A return to form (even when there’s nothing, there’s still Dan and Phil)
In June of 2019, Youtuber and entertainment personality Dan Howell came out as gay in a 40+ minute video. It was startlingly honest, not in the sense that he’d previously been facetious, but more that it was the kind of authenticity and vulnerability one rarely sees from public figures. This was six years ago, marking both a momentous occasion for Dan, and a lesser but still exciting occasion for me, in that it was the beginning of this blog.
Yesterday, in another 40+ minute video, Dan and his creative (etc.) partner Phil Lester revealed that they’ve been in a relationship for the past 16 years. Over the past 24 hours, my entire Twitter feed has been taken over by the news, and I’ve exchanged countless texts (and even a phone call) about the revelation. I’ve struggled to figure out whether or not I wanted to write about this, given the facts that Dan and Phil made their video to counteract speculation (not that I’ll be speculating, really) and that frankly, I’m not entirely sure what I’d want to say. I’ve also struggled — for the past few months but to be honest quite longer — with the question of what to do with this blog. I started it the summer after graduating high school, and my posting rate has steadily declined; in these later years, all I’ve really published are school essays and annual “best of” posts. I also recently started a Substack, which feels more sophisticated and has more potential for readership. All in all, I’ve been left with this conundrum of what to do with this space, because I surely don’t want to delete it, but I don’t really want to keep it active, either. What better way to do a send-off of sorts, then, than to write about the people who started it all?
When I think back on the largely unregulated access to the internet I had as a child, I’m astounded by the fact that all things considered, I turned out fine. I didn’t fall into any strange rabbit traps, I had enough wherewithal to avoid talking to strangers and I generally kept to myself, resulting in an internet usage defined by The Things I Liked. And when I was in middle school, I liked watching Youtube. These years serendipitously coincided with what’s now referred to as the “Golden Age” of Youtube, when the platform suddenly became a viable career option for many young people, who found rapt audiences of millions. It was a time like no other; Youtube “challenges” were invented left and right, Fall Out Boy had recently returned, One Direction was at their peak (I pointedly avoided them, though we can unpack that a later date), Marvel movies were on the rise and the phenomenon referred to as “SuperWhoLock” ran rampant everywhere you turned. Tumblr was more than a social media platform to house these interests, it was damn near a way of life.
With this “way of life” curated online, and especially with the advent of Youtubers as new age entertainers, the line between audience and creator was incredibly blurry. Conventions such as VidCon and Playlist Live gave fans the opportunity to meet their favorite personalities, but even beyond that, the very nature of Youtube resulted in people getting attached to the personhood of these creators. Or, well, perceived personhood.
When you admire an actor or singer, it’s usually somewhat if not entirely to do with the art they create. Even comedians, while more inherently personal in their craft, must be funny to earn your claps. Youtubers, on the other hand, were kind of in a different boat entirely. They were funny, sure. Creative, of course. But much of the success of their videos, in the most reductive and capitalistic of ways, had to do with how well they were able to package and sell a version of their personality. Of course, this resulted in viewers thinking they knew these Youtubers on a personal level. Parasocial relationships have existed since the concept of celebrity has existed, but the internet has definitely heightened it as an issue, and the unique position Youtubers were in put them more at risk of being the subject of a parasocial relationship.
I give all this background to try to explain, on some level at least, the absolute pickling that my brain endured in these formative years of my life. And again, as I said before: things could have been so much worse. I could have been watching the Paul brothers, but instead I, by almost pure happenstance, chose people such as Dan and Phil.
Things were far from perfect, of course. Being who I am, I rarely interacted with anyone online, whether they were fellow fandom members or the creators themselves. But the same cannot be said for many young fans online at this time. Youtubers were poked, prodded, asked invasive questions and so much worse. Every single one of the big creators of this era is bound to have a dozen stories at least about what they endured at the height of their popularity. It’s just that Dan and Phil have been the subject of some of the worst of this harassment, and they’ve also, now, talked about it.
I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of what went on in the Phandom (Dan and Phil’s fanbase). One, because it would take too long, and two, because it honestly feels a little disrespectful to rehash it all. What I will say is that they, perhaps more than any other major Youtubers of their time, were scrutinized and harassed about everything under the sun. Were they dating? Did they have girlfriends? Were they gay? Did they secretly hate each other? What kind of cereal did they buy at Tesco? Their addresses were leaked, a Valentine’s Day video Phil made for Dan also leaked (I feel the need to say here that I never saw it) and they were routinely the subject of mocking questions from members of the press who either willfully misinterpreted them or chose to not give them the time of day.
For Dan especially, who had, in his own words, an “extremely homophobic childhood,” all of this attention and dissection was the last thing he needed. The Valentine’s Day leak nearly broke him and Phil, as did the months leading up to their joint gaming channel hiatus. And though they came back and came out in one fell swoop after a posting hiatus, there was still an element to this farce they had to maintain. “There are certain things,” Dan says in yesterday’s video, “that are just basic facts about a person and their life, and to avoid talking about it makes you seem completely weird.” Namely, in recent years: the fact that Dan and Phil live together in the house they designed together, as two gay men who’ve said they were in a relationship in the past (while still somehow remaining opaque about their relationship in the present). The two of them also say in the video how maintaining friendships with other people has been difficult, because their two options were to either lie to their friends (therefore precluding a true friendship from blossoming) or to bring their friends into their lie, meaning their friends would then need to maintain the front as well.
It goes without saying that this is an extremely difficult situation to be in. I’m not here to comment on that situation, because it’s both over and not really my place to comment on. I am here, though, because yesterday something happened that I thought I would sooner die of old age than find out. I don’t say that as a slight; with everything that Dan and Phil have endured for over a decade now, no true fan would blame them if they decided to fully withdraw from the internet. However time and time again, they’ve returned and worked to provide humor and (simply put) goodness to the world. Phil, in the video, says they “played the long game” when it came to their announcement. And to a degree, it’s true that invasiveness on the internet is nowhere near as bad now as it was around 2012, when crazed One Direction fans hacked into airport security cameras to see their favorite pop stars wait for a flight. What’s also true, though, is that the corner of the internet that Dan and Phil have carved out for themselves and their fans is a tenfold more positive space than perhaps anywhere else online. People have found friends and spouses in the Phandom, and there’s a self-policing that emerged towards 2015 in regards to outliers who chose to continue to try to invade Dan and Phil’s privacy. None of this would have been possible without Dan and Phil’s own efforts in curating this space. They’ve been open and vulnerable when they’ve had every reason not to be, and in doing so, have encouraged their fans to be courteous and caring in return. In more recent years especially, they’ve opened a sort of dialogue with their audience in which they speak directly to viewers in sit-down videos, with brevity and respect. There is no place in the world like the Phandom, and even as someone who was nominally involved when I was younger and is almost as entirely uninvolved as one can be right now, I know that.
In more ways than one, Dan and Phil are the last remnants of a time I otherwise don’t care to remember. Truly, who wants to relive or rehash their middle school years? When I wrote my first blog post here — the reflection on Dan’s coming out video — I mentioned that the two of them were some of the last remaining Youtubers I still watched or cared about. Somehow, six years later, this remains true. In some ways I do feel as though I’ve grown out of them (I had a moment after I attended Dan’s solo live tour a few years ago, where I realized that perhaps this wasn’t for me, but that this was also okay), but in other ways, I think we’ve grown together — well, as much as people who straight up don’t know each other can. My frontal lobe has literally developed nearly in its entirety in the time that I’ve been watching them, and I’m not the only one. Much of their audience is in the same boat, and this is part of the reason why Dan and Phil are able to make a video like this one and expect a (relatively) mature response. And generally speaking, that response has been there. There’s this rather funny situation myself and others are in at the moment, in that we acknowledge that ultimately their relationship is absolutely none of our business and therefore we’re trying to be Normal about the announcement, yet at the same time there’s an inkling of parasociality left within us, causing us to feel this strange and perhaps unearned sense of pride on their behalf. Dan and Phil have grown up in front of us, just as we have grown up on the other side of the screen. Despite keeping their relationship close to their chests, that too has developed in front of our eyes, alongside their careers and ambitions. Witness to it all, the good but especially the bad, it’s difficult to not feel any kind of emotion about this. Sometimes all you can do is be happy for the people you don’t know but certainly know better than a stranger, then call it a day.
This blog might have reached the end of the road, but in all likelihood, I’ll still be watching Dan and Phil videos for as long as they make them. This is the last post I can think of that genuinely fits the vibe (so to speak) of this platform, and is better suited here than Substack or anywhere else. It felt like a full circle moment to write this, one of those rare ones that actually deserves acknowledgement. So with that, I bid you godspeed, fare thee well, et cetera, et cetera. Most things aren’t forever (and this blog wasn’t), but Dan and Phil very well might be.
The video, if you’re so inclined (weirdly I think it’s actually a pretty good introduction to who they are):