a powerful country. But for your average Italian under strong catholic mores and machismo? Not to mention the vast regional difference from the more conservative and rural southern italy (italy is a young country) where the social expectation to marry your rapist still survived into the 1970s.
For some reason this makes me think of that Simpsons bit where Marge is afraid that her family'll convert to Catholicism and she imagines Protestant heaven as rich and white and Catholic heaven as Mexican Irish and gay
Ah yes, Italy, the birthplace of fаsсism... truly a bastion of progressivism 😂
Also about to lean right
James insisting that European soldiers were hot and America was jealous just reads like a kink thing.
The writer's thinly veiled fetish.
exactly what I thought. A lot of the historical bullshit Somerton claims comes off as a fetish/kink thing to me, like he is trying to write fanfic with real history and claim it as fact. The "nazi's looked so hot the american soldiers were jealous" is def one that stood out, but also when he claimed the whole weird thing about how "the nazis were BRIMMING with homosexuals" and how "so many young men were being converted to homosexuality when they spent time in Italy that the other european nations were starting to get worried and stop sending their sons there". These all just come off as really sexualized wishful thinking? It's really weird
like I definitely know that Nazi roleplay is a VERY VERY small niche of people's kinks, but like hearing that made me take psychic damage
As a pro-am historian who's always had a WW2 fixation, that entire section made my blood pressure rise the further along it went. It's not just _bad history,_ it's straight up uncritically parroting the Nazis' own propaganda. He might as well have had Nazi propaganda posters up behind him as it went along.
As point of fact, the exact OPPOSITE was usually observed as true, for American soldiers in the late war. US soldiers were the best-fed and best-conditioned troops in the war at that point as the USA had the most and best food resources, evidenced by how they were outright pumping food into the British Empire to keep it from collapsing. The Soviets would have been the second, and it wasn't a close second. While it's just as anecdotal as anything Somerton's saying here and I have just as many sources handy (which is to say, none, though in my case I'm recollecting ones I've read in the past and simply don't have on hand), there are accounts from both German and Japanese POVs -- often post-occupation civilians -- commenting on how the GIs seemed like impossible giants.
@@InchonDMI’d even argue Todd went overboard talking about how jacked the Soviets were
Like a lot of examples he used were from the 70s-80s and they were just as much propaganda as the aryan ubermench
Until Kruschevs corn reforms most people in the Union were still scrawny from the famines and war
The US meanwhile, while yeah we didn’t have funions, our agricultural sector went through the roof from wartime subsidies, and unlike the Soviets there were no panzers in Ohio so they could just make infinite Oats, so almost every GI went into battle with a full stomach so they could build the kind of mass Somerton claims they didn’t have
"Pirates are philanthropists" is what you get when your main source is One Piece
Or later retellings of Robin Hood
Even Uncharted 4 made the point in its narrative about historical pirates that their greed and pride ultimately killed all of the pirates in Libertalia. While they didn't mention Avery's involvement in the slave trade, they made the point that Avery was only viewed as a pirate of the people in Britain and its colonies because he murdered and stole from Muslims. The closest historical pirate you have to a Robin Hood type is Black Sam Bellamy and he is very much an exception to the rest of the Golden Age Pirates in his conduct.
@@BigAmericanGirlFan My only actual source is one piece, so this was very insightful. For example, I learned where the manga gets the name Bellamy from
I've heard from Jamaicans that Caribbean perspectives on pirates are rather positive as they were immensely important for the history of this region. They usually don't call them pirates but buccaneers from what's been told to me
But pirates in One Piece ARE fucking scumbags with a few notable exceptions. The Strawhats' enemies are composed of equal parts corrupt authorities and other pirates.
I'm an older gay dude and I lived through AIDS and hearing Somerton blithely accuse the AIDS survivors of being "the boring ones" and that gay marriage was about "big weddings" is infuriating. This guy comes in accusing people who fought and died for the right he enjoys of being "boring" assimilationists.. the absolute gall of this man
he wants to be unique and different from the straights but hes so fucking dull he needs to steal like 50 other opinions to be interesting
I feel like these big expose videos always have one thing that makes the person go from more than “internet pest” into genuine monster. That line is definitely James’s it’s the same level of ghoulish as that clip of hasan laughing at that cop bleeding out after being accidentally shot by her partner.
Yeah that shit was *vile*.
It's very clear that he misses the days that being an out gay person made you an edgy revolutionary. Because he has no personality he's devastated that the time that being out and gay could sustain your clout is gone, and so all he has left is to put those people down so he can suppress his envy of them, or rather of the ways he thinks he'd have it easy were he them.
The impression I get from the excerpts here and in the hbomber vid give me an impression that he only considers a particular subset of gay men human. Anyone outside of that, gay men that feel differently than him, straight men, gay women and especially straight women are subhumans. Maybe even some trans people, that seems less clear. I'm not about to watch his channel to confirm though.
I can't believe straight white women held poor James at gunpoint and made him plagiarize a ton of stuff and then make up a bunch of bullshit to present it as historical facts 😭
How did we fit it in between jilling off to gay porn and worshipping serial killers?
Please don't speak this excuse into being...😅
It was me. I'm the White, Straight, Bisexual woman who did t.
@@wendynerd1199 I helped! (also white & bi AFAB)
Lmfaoooo watch him blame “straight white girls” for this. Or claim everyones just hating on him because he’s gay.
Wait wait wait... Sommerton said that boycotts against Disney over "gay days" never materialized?
Dude. DUDE. THEY ABSOLUTELY DID. MY FAMILY STOPPED GOING TO DISNEYLAND OVER THAT. The American Family Institute held that boycott for A DECADE.
My family did this too! They wouldn't even let us watch Disney movies on old DVDs we had since they thought it would somehow send money directly to gay days. It was insane lol.
Somerton is... Exercising creative liberties.
I remember my grandparents having pamphlets about how Disney was trying to make kids gay with movies like Mulan and characters like Timon in Lion King and they also referenced "gay days". My grandparents tried to convince my dad to stop taking us but he liked the park more than being consistently homophobic I guess
@@mischr13good on your dad.
@@mischr13
It's so funny how right wingers today get angry at people speculating about the sexuality of fictional characters when they were doing it in the first place
So did the Southern Baptist Convention.
19:49 "a huge swath of fans made up *mostly of women*, BUT, to my delightful surprise, a lot of gay men, as well"
It's almost hard to believe how openly mysoginistic he is. Even when women agree with him, he still doesn't like them LOL
Who do you think created fandoms JAMES?
Who do you think started fan zines JAMES?
Who do you think created the term ‘Mary Sue’ based off the repetitive characters of fan fiction in said fan zines JAMES??
WHO DO YOU THINK FIRST POPULARIZED GAY SLASH FAN FICTION JAMES?!
James somerton did?
@@pm6127 no it was clearly Tommy tallarico his mother's very proud
@@erinsweeney3326I need to know JAMES?
How did you split the points up?
Oh wait...this isn't RDC World's channel. This is Todd in the Shadows channel. Never mind. Carry on.
@@pm6127no, it was Them'll
"The boring gays are the ones that survived, " no, James, the ones that survived were either terrified out of their fucking minds and still live with PTSD, lucky enough to be informed by grassroots gay orgs like ACT UP on how to combat HIV, or were just plain lucky to not catch an illness that was killing their friends, families, lovers, and communities.
Yeah and some of them are actually still writers, Russell T Davies is one of them who lived through the AIDS crisis and saw all his friends die of AIDS. Yet he is a prolific gay screenwriter and really to me, he is probably a big inspiration for me as a screenwriter because every series he has written for TV has had Queer characters and I definitely aspire to write Queer characters in all of my screenplays and make them important parts of the story, no just mention their sexuality, no they going to have a full on boyfriend that they kiss goodbye from work and they go out on dates with for an episode if I'm writing a show.
Yes. The ones who lived are the ones that lost their friends.
AIDS wasn't a force of "Bury Your Gays," taking the hot sexy creative gays that get around and leaving behind the losers. It hurt everyone. Big names, small names, neighbors down the street, people struggling with addictions, people with blood diseases or needing transfusions. This isn't dramatic fiction, this is a heartbreaking reality.
Heck, the US's guidelines for donating blood are still affected by the AIDS crisis (unless that got changed and I missed it)
maybe james should say that to sir elton john and see how he reacts. he was just as s3xually active as freddie mercury yet miraculously never got hiv. it was just about a random chance of whether you got hiv or not
@@georgemitchell1394Elton John's credited his survival largely because he largely watched other people rather than doing it himself, if I'm remembering his NPR interview correctly. So yeah, totally active, but far from boring
His claim that 90s activists only cared about marriage equality was because they were boring and assimilationist really peeved me. You know why marriage equality was such a big deal in the wake of the AIDS crisis?? Because if your long-term romantic partner was dying in the hospital, you weren't legally next of kin and you had no rights to visitation or claiming their body. This could result in the body of your loved one ending up in the hands of their homophobic/transphobic/abusive parents, where you would not be allowed to attend the funeral. This is why marriage equality mattered not just to assimilationist wealthy white gays but to the whole community, especially when queer rights were still in such jeopardy. Marriage equality seems a lot less important in the 21st century now that the threat of death isn't looming so heavily, but there was a very good reason why it was important to queer activists in the 90s.
EDIT: I'm glad this comment resonated with so many people. Please understand that I only listed a few of the concerns that made marriage equality such a big deal. Being able to direct medical care when your partner is incapacitated, being able to keep your partner's possessions/property when they pass, and having custody of a child you raised with your partner are just a few other examples of why it was so important. Be sure to learn your queer history, kids!!
Also it's worth recognizing that even in the modern day we don't have full marriage equality in the US for disabled people, although there is some legislation on its way that may change that if it passes! Look up the SSI savings penalty elimination act for more information on why disabled people don't have full marriage equality right now.
You also can't access a life partners health insurance, or make healthcare decisions when they're incapacitated. The legal rights granted to spouses are quite a big deal, to dismiss that as assimilation is truly beyond ignorant. It's just another lie imo.
Wow, I never made that connection. That's incredibly grim. Thanks for mentioning that.
I don't know how it was in the US but in my country the right to visit somebody during the pandemic was also tied to your family status so this definitely would have been a major problem pre marriage equality
@@melanieg.9092i think it was the same in the uk, you had to prove some kind of relation to the person and that was usually thru being family or being legally married/in a civil partnership with them
as a disabled bisexual in a relationship with another disabled bisexual I feel this so deeply. it's not quite as tragic, but disabled people still don't have total marriage equality & still face these issues. & the active fight for gay marriage equality helped progress it just like the fight for disabled rights has helped the gay rights movement. we go hand in hand.
Did James seriously cite Cats as an example of like, normal totally straight boring media? Because... I've seen Cats, and I'm not sure how you can sit through the cat orgy dance and come away thinking that this is normal hetero fluff
Cats may be many things, but "normal" is not one of them.
@@spencerkoelle184 Now, "fluff," on the other hand...
@@MaxLennongood god...
He mentions the gays used to make "meaningful" art before Ghostbusters and Cats, so I think he just doesn't like Cats.
@@kingofthegundam7974I mean it would be easier to just hate cats.
Gay people can make shit art as well let them cook badly
I say this as a fat guy; "fitness culture is rooted in fascism" sounds like an excuse I'd make up to avoid the gym.
Lmao yeah, it sounds like a gag in a reality TV show. You would hear that in Family Guy or something not an educational essay
only a couple of elements are, but even then, it's not so much fascism as it was white progressives thinking that eugenics was a good idea to entertain back in the late 1800s, plus a lack of understanding about how certain diseases worked
@@nickz3252 funny that you mention that since Family Guy's first gag was about Hitler in a gym.
That quote sounds like something you hear on TikTok...
Which I feel like someone did say cause you never know with those people
It angers me too because there are absolutely issues with the modern fitness movement, but it's just that everyone wants you to have the body of a super mutant.
I just wanna fucking loose weight man.
His complaint on finding gay marriage boring really pissed me off. There's an art piece in a museum by John Boskovich that's just a box fan in plexiglass. That fan was the only thing he had from his long term partner who had died of AIDS. His partner's family didn't approve of their relationship so they cleared out his apartment without telling him and only left behind the box fan. It was the only object he had left from his partner. It's probably the only static art piece that's ever made me cry.
Of course people were going to fight for marriage equality after many queer people were denied a say in their partner's medical care, watched them die and have a relationship ripped out of existence and covered up, and many were probably barred from attending their partner's funeral.
It's boring to James because he's privileged and already has the right, but to those who lost everything, they fought to make sure no future gays would have to suffer a loss in the way they did. And this guy has the gall to call them boring because they survived an epidemic that likely killed many of their friends, family, and lovers. Why was he ever popular after saying that?
What a smug ass.
thank you for sharing the story of that piece of art, it made me tear up just hearing about it.
@@kaeminchaAbsolutely. I hated contemporary art until I read about the piece and it moved me so much that it expanded the emotions I could feel from art. I hope to see it one day in the LA MOCA, the piece is called "Electric Fan (Feel it Motherfuckers)" and there are slots in the plexiglass for you to feel the breeze from it. I'd really like to feel it.
Marriage isn't for me, i have my opinions on it. But that doesn't mean I don't know the importance of it to others. Especially for queer ppl who has been fighting for the right to marry for decades. And thank you for sharing that story about the art piece.
And i never knew that Somerton said how boring gays survived the AIDs crisis. That's such a vile thing to say!!
What's the piece called, and what museum is it in? That story legitimately made me tear up, and getting more mad with James for being such a fucking weasel.
@@Tp_hedgelinghog It's called Electric Fan (Feel it Motherfuckers) and it's in the LA museum of contemporary arts
there’s something just *nasty* and mean spirited about calling the queers who survived the AIDs crisis the “boring ones”.
Ikr!! My jaw dropped at how cruel and dehumanizing that remark was
Your pfp fits so nicely w ur comment
Right? He's literally insulting every lgbt+ survivor of the aids epidemic
God, that's extremely fucked up
And the idea that gay/queer/trans people who wanted the legal right to marry were just boring losers trying to fit in and not like… people trying to not be treated like second class citizens being denied a right that others have.
Somerton has also said that Hitchcock's first movie about gay people is Rope (1948), when it is very, very famously Rebecca (1940), which also literally won Best Picture- it's Hitchcock's ONLY film to win Best Picture- but it's about lesbians instead of gay men so he just sort of... erases it lmao- there's some very odd but distinct patterns to his behavior
Rebecca was also based on a Daphne de Maurier novel, who was... uh, her labels were complicated and show a greater overlap in the idea of gender identity and sexuality than we usually have today, but she may have been bisexual (she may have had relationships with women but it's not confirmed. Also bisexual could mean "having two genders" back in the day). She seems to have thought of herself as having conflicting masculine and feminine energy that drove her toward different wants and desires. So... yeah, probably somewhere in the LGBT umbrella, hard to pin down where when our terms have shifted and she's not here to tell us.
All that to say, more (probable) bi erasure yay
@@acecat2798 Also I am no literature expert but based on what you said here. It could have also been possible trans or nonbinary erasure to an extent. Or just erasure of anyone if the lgbtq community who isn't gay. Which he kinda did a lot.
Fun fact: Daphne du Maurier also wrote the short story that became Hitchcock's The Birds (1962), he frequently returned to her works and their underlying themes of what at the time was considered "sexual deviance" and "deviance" in general (as he did with Robert Bloch's novel Psycho) but in an abstract way that was palatable for audiences and censors. Her short story Don't Look Now was also turned into a famous horror movie in the 1970s, though not directed by Hitchcock.
Rebecca isn't about lesbians. The head housekeeper clearly adored Rebecca and her romantic love became the catalyst for her psychological torture of the new Mrs. de Winter, but the movie and story is by no means about lesbians. It's entirely about the (het) marriage of Max and his new bride, and how Rebecca's presence still haunts them.
@@cthulhuhoops I meant that in Rope, the villains are gay men, while in Rebecca, the villain (Mrs. Danvers) is very heavily implied to have a romantic lesbian attachment to Rebecca, and though it’s only hinted at (like Rebecca’s incestuous relationship with her cousin), and we don’t know if Rebecca actually acted on it or was toying with Mrs. Danvers, the theme is very clear in the film. It’s not a positive portrayal of lesbians any more than Rope is a positive portrayal of gay men, but it’s sort of indisputable that Mrs. Danvers, at least, is the chief villain aside from the unseen Rebecca, and a lesbian. I will say that my phrasing that it was “about lesbians” was a reductive take that could’ve used some added nuance, I just figured I was getting my basic point across, that Somerton ignored or didn’t do enough research before making an incorrect claim about Hitchcock’s filmography.
I know that "punchable face" is not a valid argument for morality, but James' cadence when speaking is like, ear grating to me
His british accent doesn't help either, a British accent already has a bit of smugness even the more blue collar working folks up North, but he is so fucking smug it makes him more punchable, like man I want to uppercut him
It's why I never watched his videos. The character he plays has such a hoity-toity, patronizing tone, and his delivery is so boring. Miserable! Knowing what I know now, though, that all goes from "a bit annoying" to "freaking insidious"
@jemiu9525 I find a lot of less skilled leftist creators seem to have this kind of problem. Where their delivery is meant to come across as witty or irreverent, but it ends up feeling kinda patronizing and full of itself. It seems like a difficult balance of tone to hit, and James failed it miserably.
The way he tries to sound all serious, the over emphasis, the weird accents I cant
How he talks grates me so much! It's hard to listen to even in this video.
I am a straight man, but it's mind-boggling offensive how someone could unironically say that only "boring gays" survived the AIDS crisis.
There was a much better way to say something like that too. You can prop up the victims without putting down the survivors.
Yeah, that straight up reminds me of Bill Donahue's disgusting opinions, pure ignorance and 0% empathy with our Gay brothers and Sisters.
Same. I try to avoid getting offended on BEHALF of people but god damn, what a fucked up thing to say.
And then go on to... radically misunderstand, corrupt, and trivialize who they were and what they were fighting for.
Hell, Elton John's had two charting hits in the last two years. Sure, they were both covers of old songs but it's pretty obvious one of the least boring gays is still out there and relevant. There's tons more, but that's just a very damn obvious example.
as holistically wrong as he was in that segment, james bitching about the "boring gays" while being a business major and "marketing expert" is extremely funny to me. self-awareness? who's that??
damn u gathered him 💀
like a chignon - Bob the Drag Queen
james somerton, world renowned Exciting Gay
I will have a business degree, and I am a boring gay. It's rich coming from him right.
He knows what his audience wants to hear
>"Look it up, it's true!"
>Looks it up
>It's not true
I'm a WWII historian, and much of what James Somerton said about Nazi Germany and the war itself is misleading, and flat out wrong, this is why we have misconceptions of America's favourite decade. First - although Japan attacked the US, it was Nazi Germany who declared war on the US on 12 December, just as the fires of Pearl Harbor were being extinguished, second - the US was already engaged with Europe through the Lend-Lease Act, Nazi Germany saw this as a threat, and further strained relations between the nations, finally - Nazi Germany and Japan were in the same alliance: the Axis Powers, Fascist Italy was involved too, James fell prey to popular narrative that this was _only_ a German and Japanese war, this was the nature of military alliances, including the ones prior to the Second World War, however, Germany was the bigger threat, so it was agreed between the Allies, that Third Reich had to be defeated first. One other thing Somerton gets wrong about this time, was the believe that Nazi fitness made Americans jealous to the point they needed prove their manliness, most Americans did not give a damn about Europe, they were very supportive of the isolationist sentiment, plus, average Americans were not even aware of what Nazi Germany was doing, this was not the Space Age, where information could be broadcasted in real time via satellites, communication was a lot cruder and slower in the 40s, moreover, Americans were more concerned with their immediate needs in the midst of the Great Depression, they were more worried about putting food on the table, than what a tinpot dictator was doing in Europe. By the way, the Nazi bodybuilders that Somerton cites, most would be killed in action against the allies, Germany had to rebuild its athletics after the war, and it was split between east and west, but just like the US, both Germanys had to retrofit their athletics to _not_ resemble the Third Reich, in addition, most German recruits were scrawny and malnourished teens or old folks, all the fit Ubermensch were killed long before Normandy, in fact, a lot of German civilians remarked on how fit and big American GIs were, and felt foolish and insignificant fighting against such a superpower. In conclusion, I find it super creepy on how Somerton fetishes the Waffen SS, it borders on Wehraboo territory, he was so much in love for the big strong Aryans, he was writing fanfiction about cosying up with one, and invented his own fantasy that Americans lusted for the same enemy, and that the war was born on envy and jealousy, this is the narrative that is shaped by Wehraboos, and it's vile that Somerton could warp it into making the SS into being a gay based organisation, the very group that would send people like Somerton to the death camps, remember - the LGBT were included in the Holocaust, so it is disgusting to listen to Somerton lavish one of the worst crimes against humanity in such a creepy way.
Just wanted to say this is the first time I saw the term "Wehraboo", and man, that is a perfect word for it.
Thank you for the comment. I’d only add that the European Axis declarations of war were likely also intended to discredit the Roosevelt administration that had, apparently, made both grave intelligence and diplomatic failures in a matter of days. It’s incredible just how wrong Japan and the Axis powers in Europe were about how ordinary Americans would respond.
Plus by declaring war on the US, Germany hoped Japan would join its war against the USSR
@@briangronberg6507my history classes always characterized us citizens as being up and arms after pearl harbor, practically lining up down the block to sign up and join the war.
@@rosehirstius Eh, I'm studying to be a 19th century US historian myself, so I don't want to steer too far out of my lane. My impression though was that the US was not as isolationist in the 1940s as it was in the early 1900 to 1910s. However, the US certainly was not nearly as interventionist as it was post WWII, and FDR had to spin the war as one of necessity and self-interest in order to maintain broad support.
Full disclosure, the last book on the matter I've read was Warfare State, by James Sparrow, so any 20th century historians feel free to tell me where I got it wrong, or who else talks about it more. I'm happy to throw a couple more books on my reading list for comps XP
imagine doing enough plagiarism to make up the bulk of a four-hour video essay from a video essayist and still doing enough completely different harmful and stupid garbage to become the subject of a separate two-hour video essay from a MUSIC CRITIC.
Not gonna lie…. This comment confused me
If you are gonna be a failure, might as well be the biggest failure, amirite?
@@OGseoulite HBomberGuy just dropped a four hour video essay on this subject and now Todd dropped a two hour video essay on this subject. Todd is a music critic.
At least then, you are winning at something. @@HawaiianJuicebox
Two things Todd doesn't like. Scientology, and this guy.
I’ve never seen a homosexual person talk about homosexuals the same way a homophobe would
I was thinking this exact same shit holy fuck
I have to wonder what the hell is going on in his head. Does he... hate himself? Like, I know he just attempted suicide, but... if I hated that I was gay (for the record: I'm bi), I would hide it, not make my entire career about it.
@@mwkcope He says he tried to off himself on his apology video. So who knows if it's true or if he just said it to garner sympathy? From what I know about him, I'm betting it's bullshit.
My old district manager is exactly like this.
I was thinking that when he kept trying to make it seem like everyone in the SS and at the top of the Nazi party was gay. Does he want people to think gay people did the holocaust or something lmao?
As a Howard Ashman Gay™️, the misinformation about him being exploited by Disney really rubs me the wrong way. Growing up queer, Catholic, and EXTREMELY sheltered, it actually gave me a lot of hope to learn that not only was a gay man responsible for so many of my childhood favorites, but that he was out and accepted by his colleagues. It showed me that the world was bigger than my immediate less-tolerant surroundings and made me optimistic about my own future.
There is more than enough homophobia in the world to cherry pick for youtube, so why would you INVENT an anecdote that obscures a rare moment of empowerment for us??
Oh the people who worked with him adored him. I know Paige O'Hara the voice of Belle and she still raveers the man, and she's a hardcore catholic woman from Florida. Howard was beyond talented and it still pains me he isn't still writing Broadway ballads.
@@LadyTylerBioRodriguez If there were any justice, he'd still be writing for Broadway like Alan Menken is to this day
@@missybarbour6885 In a just world he'd have as many Oscar's as Menken and they'd have done a special song for Wish to celebrate over 30 years of writing music for Disney.
But alas, that is just a dream we all must wake up from.
Disney made a whole documentary for him, and it's filled to the brim with people singing Howard's praises, along with a section in "Waking Sleeping Beauty." Roy Disney called him "Another Walt," which is extremely high praise! Disney set up a studio in New York because he so wanted to keep working while going through treatment for AIDS.
@@pinkcupcake4717 Oh its clear Don Hahn worships the ground he walked over. Can't say I blame him. That man could rhyme like no other. I look at something like the Mob Song in BATB and marvel. Sally forth, tally ho, grab your sword, grab your bow, praise the lord and here we go is just magnificent.
I like how during James' rant about Korra, it never occurs to James that Korra dating a bunch of men and then ending up being gay could just be the natural progression a teenager goes through as they discover their sexuality. I guess this is what happens when you just steal all of your content from other sources, you can't use critical thinking skills anymore.
I doubt as well that he actually has seen any of the media he is talking about
@@thedudewhomadethisvideo that’s a safe assumption after seeing just how much of his videos are stolen
@@thedudewhomadethisvideo someone pointed out on Twitter that he was planning a Evangelion themed video for a year and it was set to come out this month but last month before bomb's video came out James admitted to having not watched it at all or knowing where to start
Or that Bisexual people exist. Though given how he implicitly accused Leah Albertalli of being straigh years after she came out as bisexual, I suspect he might hold some unsavory opinions about bisexuals.
@@thedudewhomadethisvideo That matches up well for Korra considering his only case for Mako x Prince Wu was a ripped AMV he used. Like he didn't even say anything about why there was a hinting there, just stated "it was a will they won't they" implying he found the AMV and just assumed he now knew the whole story.
he's so hung up on the "gay best friend" thing i'm starting to think it's personal for him and someone really hurt his feelings back in middle school
God right? That was PERSONAL
@@pkmnherofan22There’s no way it didn’t happen to him with the way he talks about the trope.
I mean I can believe it. The reason it didn't freak me out when I first heard it was 1. I didn't know it was essentially the only original content in the Dahmer video 2. One of my gay friends had a girl do this to him in high school and found it very hurtful. So I do sympathize to some extent.
But as Harris says in his video, "Why are you making fanfic about her and not going to therapy?"
no literally, he is obsessively fixated on it.
Honestly, with how much of a fraud he is, I don't even believe he's gay. Maybe he just read that somewhere and stole it too.
One of the most heart-wrenching panels I’ve ever had to listen to was an older queer woman discussing how she was going to a funeral every three days during the height of the AIDs epidemic. How she was practically outed as a Lesbian due to her constant attendance to these funerals. To say that only the “boring gays” survived is not only horrific to say, but does a disservice to the community that Somerton now profits off of.
it also completely ignores the fact that lesbians are a huge part of the gay community (duh) and majorly involved in gay rights activism, and were at relatively low risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. obviously that's not to say no queer women died of AIDS, but the rates of sexual transmission were much lower between cis women, so to say "all the cool activists and artists died during the AIDS crisis" sort of gives away that you think all the cool activists and artists were men.
I'm really disappointed with how much effort into his visual presentation he puts into his videos. It gives you the impression of authenticity and later for some reason of generalizing all LGBTQ+ as egocentrics 😢
Not to mention ignorant of the role lesbians and sapphics at the time played in the community. It’s pretty well known that they organized donations and informal care teams for gay men in their communities. But sure! Fuck the people that survived, that lived to tell the stories of people that were killed by proxy through a virus.
@@yamataichul Nah, he just buys good-looking VFX assets online.
@@alexanderthealright true true but still he puts some make up and costumes at times
.....I thought it was EXTREMELY common knowledge that Rocky Horror bombed? JAMES WHAT ARE YOU DOING
and them for him to be like "look it up its true" with such confidence...like i almost believe he knows what he doing
Love when people refer to 1937-1943 as Disney's "golden age" when Pinocchio and Fantasia were box office bombs in their initial release and Dumbo only made a profit because of the low budget.
@@morbidsearch What the hell are you talking about?
@@morbidsearch What in the actual fuck does that have to do with Rocky Horror?
The only explanation I can think of as to why Somerton thought that is maybe he looked up the lifetime gross, (which has become pretty high do to regular midnight showings over the years), and assumed that was the initial gross when it came out.
As a Jew I fucking lost it at “they saw the holocaust James”
I’m dying at some of these just dumb observations. “The boring gays” like…. What? Who writes that downs reads it, then edits a video with it in there without checking themselves.
He’s literally the phrase “I can’t be a misogynist, I’m gay” personified.
James:
"You are a homosexual because you like to have sex with men
I am a homosexual because I hate women
We are not the same"
He also embodies the phrase, "You're gay because you like men, I'm gay because I hate women; We're not the same."
He's a gay incel... two words I never thought I'd put together, yet here we are.
He's the same with ace people. I can't be wrong about asexuality, I have an ace best friend aka Nick.
@wintersonnet I just now heard about that after seeing Tipster's reaction to James' recent "apology" video (Tipster saved the video before it was taken down, so he's decent source since it's got most of the video). After seeing that, I absolutely believe he had the same attitude toward ace people that he's had toward women/bi people/pan people/queer women and Nick was his fall guy/shield for it. Gross and I'm glad Nick got out. Ace people already get sh*t on from certain people in the queer community who have an attitude similar to James. It's always both gross and disheartening to hear it from other queer people.
I love how "straight women" are siultaneously overly sexualizing and fetishizing gay men but also they're prudes who are up in arms about gay sex on screen! Which is it???
It's any narrative that suits the misogynist more at that moment. He's so jealous of women, it's dripping off him. What a slimy, weird little liar.
a secret third thing: misogyny!!!
At this point, I'm not even sure if he's gay. He looks like he just hate women so much that he just filtered his identity into the gay category by process of elimination
He'd be a right wing pundit, but that involves having a woman in the kitchen and that's just too much female presence in the house to him.
If only there was an ideology that portrayed its perceived enemies as both weak and powerful. I'm not saying he's part of that, but drawing from their playbook is a huge red flag. Plus it being misogyny.
It's so weird. He swings from saying straight women fetishize gay men to saying that straight women hate Yuri on Ice because it's gay? And then he said that straight women supposedly fetishize Dahmer because he was a gay serial killer, but then also claimed that straight women fetishize Ted Bundy, who wasn't gay. So ...
"Flipping the script on the older single woman preying on a young girl to the even more toxic image of an older gay man preying on a teenage boy."
Why is it "even more toxic"? Why can't they both just bad?
Misogyny, that's why.
thank you! I immediately thought the same thing! to James, homophobia against lesbians is "less toxic" than homophobia against gay men 🙃
It would have made more sense if he said an older single woman preying on a young boy, even as recent as a few years ago that isn't taken seriously as much as gay man pedophilia.
Also Jafar was preying on Jasmine anyways, he forced her to marry him
it is sickening how one can dismiss lgbt people who lived through AIDS, watched their friends and lovers pass away while those in power did absolutely nothing, as “boring”. how can someone be that willfully ignorant is beyond me. disgusting.
George Michael singing Somebody to Love at the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert while his secret boyfriend was dying of AIDS is one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever listened to
Elton John has said he has severe survivor's guilt over being such a party animal and not getting it.
Willful ignorance is far too kind of a description. Malice is more fitting. Ironic he said such nonsense
given how he's basically one of the rich gays that wouldn't have needed to worry about anything
Whether him or Nick wrote that crime against empathy, it's _soaked_ in deep self-loathing
The way I've gone from "James Somerton is a lying hack" to "James Somerton is a literal detriment to Queer History" in the span of a few hours is actually really staggering.
I had never heard of this guy before this weekend and now I'm checking in with all of my fellow queer friends to see how much of these lies have permeated our mindsets.
Thank you for making this, Todd. Thank you so much.
Edit: I guess a lot of people felt this one. Somerton nuking everything but his channel tells us everything we need to know.
Sorry to hear, I hear from others Kaz Rowe might be better
Same here. Its crazy. I wonder just how much damage he has done. How many young queer women or transmasc people he's caused doubt and self hatred in. It boils my blood
Heard about this guy on tiktok EARLIER TODAY and I've gone from "who?" To "my guy we need to have a conversation NOW"
i mean his lying is also a literal detriment to queer history considering the sources he erases through his plagiarism
Never trust a business major lol
he creates oppression where there is none, and he erases oppression where it does exist
also i recall someone saying that he probably has a fash fetish, and honestly i believe it
This is so accurate, and it honestly makes me sick. He seems to only care if an issue directly involves his specific part of the community (cisgender gay men) and twists things so the larger oppression of the queer community only targets that specific thing
@@hootenannyskeletonis fash short for f*scist
@@kkickksyes
Right?! It makes NO SENSE. Pick a lane, bro!
My favorite scene in lord of the rings is when the fellowship held a group therapy session and gimli started crying while he talked about his dad.
The "Nickelodeon hated the idea of Legend of Korra because they didn't want a queer female protagonist of color" clip drives me so crazy, partially because literally everything he says is wrong (as Todd lays out), but also because while Legend of Korra isn't perfect, the fact that the writers didn't originally intend for Korra to be bisexual but instead just… gradually realized that was the way her character/relationship with Asami was developing, and *went with it*, has always been one of the most important aspects of the show & their relationship to me.
Per Bryan Konietzko (from a tumblr post a couple days after the finale):
"Was Korrasami “endgame,” meaning, did we plan it from the start of the series? No, but nothing other than Korra’s spiritual arc was. […] That’s how writing works the vast majority of the time. You give these characters life and then they tell you what they want to do."
There are countless examples of showrunners/writers responding to unintentional queer subtext with denial or derision and mockery, and although there's been an ever-increasing number of explicitly queer characters/relationships in children's media (thanks in no small part to the ground TLOK broke!) in the years since TLOK aired, a queer relationship being allowed to "organically blossom" (as Bryan Konietzko describes in that same post) without having been intentional from the start is *still* rare even today, nearly a decade later.
Like many of James Somerton's lies, claiming that Korra was *always* supposed to be queer but the studio *hated* that and *forced* the writers to keep her in the closet for the first couple seasons isn't just false, it's actively erasing an important part of an important moment in queer history.
Not only that if Nick didn't want Korra to be gay they would've made sure she never would be gay
this comment is better sourced than somerton's youtube videos
also you're right and you should say it
It pissed me off how James' video about Disney and LGBT never once mentioned Andi Mack, a Disney Channel sitcom where one of the main characters was openly gay
The whole "the boring gays wanted to marry" is truly vile because the reason people pushed so hard for marriage equality is because they wanted the right to visit their partners in the hospital as they were dying of aids, have a right to their body instead of potential homophobic/abusive family that would forbid them of attending the funeral.
reading stories from people who were there for the AIDs crisis is heart wrenching. of being torn from your loved one, having to sit on a hospital couch while they died, their family who never accepted them for who they were rips them away and forbids them to attend the funeral or grave. the idea that these people, these survivors, were “boring gays who want assimilation” literally makes my stomach feel sour. it’s such a fucked up thing to say, i hope somerton realizes that, in some way.
A former uni teacher (now friend) of mine told me how, when his partner died of AIDS, the lack of legal recognition allowed his partner's family to deny him any visit. They also refused to let him grab anything from their flat, and burned most of his their son's belongings (clothes ; furnitures ; pictures...) ; as most people back then viewed AIDS as some sort of new Black Death.
I wonder how he'd feel about being called boring for his pro-marriage activism.
There's a tiny nuggest of truth to Somerton's complaint about marriage equality causing something of a rift between white, middle-class gay people and most of the rest of the alphabet soup (but particularly trans people of color) on the subject of priorities. A non-zero amount of what was supposed to be high-profile queer activism during the 00's focused predominantly on marriage, with the struggles of trans people being backgrounded. And some people were rightly pissed about that. It was a common subject of discussion in queer spaces at the time.
And I'd say it was an argument well worth having, given that the queer community now seems to be more unified and less exclusionary. We're doing better.
Somerton, naturally, misunderstood all of this because he didn't care enough to do the work.
As a Holocaust historian what’s truly gross is the way Somerton flattens evidence around sex between men in the SS and the Hitler Youth into homosexuality when much of the evidence I have encountered in nearly a decade of education and work in the field is about abuse. What we think may have been pervasive in the Hitler Youth among the adult leaders was the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of children and teenagers. What we have evidence for in the SS, evidence we had to work extremely hard to find because nearly all the victims were murdered and those who weren’t experienced deep internalized shame, was the sexual abuse and sexualized abuse of men and boys, including Jewish men and boys. That isn’t “homosexuality being common in the SS” it’s the SS committing sexual violence as a tactic of genocide regardless of the gender of the victim.
Follow up: for clarification of the phrase “sexualized abuse” I’m referring to ways the Nazis targeted Jewish men and boys in gendered ways without necessarily ever touching them. For example men and boys suspected of being Jews in hiding were often forced to publicly strip to prove whether or not they were circumcised.
to put it another way, the Hitler Youth's sex problem wasn't a gay one, it was a pedophilia one. The Hitler Youth was about as gay-friendly as the Catholic Church.
@@IsaacMayerCreativeWorks yeah as soon as James mentioned the Hitler Youth, I immediately thought of Scout's Honor, the doc on netflix about abuse in boy scouts of america. HY, being a youth organisation, probably had the same issue of sexual abuse that the boy scouts did (the doc mentions that even the first ever scouting troupe in English in the early 20th century had a sexual abuse problem)
When your made up shit are do poorly thought out you end up parroting homophobic propaganda.
A gay man simplifying child abuse as "homosexual acts" is downright disgusting to me, when you consider how many homophobes use pedophilia as an excuse to attack the queer community.
His obsession with how “svelte” and “sexy” the nazis were and his idea that every nazi soldier looked like the ideal ubermench is implying so much about Somerton’s taste that makes me very uncomfortable
Dude 100% has a Nazi fetish.
the bit about Jeffrey Dahmer is, ironically, an extremely unprogressive rewrite of history. If he wanted to talk about Dahmer and the "hate mobs" surrounding his killings, he should have discussed the reason his specific targets were chosen. Dahmer targeted NON-WHITE gay men because he knew the police would not care enough to search for them, an intersectional issue that persists to this day. LGBT people, especially black and Asian people of color, have consistently been treated horribly by the police system. THAT is something that *I* have researched, because *I* was actually interested in knowing more about Dahmer. Look at that, an interesting and actually accurate piece of information around which one could craft a video essay. It's too bad lying about your own community is so much more fun.
The cops gave Konerak Sinthasomphone back to Dahmer after a neighbor (herself black) spotted the drugged fourteen year old boy after he’d escaped Dahmer’s apartment. Dahmer told them some bs and they let him take this bloody, drugged, child back into his apartment where Dahmer murdered him. So he was right. Cops didn’t care at all.
Listen, how can he make straight white women responsible?????
@@mnschoen the ultimate enemy of gay men---women >:(
asia is a large continent home to many dense populations, so I'd hazard a guess that we show up higher on those statistical rankings due to sheer volume alone. as for native american/first nations men, though: in the USA, they're just as likely to die from police violence as black men are. we queer asians are still treated poorly by law enforcement and the greater online queer community, but it would be a disservice to claim that trauma for ourselves.
@@thag_simmons I mentioned Asian people specifically because of Dahmer's tendency to target them, but you are correct. 👍🏻
“They saw the Holocaust, James” is the sickest fucking burn I’ve heard in a while.
Time code or chapter?
@@senorsnout4417 52:35 for the minute of context leading up to it
My uncle was a US Army sergeant who landed in Normandy on D-Day + 2, fought for his life in the Battle of the Bulge where he received a bronze star, and saw the aftermath of the camps; he wasn't an actual camp liberator so he didn't see the absolute worst of it, but he saw the Dachau main camp about a week post-liberation, fought over a couple of the sub-camps, and was one of the people helping to hunt down Nazis hiding, fleeing, or attempting to start an insurgency via the local population, for which he earned a second bronze star. Just remembering how my uncle reacted to anything German - nothing dramatic, but it was clear he still had PTSD 50+ years later, as did most of the men at his unit reunions - it's blatantly obvious even just from that personal experience that James's weird Nazi fetish is something he's projecting onto the past.
Sounds like something Hbomberguy would say. Amazing line.
"They saw the Holocaust, James." That's such a brutal line. Perfectly demonstrates what is wrong with that line of thinking while also being full of contempt
There are people that are dying, james
My grandpa was in the navy during the war, he served on the USS Tuscaloosa
He was in the Mediterranean, supported the D-day invasion, and followed the pacific fleet
He rarely spoke of his experience in the war, but when he did he’d only mention the horror of seeing a ship just like his get hit by a kamikaze bombing and seeing dozens of men the same age as him running off the deck as they screamed from the fire
He never once mentioned the body types of the enemy
This does speak to broader issue of people making statements/writing things that can be debunked by just looking at what it is they are talking about
@seanmcloughlin5983 no, literally; that video was the one and only one I ever entertained from this chinless Canadian, and I didn't make it past that part with how peeved I was. My own grandfather was apart of the colonial British troops, and I can fucking guarantee that was the last thing on his 18 year old mind. It's just such a gross conclusion to ever come up with, and I can't imagine why he would go out of his way to just make shit up like that when there is actual pieces of scholarly work that explore pretty interesting psychological conclusions to the Nazis and their propaganda/uniforms. It's just ridiculous.
Yeah that one pissed me off the most. Has he never met a combat vet? Or even heard one speak? Nobody’s paying attention to the fucking looks of the enemy. You’re not gonna find an Afghanistan vet talking about the cool t shirt a Taliban fighter was wearing. They were too busy focusing on seeing their friends limbs get blown off their bodies by an IED. No GIs from the European front gave a fuck about the boyish good looks of the “aryan super soldiers”. They were trying their hardest to ignore the sounds of screaming and death rattled all around them. Go talk to an ally from the European front and the images that are burned into their mind is the sight of walking Jewish skeletons that had been starved beyond recognition. Their fellow soldiers that had been disfigured to the point they didn’t look human. It’s disgusting that he would say those things. They weren’t focused on trying to get into nazi shape when they returned from the war, they were fighting with the urge to blow their brains out from the immutable memories. (Not to mention it’s really weird that he essentially just spewed out the Nazi’s own propaganda about how handsome their pure Aryan soldiers were. Like he’s literally saying the things about these soldiers that Hitler was trying to convince the world of)
As someone who’s been on the receiving end of this mindset, Somerton’s queer elitism is what really gets me. He’s not one of those “boring gays”, he’s not a “stereotype” like in the queer media he hates (insert misogynistic/bi-erasing comment here), he’s not the “gay best friend”, he’s ✨different✨ and ✨so much better.✨ Everything he says feels motivated by pure spite and bitterness, just like the people who spend hours complaining on TikTok about which identities are and aren’t “valid” and participating in petty in-fighting.
Damn, you’re right. It’s pick-me behaviour but for being a “good” gay! This comment made it click for me.
im convinced he was arguing about asexual people on tumblr in 2016. i have no evidence this is pure vibes
@@iwakeupandboomimaratHe also kinda has the vibes of somebody who would whine about neopronouns and “cringey Steven Universe gays” on TikTok 😭
@@ErisIsAnAbominationSteven Universe fans are cringe tho
"Historians are treasure hunters of history, not rule following weenies" is the most historian thing I've ever heard.
“The Night of the Long Knives happened because Ernst Röhm was fat” will forever live in my head rent-free. Absolutely astounding.
*looks at Göring, still alive during the Nurenberg trials*
As a fat person working on nutrition, personal fitness, and healthy weight loss, I've been morbidly fascinated by the obsession fat activists and HAES influencers have with victimhood and their use of social justice language as a shield. Seems like James was just parroting their bizarre talking points
I would be sorta understanding if it came from Americans mouth, because their education system is famously bad, but apparently he is Canadian :/
How can someone be so willfully stupid?
@@helen.faunway you're doing awesome for yourself! And yes seeing James parrot those ahistorical/unscientific talking points was what I saw that made me never watch anything from him again. I think a lot of influencers on the left (both grifters and genuine people honestly) tend to accept that BS as being part of the progressive movement just because they want to be seen as having the nice view and they don't want to do the deep drive into the scientific research and history that debunks all of fat acceptance.
I wrote a paper on the Nazis in college. Todd is right. Rohm was killed because Hitler was getting rid of the competition and consolidating power. The idea that it was because he was fat is not only ahistorical, but the real reasons are fairly well known. It took a lot of hubris to make that claim.
James: "cuz you will literally refuse to see us if you don't"
James Somerton famously calling a ton of bisexual people and non-binary people "straight white women" lmao.
Not to mention the trans masc folks also roped into that label lol
I completely lost it when I originally watched his shipping or his Killing Stalking video for that very reason
Literally my thought too. I love how this guy seems to thinks that the Queer Culture means exclusively whatever cis gay dudes (and sometimes lesbians, if he can be bothered to remember they exist) do, consume and make. The disdain he shows towards fandom truly says it all to me, as that's one of the queerest space i've ever been in. It's also traditionally full of bi\pan\sapphic women, as well as trans and nb folks, a lot of them afab. In my two decades of being in fandom, i've become weary of anyone who shits on "straight women" engaging with queer media; it's often just an excuse to be misogynistic, and a way to also de-legitimize transformative and fandom work.
So yeah fuck that guy. We deserve better than to be erased by some shithead with a nazi kink.
@@mclev9375
Ah, but don't forget, according to him, lesbians don't actually count 'cause they're soft and nice and the straight public like them. Just look at how many lesbians there are in media! /s
@@mclev9375 I kept getting recommended that Killing Stalking video and I never clicked on it because I knew it was going to bemoan fujoshis and BL and say old untrue shit how fujoshis are all straight women who fetishize gay men and blah blah blah
In fandom but nah most fujos are still straight. Maybe in the West they're not but certainly in their home country
I think I actually found a lie in this video that Todd didnt notice lol. James says that Joey Stefano "created a hit clothing line" but I can only find references to Joey Stefano themed apparel that had been made after his death to celebrate him.
If anyone knows if he did or not, please let me know because I said out loud "Woah that's sick" upon hearing that, only to Google and realise that I may have been duped by one James Somerton.
Ooh, that's good
Ya I think he's getting that from this line in "The Tragic Story of Local Porn Star Joey Stefano" from Philly Mag:
"Line of Joey Stefano-branded apparel? Just ask the former Spruce Street Video employee about his signature Stefano sweatpants, created to commemorate Joey’s appearance at the 1992 PrideDay Parade."
Which I think is meant to be a joke? Like a single video store employee made some sweatpants for himself to wear, not an actual clothing line.
Or maybe they were meant to be inspired by whatever Stefano was wearing on the set they talk about on pg.33 of Wonderbread and Ecstasy (which you can find online by looking for the title + "archive"):
"Watching Stefano wander the set that afternoon, Colbert began to think
that directing him, in fact, might not be quite as enjoyable as, say,
performing with him. In a pair of sweatpants that accentuated the positive,
he was fairly irresistible. Though Colbert had a scene to shoot in a matter of
minutes, he reasoned that a warm-up would not be out of order, and soon
he and Stefano were in each other’s arms-giving an impromptu audition,
as it turned out, for LaRue, who happened upon them. “That’s hot! That’s
hot!” Colbert remembers LaRue saying. “If you can do that, I’ll use you both
in a scene next week!” "
Can't find anything else about a clothing line in there, and the only mention of a gay pride parade is from a video Stefano shot called More of a Man, where the final scene is Stefano getting plowed on a flower float in a gay pride parade (pg. 74 of Wonderbread and Ecstasy):
"The video that resulted was a hefty improvement on the average gay porn
title. It concerns the gradual process of Vito’s accepting his sexuality, ending
with his symbolic deflowering-he’d already been deflowered a few times
during the course of the story, but it’s the thought that counts-inside a float
at the gay pride parade"
Haha sooo definitely another one to add to the tally!
@@hanklestank Thank you for this, that's kind of incredible that he saw the bare mention of someone wearing some commemorative sweatpants and stretched "hit clothing line", amazing
You heard the man, John Waters is now a "boring gay"
So was George Michael apparently. Who lost his lover to aids by the way.
I'm sorry, what?
According to James, only the “boring” gays survived the AIDS epidemic. John Waters hasn’t died of AIDS… so he must be tame and boring. How insightful, James.
Or the House Music Genre which was big in the 90s as boring, House Music is like the gayest genre of music out there
@@nickrustyson8124 weeeelllllll house music is black culture that got adopted by gay culture but i see your point
The term “boring gays” isn’t just disgusting to the survivors but super victim blaming to the deceased, that their deaths weren’t because of government negligence to an epidemic but the very normal thing of gay sex which was so wild it killed them. It’s almost like he’s jealous that he didn’t live in a time of constant loss and panic.
If I remember correctly he had one video where he spent a decent amount of time basically moaning about how nobody wanted to fuck him for the longest time because he's fat, so I wouldn't be surprised if at least part of his view of the AIDS epidemic is clouded by jealousy of the "fun gays" who got to fuck everyone all the time (unlike him). He tries to present himself as a crusader for gay rights but I note an undercurrent of resentment in his words - of both the "fun gays" (who got to have all the fun but in his mind paid a price for it) and the "boring gays" (who probably remind him too much of himself). And since this and HBombs video already established that he's lying through his teeth, I'm not surprised that he's presenting the AIDS epidemic inaccurately as well.
to the degree that it's a self fulfilling prophecy that if you kick young people out on the street and force them to congregate in emergency families of choice, you get some wild times as the young raise the young, it's a little true that gay people were "wild" - more like abandoned and feral and determined to exist, more like determined to make the crime fit the time, yes, we did sometimes become what (bi punk icon) mike ness called "the kids of the black hole" in those days. but in the isolated cases and pockets where it was true, it wasn't because gay, it was because repressed, because vulnerable, because clandestine, the same thing you see in the stereotype of the "preacher's kid" or ex-fundie people going off the rails in their 20s.
And people now forget that HIV/aids can have *YEARS,* not weeks or days or months but YEARS of asymptomatic transmissibility, long enough to meet, fall in love, and separate in "tame," normative, ways. They also forget how much more common and how much more ironclad closeting was in those days, where people would blame all the other ways to get HIV publicly. It was a dark fucking thing. And Ronald Reagan stood up there and gawped about a house on a hill.
The whole "boring gay" thing feeds into a whole bunch of straight stereotypes that gays are "supposed to be" a certain way: namely flamboyant, super promiscuous, entertaining, wild artists etc. It's an old fashioned holdover from when only the most flamboyant, DGAF artist type people could actually afford to be out of the closet.
He acts like a lot of those same types of deaths and things aren't happening today either... Growing up in Detroit, my experience was never a great one. STDs seem to be everywhere and help hard to come by. I remember almost letting myself transition, only to scramble back into the closet after my closest friend, also trans, was stabbed to death, thrown from a car, and run over repeatedly... I only mention my experience because when I finally had the means to move to Grand Rapids, I noticed how different things were and how much easier it was feel safe and find dependable help and resources. There are so many people in places that really suck for queers or specific queer identities. I feel like instead of helping, he just sits on his ass and romanticizes a time when no queer was safe - or victim blames anyone who survived those times. It's fucking gross.
We all agree that Reagan was awful and that the government should have done more to spread awareness or at least not stigmatize people who had aids, but considering that there wasn't any effective medication that could treat or suppress AIDS at the time, what more could the government have done other than basically tell gay men to stop fucking randos or shut down the gay bath houses? Because that solution would also be considered homophobic.
as the survivor of a hardcore middle school dracula obsession, hearing the phrase "francis ford coppola's incredibly faithful retelling of the story" awoke some sort of primordial rage in me
I share your pain. Bram Stoker's is one of my favorite novels.
There's always hope for a carmilla-style youtube vlog dracula! (Lizzie Bennett diaries is probably a better example). There are some great lower budget options for a great dracula
@@gregdeandrea1450 Not quite, he listed a 70's miniseries as being closer than Coppola's version.
@@gregdeandrea1450 Maybe I'm weird, but I'd LOVE to see a modern Dracula story where the first 30 minutes is a dude scrolling through found footage and newspaper clippings, before getting into the meat and potatoes of the main story.
It was pretty faithful besides the Dracula/Mina love and origin story
These claims are all so wild, I don't want James to apologize, I want him to explain the thought process behind each and every one of them.
Now THAT I want to see.
He can't.
At least not until a better auteur messes up and has to apologize for it.
THEN, James can just copy it, half-assedly, and present it as his own.
"if i make it up, i will be the first one to talk about it". kind of like me when i was a kid with an uncontrolled imagination AND I was taught to lie by my parental figures. i'd make up problems to complain about to feel special. in my case the actual problems were to scary to confront, in his i still think it's because of the views
@@hypatiakovalevskayasklodow9195
That's some pretty good insight, I think. I did some of that too. James seems like he never grew out of it.
Well he made it up, he said himself it's raw observation and he has no supporting evidence.
"the jurry booed" is such a "then everybody clapped" thing to say.
That’s something that James does a lot. He once said that people didn’t understand the interpretations in the “Evil Queens” video (which is 99.9% stolen) but once he explained it to them, they came around to seeing it his way.
I feel like “everyone wanted to be more like the hot nazis” says a lot more about James than anything else
I noticed it too, it seemed like he just REALLY wanted his viewers to know how hot he thought they were
Ultra cringe, but I'm not surprised.
I don't understand how he missed the entire Victorian fascination with strongmen and President Theodore Roosevelt's "vigorous lifestyle" that included cold baths and exercise. America's obsession with healthy muscular bodies predates the 1940s by a lot.
The Nazi thing is just so weird.
And claiming fitness culture stems from the Nazis is wrong. There was huge German subculture revolving physical fitness and nature since the late 19th century, and many of it included communists who cared more about promoting working class health rather than the Aryan ubermensh body. A lot of it still continued under East Germany. Giving it ALL to the nazis is ahistorical, they just embraced the more racist right-wing elements of a larger older and diverse movement.
Yeah, with that and the "Nazis were all hot gay guys" claim, it's pretty obvious the guy has a Nazi fetish.
"The naughty gays who were sleeping around" "living lives worth telling stories about" "the boring ones". I am incandescent with rage. My 'adopted' aunt had a best friend that my sister and I called "Blue Jeans" (Eugene was too difficult and he wore jeans and a white T-shirt like it was a uniform). They were the only two of their friend group of 13 who were still alive in the 90s. He didn't have family. He never got married. He lived the rest of his life absolutely messed up at living through hell and losing nearly everyone he ever cared about in his adult life. Everyone who lived through that was scarred (including straight women who were socially part of the community, James). Not getting AIDS didn't save anyone from the pain of everyone you knew dropping like flies, of going to funerals being the most common way you saw friends, of being terrified of who you were going to lose next, of being terrified if you were next, of dealing with the huge anti gay sentiment....
How has this guy who decided to talk about gay stuff for a living managed to avoid reading or watching anything about that era?? And to come up with such terrible, dismissive views of people who lived through that time is so offensive
Jesus, that’s sad. I hope Eugene and your aunt could find support in each other
Exactly this. My uncle and his longtime partner were hugely popular in the Boulder CO gay scene, but neither of them got AIDS, and it still didn't save them. Uncle John struggled with depression and alcoholism throughout the 90s and 00s, largely because of losing almost all of his friends to AIDS, and lost his partner to his alcoholism and then died of liver failure in 2006. So, no, the survivors of the epidemic weren't the ones who weren't active in the gay social scene, and no, those who died of the disease were not the epidemic's only victims.
My uncle died of HIV soon after I was born in the mid 90's. I am named after him and my Mom says I remind her of him whenever I smile.
I wish I could have gotten to know him more...
James needs to remember sex ed where he hopefully was taught that one single exposure to HIV can already infect you. No "sleeping around" needed. I've met someone who caught it at their first sexual encounter ever. They were a virgin before but it really only takes one time. Thankfully we live in a time where treatment is available unlike when it first started spreading.
Sorry to hear that 😔 i can only imagine how terrible those years were
I love when James is so smug that he tells the viewer to look up a fact, Todd just says 'i looked it up and its completely false'.
I appreciate the fact you had a vampire expert and a pirate expert on hand. That's an impressive reference list lol.
Elisa was one of the people Todd met back in the Channel Awesome days, so that certainly came in handy here.
his open misogyny, calling bi women straight or lesbians and misgendering the creators of She-Ra and Steven Universe, saying that only “boring” people survived the AIDS crisis, praising nzis for being jacked and gorge for SO long is all too disturbing
@@laurentweet9254none of this stuff matters. Stop living on the internet
There's a very specific issue that *really* grated on me watching clips of him talking about Yuri on Ice and Love Simon and other bits where he accused “white women” of “fetishisizing gay men/gay relationships” etc.
I know he's not the first person to make this argument (and I mean, I watched the Hbomberguy video so of course he isn't). I was around for the heyday of Tumblr and un-nuanced shaming of hypothetical “teen girls” into yaoi. And frankly I never asked for some self-appointed twit to bring those days back.
I'm a trans woman. I didn't come out to myself until *well* into my adulthood. I'm also pretty sapphic-leaning. And you know what didn't do my emotional or social health any good at all? Shamedly repressing any thoughts, desires, or interests I had in WLW relationships under the pretext that it was “fetishisizing” for a “man” to be excessively interested in that sort of thing.
The idea that any of the “women” interested in male relationships might not, in fact, be women didn't come up in any of the segments of James's videos that I watched. Certainly, do cishets ever “fetishize” gays in media, or write pandering stories, etc? Sure. Can you always tell at a glance which fans or creators are doing what? Not with any great reliability. You have aesthetic judgements and… vibes, basically, and not much else a lot of the time.
Does James acknowledge any of this ambiguity in the full videos? I dunno. To be *completely* fair to the guy, I haven't watched any of his actual vids. And I don't plan to. If you've seen his stuff, let me know if he ever did! Frankly, given his aforementioned misgendering of ND Stevenson and Rebecca Sugar - not to mention his *abominable* treatment of the author Becky Albertalli - I am inclined to give him precisely zero benefit of doubt.
@@Eviel1nexactly what came to my mind too!! As a gay trans man myself, there’s something to be said about “straight cis girls” who are into BL and end up discovering that they arent cis nor straight.
and he jacked that “only ‘boring’ people survived the AIDS crisis” line from Fran Lebowitz
EDIT: saw the full context of that statement, and I can now definitely say he completely missed the point of what Fran was saying bc she was talking about losing a discerning audience, not abt… assimilationist politics or whatever the fuck
EDIT EDIT: Todd mentions what I said in the earlier edit lmao
Dude is literally writing some kind of self-loathing fan fiction and passing it off as gay history
Just how terrible do you have to be for a _music critic_ whose works have always stayed in their area of expertise to make a one-off facts-laden 1.5 hour long takedown of you and your work just because their integrity wouldn't let them do otherwise?
Mega respect, Todd.
I think that might be part of the problem; he's super boring...and he KNOWS it! So when he talks about "boring gays", I think he's projecting hard!
I've seen this video several times now and the most obviously false claim out of all of them is the one about straight women being outraged by sex in "Red, White, and Royal Blue." You'd think someone claiming to be so knowledgeable on queer culture and history would know what a fujoshi is.
In James’ mind, “straight women”( I believe he means all women whenever he says this) are able to simultaneously fetishize gay men and disgusted at the thought of them kissing
Seriously. Has he never even glanced at the statistics of who reads and writes gay fanfic, or...?
to be fair, a vast majority of fujoshi i know are/eventually discover themselves to be some level of queer. i feel like the stereotype of fujoshi all being completely cishet women is a bit flawed. in fact, a huge amount of the trans men i know say that being a fujoshi as a teen is what helped them eventually discover their gender identity.
then again, i don't have a lot of friends who are completely cishet so take that for what you will lol. also, i don't think there's anything inherently wrong with cishet women being fujoshi; so long as they treat real gay men with respect, i'm fine with them existing & doing what makes them happy.
@@lynn4840here's another transmasc agreeing for anecdotal evidence lol.
IMO a lot of fujoshis are just "straight cis women fetishizing gay men" rhetoric is just yet again more misogyny.
@@lynn4840 fujoshi, as long as they are actual allies, are vital to getting more and better gay representation, so more power to them. In capitalism we can't really expect to win this fight for queer rights on our own. It has to be profitable, so needs a bigger market.
I'm a lesbian history major and a writing tutor, so every single thing about JS pisses me off. On my second watch of this video, what made me most mad was how similar JS sounds to some of my tutees.
Most university level writing requires some amount of historical context to convey to your reader that you understand the origins and implications of what you're writing about. Sometimes, I get tutees who attempt to do this but fall back on popular misconceptions of history.
When JS just spouts bullshit about what he assumes to be how it was "back then," I see the consequences of the popular idea of history being a constant march towards progress (with the antithesis being that everyone "back then" was a bigot in every way imaginable).
For example, I just took a class about gender in premodern Europe. If JS had to talk out of his ass, he'd probably say something like, "people in the middle ages ostracized and killed gay people because Christianity only permitted relations between a man and a woman." And while that isn't entirely false, there's so much complexity that is lost. Love between men and women was thought of in terms and ideas that don't at all match up to our modern day conceptions. Their existence comes down to us in poems, in legal documents, in hagiographies, and artworks. I can see myself in a seventh century nun while also acknowledging that we live in extraordinarily different cultures, and that's the beauty of history.
One reason why watching JS is so exhausting is that his treatment of lgbt history is so negative. In his imaginary version of history, gay and trans people never get to be happy. The straights always have the power in the end. While it is important to highlight the dynamics of systematic oppression, it feels so gross to not have faith in our ancestors.
Underrated comment
so “Whig Historiography in fields where it shouldn’t apply” rears its ugly head again.
Appreciate you sharing your experience here.
His odd pessimistic worldview is also a bit gross to me because it reminds me of how male influencers often call their audience ugly/beta/etc and then push themselves (and their products) as the answer to solving that and their problems. This trend of pessimism from leftist influencers kinda hits the same way for me, positing that acceptance will never come and can never be achieved. So we must always be mad at The Man and Society and always consider ourselves victims. It's poisonous to the mind and causes people to not bother to emancipate themselves.
About historicity--I'm so confused by the claim that "early English" writings warned parents about "catholic boys" in Rome. The phrase early english implies that these writings would have been pre protestant revolution, and so these english parents would have also been catholic?? words mean things
@@ambrose745Would have been useful if JS clarified “early” in relation to which timeframe. Not having watched the video, it might be missing context or so.
The “gay male body image was invented by Nazis” thing pisses me off so bad because any self-respecting gay media nerd should know that J.C. Leyendecker, a gay man, basically forged the American male beauty standard from the 1910s-1930s with his illustrations for major magazine publications. He was one of the most influential American commercial illustrators of the early 20th century, his work predates the proliferation of Nazi propaganda, and he was very, VERY gay.
Love Leyendecker.
But also...Tom of Finland was extremely prolific. When I wear my Tom jacket, older gays get so excited 😭
James is wild.
(Laura Mellin) The whole body image thing was started by “scientific” whites trying to prove how their bodies were the best, to excuse their poor treatment of everyone else. It’s as old as colonialism. But the modern obsession with fitness started in the early 1900s, based on the more youthful fashions that required tans and fancy sports clothes. It’s complicated, but COMPLETELY pre-dates Nazis.
Oh, like Sal Romano in Mad Men? Nice!
Ayoooooo literally work in a graphic arts archive with his post covers :) I pull that stuff all the time for classes and exhibitions
AND he based his male drawings off his lover. 'Couple Descending Staircase' is literally my favourite illustration of his. I stare at it in an unhealthy way so often. Its so wlw/mlm solidarity to me
How a man with the stage presence and charisma of a loaf of bread became one of the most prominent LGBT creators is absolutely staggering to me
By using well written content he stole and mangled from other people.
I was wondering the same thing after seeing hbombs video
at least a loaf of bread wouldn't lie to me
by making a lot of content regularly, I guess, it usually makes youtube to push your stuff up in recommendations
like, when creators, queer or not, actually care about their video essays, it usually takes them some time to make videos, the ones I personally watch post new videos once a month, three months, six months, a year sometimes (hi hbomb). just because it takes a lot of effort and time when you don't half-ass it.
Far too many people's standards are matched by a loaf of bread.
He really is just a downright misogynist. Hbomb made the joke "what girl hurt you in high school James" but I legitimately think he had some kind of bad experience when he was younger and now just hates women. You can see how he's super blunt and barely interested when reading his (completely plagiarised) scripts, but once he goes off on a tangent about women he becomes animated and excited. Just so, so strange.
Not to mention the whole "Nazis were so sexy it made Americans jealous" thing, like, dear god.
His weird hatred of heartstopper is so insane. Half the time he’s mad about how cute it is and the other half it’s cause it’s boring. He also thinks call me by your name sucks because “it’s boring”. Yes the romance movie is slow. It’s a romance movie not John fucking wick.
I'm sure he just knee jerkily hates it because he assumed the author was a straight white woman with "kawaii ideas about gays" and for having no sex over anything more substantial...
There was a video he had where Somerton talked about queer movies. He seemed to have a particular preference for darker gay movies over cutesy kawaii romance or straights interpretation of gays like Imitation Game. He said the Imitation Game even ignored much of Alan Turing's sexuality.
@@kingofthegundam7974call me by your name was directed by a gay man based on a book written by another gay man. It’s a gay movie. James is just the only homophobic gay person.
@@AugAug989The author of Call me by your name is a straight (and quite problematic) literary professor I'm afraid. But the director and screenwriter are both gay cis men and the screenwriter prominently worked on Maurice. There are reasons to critique it but surely not because it's "boring".
It's hilarious that the only time there is any emotion behind those cold, dead eyes is when he's being a misogynist.
This would all feel less weird if he didn't deliver everything with exaggerated fake emotions that do not sell.
or talking about how attractive nazis were.
💀💀💀
@@mexistential It's especially infuriating when he's a proven plagiarist. He's literally reading the thoughts and opinions of others and presenting it as his own while being completely deadpan.
@@groundbreaker91 yeah i saw the hbomberguy video as well. A lot of people lie (ex anyone at PragerU) or even steal material (other essayists in the video), but rarely do they add a quiver in their voice that sounds like they’re at the end of their rope. The fake emotion on top of the lying makes it more annoying and weird (to me).
“They saw the holocaust, James.”
New life goal unlocked: never say something so profoundly wrong and uninformed that the above brutal response can be used to completely slap me into the shadow realm.
yeah that part holy shit lmao
That’s a good goal.
you're doing great so far
I can't but feel like an undercurrent of sinophobia in James' work
Yeah he clearly HATES the Chinese.
Exactly. I can understand being critical of the Chinese government. But he doesn't even distinguish the Chinese government from the Chinese people, which he does with nearly ever other country he mentions. He just repeats "China" like it's a boogieman or something.
Like... who cares if a movie in China did well. Why should that show "fudged numbers". I don't understand why a silly blockbuster movie doing well needs to be a mass conspiracy. Especially considering it's one of the most populated countries. It's ridiculous.
@@resentfulshrimp8044 the theories ppl have about China are funny bc they often contradict each other. one of the most common things i hear is some variation of "the government control every single thing they do" but then they also say they change the numbers of this movie to make it more successful. why would they need to do that? just send all the people to see the movie lol
Sinophobia is my favourite word currently. Because Western media is absolutely chock full of it. The amount of lies and propaganda is insulting
Now, when u think about it he did make thousands of co-relation on how china controls disney
"I didn't go through Nokia's quarterly reports looking for their 'burying utopian technology' budget" is legit one of the funniest sentences I've heard in a very long time
Like Nokia the company most known for making crappy phones and one bulletproof phone in the 2000s have the resources to make a utopia when they have been shitting and pissing themselves since the iPhone came out and they're still using hardware from the early 2010s
man, imagine surviving the mass extinction of your entire community and the deaths of most of your loved ones only for some canadian plagiarist to say 'you lived because you were boring'
I’d be furious. While I’m not gay myself, I find that a disgusting thing to say.
At best it’s downplaying a massive crisis and at worst it spits in the face of both victims and survivors. I really don’t understand how he could say something like that and keep it in the video, and sound smug while doing so…
@@rokamayono8590to be fair, he pretty much always finds a way to sound smug. 🤪I didn’t notice at first, since the contents that he plagiarized are good content, but there is this tone that he’s holier than thou, rather than just earnest.
My uncle lived through the aids crisis and saying he survived because he’s boring is so insulting. Yeah he should have lived a more exciting life and never met his husband never met his nieces and nephews. He should have been more adventurous and died before I was born. Fuck you james
@@katieowlpower it's all I could see when I got served one of his videos. the smarm that drips from his voice, the disapproving, snarky tone.. I hated him, I have no idea how this many people were fond of him in any way but I understand a lot of people were seeing him blend in to a larger group of video essayists in their content. I am being more mindful of my content now :/
The Canadian Plagiarists would be a great one-hit wonder band name
Isn't it ironic how he accused straight women of being obsessed with gay men and their kawaii cutesy ideas of gay men but then he projected his fantasies on WW2 soldiers, which were largely teenage boys or very young men just trying to survive?
Ironic and very gross.
Its, honestly, uncomfortably close to legit pedophilia to me.
You are talking about the Nazis.
@@archlinuxuser 1. Not only the Nazis and not only German soldiers. 2. So if they're Nazis then it's okay to sexualize teenage boys? 3. As a person whose country was ravaged by the Nazis during this war, not everyone joined willingly - and not everyone was actually a Nazi.
And James claimed that the Americans aren't jealous of the Soviets because they are wearing winter coats, implying that the Russians aren't fit enough, despite the fact that the Soviet Russians have no shame of being jacked.
Also OMG gays in the 90s were fighting for things like marriage rights so they could do such "boring" things as visit their loved ones in the hospital when they were sick. Weird that this would be important to gay people who had seen friends and lovers die in record numbers.
Also, not every gay person is an artist. Assuming that an essential part of the gay experience is being an artist is SO WEIRD. We're everything, we do everything.
As a STEM gay, I guess I don't exist
absolutely! even though JS goes off about the "boring gays", they were still impacted by the AIDS crisis as well, even if they had a desk job. he paints gay people as some kind of monolith of people who are either awesome and fucking and making cool stuff or boring office slogs. no matter if you were a "boring" gay or not, if you were queer during that time you were probably impacted by the crisis by friends, family or community members regardless if you were having sex or not
James Somerton is like the adult manifestation of me writing an essay in third grade about The Taming of the Shrew, which as we all know is a horror film about hordes of shrews attacking humans. (I have absolutely no idea where I got that!)
OR like the "oppa homeless style" tumblr post come to life
@@HumansMakeAIArt tommy tallerico was the oppa homeless style guy. his mother is very proud
there was actually a horror film about giant shrews attacking humans. I can't remember what it was called, though. The shrews were dogs with rugs draped over them
I mean given that the 'oppa homeless style' post was also made up by someone on Reddit so they could get mad at Tumblr, seems very on brand for James.
@@hannahlewis7910 "The Killer Shrews", a 1959 black-and-white movie about an isolated island where researchers accidentally create a species of cannibalistic shrews the size of dogs. However, the shrews end up devouring everything on the island and the survivors have to hide in metal garbage cans.
If anyone wants to watch the movie, I would strongly recommend watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 edit of it. It's uploaded on UA-cam, and Joel and the bots make it a LOT easier to watch.
James REEKS of privilege. I’m so serious. Being gay doesn’t absolve you of the fact that you are extremely privileged. I GASPED audibly when he said that the queer folk who survived the AIDS crisis were “the boring ones.” James gives strong shaming, transphobic, misogynistic vibes that just get more and more rancid. Even putting aside the plagiarism, he SUCKS. I’ve never been a fan, and hell I didn’t even know much about him before this whole scandal since I tend to stick to smaller queer creators. But I just keep getting more and more horrified the more I hear.
Yeah being part of ONE oppressed group doesn’t mean he gets to talk about other oppressed groups the way he does…
Isn't that the opposite of slut shaming?
@@PutkisenSeta yeah actually, I should change that
That's actually exactly what I said to my partner when we were watching the big HBomberguy video. I said, "James seems like the most privileged kind of gay."
You nailed something I never liked about James but I never really managed to articulate. He seems like the kind of guy to make a tweet about how bad JK Rowling is, only to then go onto /lgbt/ and post some shit about how they should drop the T from LGBT
As a pan man who has visited a concentration camp, I can definitely attest that nobody who sees holocaust shit is going back home thinking "wow those Nazis were hot". What the actual fuck.
Unless they are themselves Nazis.
And then you have a bigger issue.
At least where he's going if he drops the soap some guy will touch him.
@@GamingtheOtter can we not do rape jokes? I don't like Somerton either but a joke where the punchline is "he may get raped" is fucked up.
They probably thought that all Nazis looked like Ralph Fiennes in _Schindler's List._
@@GamingtheOtter he’s not going to jail. Not only is it an unfunny failed joke, but is completely inaccurate. You fail at being informed and at humor.
"Art Became Ghostbusters and cats in the '80's."
"art became Vanilla Ice and Space Jam in the 90's"
"art became Blink-182 and Shrek in the 2000's"
"art became Frozen and The Avengers in the 2010's"
"Art became Paper Lace and Starland Vocal Band in the 70s"
Instead of trying to be an off brand version of Contrapoints, this guy should have just focused on writing alternate history fiction from an LGBTQ lens.
Never has anyone been so bad at accurately identifying straight women 💀
Butterfly meme: Could this be a white straight woman?
ikr.
Straightar is non-existent for this guy
his straightdar is malfunctioning
@@djizomdjinnjames seeing people he made up: is this a straight woman attacking me?
Imagine having ALL OF WESTERN HISTORY to point to when you wanna show how bad homophobia is, and you choose to just makes shit up.
Yeah, right-wingers make shit up constantly, but at least they have no other option
If all of Western history is homophobic, then it's probably not a phobia, but a mere strong cultural preference for hetorosexuality.
@@Frip36 The point here isn't that _all_ of western history is homophobic. It's that homophobia has been present in some form throughout all of western history.
It's like how racism is intertwined with US history. Obviously, not every single historical event that occured was racist, but you could name any time period point out some form of racism that was going on in the US at that time.
@@Frip36that’s like saying culturally most people prefer apples therefore they will be hateful to those who prefer oranges. having a preference doesn’t mean you traumatize a group of people who have existed since at least 101th century BCE.
@Frip36 what are you talking about? That's like saying a place has a strong cultural preference to a certain race so they aren't racist. No one argues that homophobia is an irrational fear, it's hate.
So a note about the Yuri on Ice misinformation, as a huge fan of the show who has read A LOT of staff interviews: As stated here the whole "censored for timeslot" stuff is not only a blatant lie but also a layered lie. Apart from YOI airing quite late at night (as most anime that isn't aimed at children does) there is no "law" about what timeslots are allowed to show same-sex kisses. There is, however, network censorship in terms of what certain TV networks will allow at certain timeslots, which is why most anime does end up airing late at night, but it is very unlikely that this is the reason the famous kiss scene was "censored", which in itself is debatable. Ironically, the staff have aluded to walking dangerously close to the "not allowed on TV" line, but not in regards to the gay romance but about a scene in episode 1 in which one of the main characters appears butt naked.
HOWEVER, the director Sayo Yamamoto stated very literally in an interview that there was pushback during production from "various places" (she doesn't specify if this is from the animation studio or if it was coming from any of the companies in the production committee) specifically in regards to "that scene" (again she doesn't specify but she's talking about episode 7 in that interview, where the kiss scene takes place); according to her account, she had to fight very hard to get that scene through, so there was indeed backstage meddling in regards to that particular scene, just not at all related to what Somerton was claiming, which i'm gonna assume he just blindly regurgitated from twitter conspiracy theories.
Another thing of note is that there have been publicly known attempts from the production committee (namely Avex, which is the distribution company) to tone down the queer subtext in the series, but most of them have been post-fact. One of the most infamous incidents was regarding a poster in one of the official guidebooks in which Yuri Katsuki wasn't wearing the wedding ring he and Victor exchanged in episode 10. The artist got a lot of criticism when the previews of the poster were first published and she claimed she did initially add the ring but the publisher asked her to remove it. The public outcry was big enough that they were forced to add it back.
A lesser known incident, but imo more damning, involves a convention in Thailand that held a panel with some staff members (I don't remember who exactly was present at this convention, I believe it was Noriko Ito and Tadashi Hiramatsu but I may be wrong) in which they showed the audience a concept illustration of the aforementioned wedding rings, which revealed a closeup of the design including a snowflake engraving on the inside. When asked why this illustration wasn't included in the concept art book that had been released a short time prior, the staff members confessed they didn't know and were surprised to find out it wasn't included, since they had assumed it would. It shows a deliberate effort by some entity involved in the marketing and publishing of the series promotional materials to erase the very transparent queer themes in the show, possibly because (and this may be the only thing Somerton got right) they wanted to market it as a figure skating series, a sport that is wildly popular in Japan, and probably presumed it wouldn't be successful if it was perceived as BL. Either that or they're just homophobic, which I think is plausible considering how these two incidents took place AFTER the show had already become a massive hit.
As a bonus example of how little Somerton knew about the topics he was discussing, he refers to "the creator" when the show was very famously a collaborative effort between two women: director Sayo Yamamoto and artist Mitsuro Kubo. While the concept for the series was Yamamoto's brainchild, they spoke at length about developing it together and I believe they always appeared at conventions together as the creatorS of the show. I never watched his YOI video in full but I'm gonna assume this was one of those he "didn't really want to make and only did it because patreons asked for it", that he refered to in his now deleted shitty apology video, since from thw few clips I've seen he was completely clueless about it.
From what I've heard and seen, it seems like he doesnt really like anime and most of his anime videos are very poorly done.
@@geekygecko1849honestly im a firm believer that hes not an anime fan but he did vids on them to appeal to their fandoms. which like i usually wouldn't care about but hes actively spreading misinformation so
with how James talks about women, i think him referring to Sayo and Mitsuro as "the creator" was deliberate on his part
Been seeing a lot of comments (rightfully) pointing out the misogyny, erasure of bisexuality and hypocrisy, but I also want to point out how Somerton completely discredits the achievements of Chinese cinema by chalking it up to government manipulation and ignoring how Japanese modes of storytelling have their own genre conventions in favor of "subtle Eastern storytelling"
James' remark that "boring gays" were the only ones who survived the AIDS crisis made me feel physically sick. How do you sleep at night knowing you have so little sympathy/remorse for an event that historically scarred a community you claim to speak for? Disgusting doesn't even begin to cover it.
I literally audibly gasped in horror when he said that shit literally what the fuck
yeah, I don't know how tf that just slipped by some people, because in any other community, he would be fucking spat on for a comment like that. imagine saying some shit like that about the Holocaust, or any other genocidal event on the level of the AIDS crisis, you'd have the shit smacked out of you before you put your stupid fucking turtleneck on. like he doesn't even have to lie, YET HE DOES. he actually kinda disgusts me, like I'm not gay, but this is just a basic human decency thing. cause HIV doesn't fucking discriminate. he's saying that gays who fuck were the only ones who died, when that is so not true. HIV killed *everyone*, gays, non-gays, drug addicts, and blood transfusion patients. it was an STD that affected gays more than others, but it was by no means a uniquely gay affliction, let alone a uniquely sex-having gay affliction. like forgive me, but shouldn't he be for all kinds of gays, not just the "fun" ones?
How to insult every single elder of the community at once
I read another comment that said James is the epitomy of "You're gay because you like men, I'm gay because I hate women. We are not the same.", and given not just the weird misogyny but other weird shit he says about the LGBTQ+ community... I can't help but wonder how accurate that comment was.
@@GreekDudeYiannis As Hbomb said as well he has in the past misgendered AFAB trans and non-binary creators and lumped them in with "those damned women", whether that's intentional or not, at best it shows a clear lack of care for getting the facts right, at worst it's a clear lack of respect for trans and non-binary identities
I'm thinking about one thing hbomberguy said- about how James markets loneliness. He stole other queer people's essays, removed their names, pretended he made it all himself, then told his young audience "Look at how alone we are. The queer community is fighting and we are losing. So many people still hate us." So that he could be looked at as a hero. A comfort.
I think part of the reason he portrays himself as a lone voice in the sea of straight creators is that he didn't want his - mostly young and not very well-read when it comes to other content creators - audience realising how much he stole and how much he made up.
I'm gen Z just now going to college and just recently starting to seek a deep media and academic literacy and little knowledge of queer history. I was intruduced to him with non of those things I presume a lot of us did and that really makes it easy to plagrising things we will not get to reading any time soon
@@cup_of_tea755 It is just bizarre to me to hear that anyone is portraying themselves like than when the canonical “Breadtube” people are Hbomb, Contrapoints, Philosophy Tube, and Lindsay Ellis.
Oh wow that is despicable
As a young queer, I feel that. It’s an incredibly damaging thing to project onto your audience. Just plain horrible.
As a former "straight woman that wanted to be a good ally" watcher of his, I feel like he used the cishet fem-ally guilt and anxieties to his own advantage. Like, all the times he blamed straight girls and women for being homophobic or fetishizing or both, it made me feel guilty and my fears validated and I never even considered that he made stuff up because of it.
There's a certain irony in a guy who talks about one-hit wonders so often having, like, possibly his most successful video of all time be something entirely unrelated in topic, format, ETC to his normal content.
The 10 Worst Songs of 2020 video, as of writing, has more than this one, but I could absolutely see this surpassing it eventually.
If I were the CEO of Homosexuality, I'd fire James and ban him from the premises. Alas, I'm just a wagie at Gay Corp.
You're what, what James would call, one of the "boring" ones 💀
I'm the VP of Questionable Content Investigations at Gay Corp and I assure you that the CEO is considering it. Also you're due for a promotion to middle management so you can work less but longer hours for about the same pay
Wow, Gay Corp sounds about as boring as Staight LLC. Is the furniture at least more interesting?
Why is this so relatable
@@shinyskunk The chains of employment bind us all.
Lying is bad. Lying in ways that actively damage your own already vulnerable community is unforgivable. What an awful person.
People care more about making money for themselves. Lasting effects be damned. I don't get it .
guy is a narcissist, so there's that. he just hoped it would never catch up to him. but he got too big and the evidence was starting to pile up to the point that other creators could not ignore it
I mean its like extra harmful too when, inbetween his lies and random tangents to complain about women, all the actual pro-LGBT rhetoric he espouses is stolen wholesale from smaller queer content creators, article writers, and authors, before he writes those creators off as "straight people making content to pander to gays" or "boring gays who survived AIDs(???)," and then tries to shift the blame for his plagiarism onto his co-writer.
It's so ridiculous that he's gotten away with it so long after many people have called it out, and as hbomberguy said, it's so messed up that James implies he's the only queer content creator while he steals from and denigrates the work of *real queer content creators.*
this. he is a predator.
A lie can grow overtime too
for point 24, the audacity of this man saying that the fight for marriage equality was so rich gays could have "big gay weddings" when it was actually about how the partners of people dying from aids had none of the rights that a spouse of a dying person would normally have - visitation, making medical decisions, being included in wills, etc. this is a well known aspect of the fight for marriage equality, ESPECIALLY in the 90s, and for somerton to say it was a bunch of "boring gays" not in the community....it's sickening
The way his delivery changes from dry, dead eyed talking at the camera to excited and just so happy to talk about sticking it to some imaginary straight women is so off putting
The AUDACITY of him calling the LEGAL RIGHTS, PRIVILEGES, AND PROTECTIONS associated with marriage and military service BORING.
Sorry, but this makes me so mad! Historically, seemingly mundane stuff like marriage or military service are big issues because they are both symbolic and legal acts. Marriages carries a huge amount of legal baggage, including such things that might have been important to AIDS crisis gays like being consulted and contacted by their partner's doctor, being allowed to visit them in the hospital, being able to inherit shared wealth despite a hostile or estranged family--not to mention basic rights of divorce, financial treatment by banks etc, ability to adopt children, etc etc. Military service is closely tied with the creation of the United States and with citizenship. Women, Black people, and others used military service long before the 90s to show their suitability for equality in the US since the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and then again in the the World Wars. The desegregation of the US military predates the desegregation of the south for godsakes. These aren't BORING positions, these are part of a WELL-UNDERSTOOD playbook for civil rights broadly, not just for gays.
I guess practical, legal/bureaucratic things that are actually helpful to the greatest amount of people day-to-day, can often be boring? The older I get, tbh, the more I appreciate attentive, deliberate, hardworking, competent, "boring" people.
it's not some adventurist casual sex meetup, so it's "boring".
Fuck military "service" (although I understand the principle of the thing being equality), but I 10000% agree with the rest of your comment!
@@4nn4heven if it isn't a good thing (I agree with you, it isn't, serving empire is bad), the main thing about access to military service which is interesting is that it's one of the few ways to build up enough wealth to become middle class if you're poor. It isn't liberation by any sense of the imagination but it is economic enfranchisement.
The claim that only "boring gays" survived the AIDS crisis is wild coming from someone who is almost wholly incapable of forming original thoughts.
Right?? Kinda seems like he's projecting.
He's the most boring gay of them all.
He creates a whole lot of original thoughts, they just have no basis in reality
He's quite possibly one of the most stale people I've ever watched.
It's very funny for him to call anyone else a "boring gay" when he's the human equivalent of a rainbow Citibank logo at a daytime Pride parade.
Here's something interesting: in his video, hbomberguy talks about how Somerton's video about Disney and the gay community was almost entirely plagiarized on the book Tinker Belles and Evil Queens by Sean Griffin (Somerton later claimed his video was "based on" the book). So when you mentioned some inaccuracies in the facts, I was wondering if those inaccuracies were also present in the book and... no. The part where Griffin mentions Howard Ashman's death and the Oscars ceremony, he only says this:
"While protesters outside the 1991 Academy Awards pointed out the homophobia of The Silence of the Lambs, which would win Best Picture, that same night Disney had been nominated for Best Picture for their animated version of Beauty and the Beast. The studio had used the release of the film to honor the talent of lyricist Howard Ashman, an openly gay man who had helped resurrect Disney’s animated features and who had recently died as a result of AIDS. At the Academy Awards, when Ashman posthumously won an Oscar with Alan Menken for Best Song, Ashman’s partner Bill Lauch came to the podium to accept the award." (p.99)
Somerton, under the guise of activism, discredits the actual queer sources he uses for his videos by mixing them with falsehood (his claims that Disney exploited Ashman's death). I'm glad his whole platform is gone now. Anyways, read the original book if you can, it's a much better resource and from what I've read so far is super interesting!!