More than that, in videos that last a few minutes uploaded weekly over the course of many months or years, many of these YouTubers-including Troye Sivan, Connor Franta, and Joey Graceffa, who today constitute a core community of vloggers with millions of followers and numerous lucrative side projects from books to music to coffee-come out in the process of vlogging and choose to invite viewers into that process. And a queer conversation wouldn’t be complete without a group of gorgeous gay men sharing their insight about everything from safer sex, dating, hooking up, PrEP, open relationships, and how. These themes of artifice, personality construction, and control are key to understanding why YouTubing-the act of vlogging (video-blogging) about one’s life on YouTube in a way that appears natural, unscripted, and entirely relatable-has become an important creative outlet for young gay men. In doing so, we also grasp the importance of control, avoiding situations where the mask could slip and the secret be revealed. Whether it’s because we’re uncomfortable in our own skin or that we’re in an environment that doesn’t appear to be welcoming of our sexual identity, we learn to construct and present a persona to the rest of society, including to family and friends, in order to mask the secret we are hiding. Often during our most formative years, the indeterminate period between coming to terms with our sexuality and sharing our identity with the world, young gay men learn the importance of artifice.
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