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 RU-vid: 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.
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 😭
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
@@lord_ozymandias Nah, not enough recitations of ancient poetry. I only recently read the actual books after years of soaking myself in the lore of Middle Earth, and I gotta say, that might be one of the more annoying aspects of Tolkien to me. I get he was trying to establish the deeper mythology of the setting with them, to make it feel like a world with a long, storied past. But man, does it bring the narrative to a screeching halt at times. Especially in the Fellowship. It gets a lot better once things get a bit less...leisurely, I guess is the word I want.
@@jorgeluz9560 Fair advice. The only problem for me is that I actually _want_ to know more about the Elder Days, and that is what makes up a lot of the content of the poems and songs. I'm often really interested in the origins of fantasy/SF worlds, their ancient, nearly forgotten history, etc, just like I am with real life. Also obscure pieces of lore and suppositions, like the Lurker in the Lake possibly being one of the "nameless things" Gandalf saw in the depths of Moria, which "gnaw at the world," and are older than even Sauron. It's the edges of worlds and the things beyond the bounds of the characters' knowledge that most catch my imagination, I guess.
@@Nixeu42do you watch in deep geek? He does some excellent deep dives on this kind of thing! (also if you're into norse stuff at all, the children of ash and elm is an amazing book about the norse imagination/the invisible world that surrounded them)
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@finallyforfeited 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
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.
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 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
fun fact this is toddintheshadows's most popular youtube video after almost many years of discovering toddintheshadows videos were pop music topics and sometimes album topics of failed miserably
The funniest part is that you don't even have to look it up to know it's not true. RHPS in widely known as a cult classic (probably even THE definitive cult classic,) which explicitly means that it failed at the box office! How could anyone think it rescued a whole film studio?! But, ya know, I'm glad Todd looked it up and brought the receipts.
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 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
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.
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
@@MineralTown my favorite green lantern, kyle rayner, is a sensitive rags to riches artist. he had a young intern who was gay and had to let him down easily bc everyone mistook him for a gay guy. 😭 then when his intern gets hatecrimed, he finds the guy who did it and nearly beats him to death :) truly a great subplot its awesome
@@MineralTownyup! Very much on point. Comics were historically made by the "outcasts". If I remember correctly, even Superman himself was made by jewish authors, as a "parody/reclaiming" on th Ubermen concept. Comics have always been woke.
"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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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?
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
“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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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??
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.
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 ...
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.
@@iwakeupandboomimaratyou probably had this vibe because JS’ behavior is/was similar to toxic tumblr users who used their marginalized identity as a bludgeon people into submission, except on youtube. my brain basically kept comparing JS to Riley. iykyk
You forgot the part where he would just wholesale make shit up for no reason. Honestly, on paper at least, James has *a lot* in common with the Alt-Right crowd.
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
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.
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
Complete tone shift, but it makes me think of Jenny Nicholson's talk about how Episode IX Sheev Palpatine should've returned "smooth and sexy". Maybe that's real in the Somerton Timeline.
I’m not defending people who write fan fiction about Jeffery Dahmer, but he has no room to criticize them given how he talks about literal goose stepping nazis. Glass houses Jim, glass houses.
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?"
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
I'm also so confused. I'm not sure I could watch more but like he seems to be complaining about too many abs but also seems to be weirdly invested in adding weird LGBTQ nuance? None of it seems to be leading to any sort of helpful conclusion or cohesive so arguably he's against the abs while talking them up. But also it's all his weird take unfounded by anyone else's sources so possibly just his weird WWII take.
Guy obviously has a creepy fantasy about dodging the camps by blowing an SS officer. And wants to make everyone believe said fantasy is rooted in reality. Shudder.
@@cupguin Assume he's mad that gym bro types won't go for his fat ass and it starts to make a degree of sense. Hell, his BS about what used to be attractive before gym culture is a badly disguised effort at describing himself. "I'm hot and if you won't get with me you're a fascist," seems to be the thesis of the video.
It is so funny that he fell for literal Nazi propaganda. In reality, Leni Reifenstahl had to hire extras outside the party's official ranks because she was furious at how paunchy and unattractive the actual Nazis she had to work with were.
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.
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.
"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)
It feels like he either has some level of pro-Nazi sentiment or has a weird fetish for them with how much he tries to insert gay men into a regime that violently oppressed and genocided them. Its really disturbing to hear someone claim that a large amount of the Nazis were gay and it makes me utterly sick to have our community roped into that kind of revisionism.
Ernst Röhm is the only one I can think of that was openly gay and he got publically executed for it. In a weird way the "most nazis were gay" conspiracy theory is similair to everyone's idea of Caligula. Most of the claims of a gay SS were basically homophobic propaganda, albeit aimed against a horrible government. Most accounts of Caligula were written by his political oponents.
It disturbs me. Ernst Rohm by his own admission was bi not gay, but homosexuals are the ones who have been the target of his supposed queerness as a cudgel.
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
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.
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.*
Me after learning about the plagiarism: This cannot get any worse James Somerton: Americans fought in WWII because the Nazis were just so unbelievably hot 🥵
The sheer audacity of rendering the storming of the beaches at Normandy to the Squidward meme of "Oh no, he's hot!" is fucking unbelievable. Holy shit 😂
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.
Every time James says "straight women" with those audible scare quotes, it raises my hackles because I've been through the tumblr wars long enough to recognize when people are using that term to mean "Queer women and trans men that we think are fakers" And given that in Hbombs video, there's evidence of him misgendering and straightwashing the targets of his vitriol when it's convenient for him, I'm gonna trust my instincts on this one.
He also has literally misgendered afab trans people and called out bi women straight. He wasn't even being subtle about it...and honestly his fans are kinda sus since he seemingly went on misogynistic rants so often
@workchannel8053 Shit like that from Tumblr, Livejournal, etc are exactly why I was terrified to come out as a lesbian after thinking I was bi for years. I was so afraid people in my own community would think I was a "Fake." It took close to a year for me to get up the courage to come out online, let alone IRL. IMO, his constant shade at "straight white women" is ~en vogue~ PARTLY because of the cultural backlash against Karens/white feminism historically overriding people of color, but also because, yanno, ~it's always okay to shit on women~ /s. Which means he's just capitalizing on racial discourse so he can feel good about, and get away with, his own misogyny. It doesn't help that, at least in my opinion, there's a legitimate conversation to be had about the demographics of BL and/or yaoi and/or m/m shipping, but let's be real: James does not deserve to be at that table of discussion--or ANY, involving queer folks.
@@damien678 he also sometimes switched out trans for queer/lgbtq+ in the plagiarized texts... that alone would be only sus but with all the context it feels like intentional erasure
@@potatopotayto8332this imo (besides all the blatant misogyny and the erasure of the actual trans people telling stories) gave me the biggest red flag. big TERF energy (possibly without the F?)
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
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.
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 Gays in the 90’s section made me incandescent with anger. First, as someone who turned 21 in 1995, the aids pandemic had been in full swing for a decade and a half so, like every other gay man of my generation in the western world, I grew up knowing to ALWAYS use protection. There were bowls of free condoms and lube in literally every single gay associated space, literature hanging by the doorways of every gay establishment. People were still catching and dying from aids, but it wasn’t the “good ones”, it was anyone. My generation built on what was achieved in the past, but our battles weren't only workplace discrimination, but also quite personal. Should you find yourself in the position where your partner was hospitalized for whatever reason, you could be denied access to them because you weren’t a family member. There are so many documented cases where the extended family of someone (especially if that extended family were religious) ostracized and cut off their loved one’s gay partner, denying them visitation, kicking them out of their own homes- I had a friend who was attacked by the family of his recently deceased partner at the funeral, his “mother in law” ripping a necklace he had received from his partner from his throat and stealing it. That’s why we fought for marriage rights, not because we wanted a “big ol’ gay wedding”. Like, fuck this guy. EDIT; Also, both Cats and Ghostbusters were written in the 80's, and both were written by straight men. At the same time as straight man Andrew Lloyd Webber was getting Tonys for Phantom of the Opera, big ol' boring gay Stephan Sondheim was not getting Tony's for Sunday in the Park with George, which was not a thing that happened in the 90's, but a thing that happened in the 80's. I mean, he's off by a decade for anything he's saying to make any kind of sense, right?
I would'nt call myself an lgbt activist but no one should be denied access to their loved ones in health care or a funeral event. Its outright shameful. Stuff like that is why people say "there's no hate like christian love."
That section literally made me see red. It's so deeply offensive to people that went through such trauma. Literally trivializing their pain and horror. Disgusting
I think James is projecting a little bit with his weird obsession of this idea of “good gays” who are wealthy and conservative. He comes across as very elitist IMO
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 reveres 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.
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.
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
The idea of marriage equality being a boring, conservative issue when it was born out of people not being able visit partners dying of AIDS and losing custody of children because they weren't officially recognized as their parent is so twisted. He doesnt just make up facts, most of these facts seem to be the opposite of the truth just so he can pretend he's the first one to report on it or something stupid like that.
He's also forgetting that it was lesbians and other queer women and nonbinary folks who also took care of some of the gay men who were dealing with AIDS, especially when they didn't have partners and their families disowned them. The AIDS crisis is what really solidified the modern queer rights movement.
For real. Before gay marriage became legal, there were documented cases of gay men adopting their partner as their son so that their partner could be listed as next of kin and inherit if they died or listed as legal guardian of any children they had together. Marriage is so important when it comes to civil rights issues. It isn't boring, it's literally needed in so many things in everyday legislation. It's not just AIDS either, the "don't ask, don't tell" military policies in the Clinton era caused so much heart ache for partners of serving personal who died in combat. They couldn't see bodies, or retrieve personal items from their loves ones and sometimes didn't even get informed they had died, if the soldier in question was estranged from their family and they recieved the letter instead. Marriage equality was so, so important. To call it "boring" or to make out it was a side issue is just so insulting to so many gay partners who suffered before it became legal.
Somerton's Straight Woman is the new Schrodinger's Cat. Are they clutching pearls at the slightest hint of the gay, or are they perverts salivating over it? Whichever fits the narrative he's swinging for, sometimes both in the same video.
yes, most absurd is, that i think straight men are more uncomfortable with gay sex, than straight women, so really i don't know why he hates women so much.
@@IamAlmostRealWitch I have a feeling it's because at least straight men serve a function of being a sexual object for him, but he has no use for women so he completely disregards them, which is basically a classic incel mindset but with the opposite sexual orientation.
he could have made the argument that they clutch pearls in public and salivate like perverts in private, but that’s not the line he takes. somerton is simply not very good at constructing arguments or thinking critically about the stuff coming out of his mouth.
@@buhguh-r8g I think you're right. Straight men can be a kink, you know? Like, *obviously* (who wouldn't think so?), the nazis. *shudders* (Straight) women, on the other hand, are completely useless (to him).
The funny thing about the “straight women hate the gay sex” take is that it’s the opposite complaint that I usually hear about this subject. It’s usually “straight women fetishize gay relationships and gay sex”. Apparently James hasn’t been in the fanfiction community.
Except he also complains about straight women fetishizing gay men! It’s not that both of these problems can’t coexist-they can and do-it’s that he generalizes all straight women to be both homophobic prudes and gay fetishizers simultaneously.
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.
Maybe it's just me, but as a bi person, the idea that a lot of his lies seem to be about fake homophobic reactions to media strikes me as harmful. There's enough real homophobia going on, why manufacture fake outrage over things that never actually happened? Why not put a spotlight on ACTUAL backlash/problems? It's so gross to me.
yeah it's bizarre. i distinctly remember the backlash to royal red white & blue. a lot of it was from the daily wire, not random straight women on social media. why miss the opportunity to target the very real ongoing harm the daily wire does to focus on bogeymen??
And then also erasing actual homophobic backlash by claiming Well of Loneliness was given a pass because the topic of lesbians made British officials too uncomfortable to prosecute it, when in reality the UK ordered every available copy of her book destroyed because that's what they actually do when something makes them uncomfortable.
Bro could've looked at the most common right wing news media for backlash. Making shit up is his technique to cover up being THAT lazy in researching ☠️
Coming for HBomber's video, it seems like he wants to portray himself as the sole person that talks about these controversial problems. So, him making stuff up is not surprising since you would never see his made up stories elsewhere, so it would appear that he is indeed the only one talking about these things since... you know... they aren't real.
Nazi fetish is a bit too strong of an accusation imo. I think he made a bogus fake history video lying that the gay male fitness and body building community has inherent origins in Nazi ideology in order to justify his personal dislike of them
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".
@@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.
I hate that narrative. The aesthetics of working out, and being in good shape is not Nazism. The Soviets, not exactly friends of the Nazis were extremely about physical fitness.
why can’t Janelle Monaé’s “Pynk” be about both female empowerment AND queerness? it’s so weird that Somerton was trying to imply that female empowerment was the “wrong” and “distracting” public opinion.
Exactly. I dont think he knows anything about Janelle Monáe or the music or what the song is about. He just wanted more ammo against his imaginary war against straight white women. Also, he called Janelle Monáe bi. No, they identify with being pan. That is the label they have used since they came out. But he has a long history of getting labels and gender wrong so I am not surprised.
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
I have never seen a gay man spew such homophobic rhetoric. His implication that gay men-especially in the mid-late 20th century-were all flamboyant, artsy, sex addicts is so deeply insulting to his own people.
@@geekygecko1849STEM is boring. You should be an interesting gay like Somerton: make hour long videos where you read off of Wikipedia articles and make stuff up.
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 one small line about WWII really pisses me off because it shows that James never even finished high school history. “Remember, Japan attacked America, but American boys signed up to go fight in Europe.” YEAH. BECAUSE THERE WAS THIS THING CALLED THE AXIS POWERS, JAMES. THERE WAS AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN JAPAN AND GERMANY, JAMES. THAT’S WHY IT WAS A WORLD WAR, JAMES!!!
The Cold War bit has me upset. Not only was he wrong about the physique of the Russians, it was called THE COLD WAR. There were no direct battles for soldiers to go see the enemy and then go write home about, it was a giant stare off between Russia and the US and trying to make the other flinch without even touching each other.
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.
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.
The claim that Rocky Horror somehow saved Fox is even more laughable considering it's a pretty famous part of the film's history that it was initially a box office flop. It didn't start becoming profitable until it built up its cult following as a midnight movie.
Like the whole point of the movie is the shadow cast, which only started because it flopped. That should be some pretty common knowledge for a queer youtuber who talks about movies.
Also, there is a 12-year gap between Cleopatra and Rocky Horror! Fox films between these two include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Cabaret, the Poseidon Adventure, Patton, the French Connection, the Towering Inferno and Young Frankenstein.
Yeah it's claims like that where it seems like he's just punking his audience to see what he can get away with saying. As you said, anyone who knows Rocky Horror knows the basics about how it flopped initially (plus the fact that it was YEARS after Cleopatra...)
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
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
@@Chimera-man-man It's like when I heard "the Incas made lots of different potatoes. potatoes are super versatile across hundreds of elevation levels" and started telling people "WOW THE INCAS MADE HUNDREDS OF POTATO CULTIVARS" without really looking it up. I was like 19 though, James is like, what, fifty
I almost cried hearing him so blatantly accuse gay people in the 90's of not caring about so many important aspects of activism. James is so horrendously toxic and spiteful. It makes me sick
You can tell that Somerton couldn’t be bothered to watch ATLA because he assumed that everyone in that show is white because of their “fair” skin. Literally most, if not all of the various tribes and nations are based on eastern cultures (exception off the top of my head is water tribes being based on inuit cultures). He looked at names like Aang, Toph Beifong, and Sokka and went “Yup. White.” But then saw Korra with her darker skin and went “Oh Nickelodeon must not have liked this show cuz they don’t like dark skin.” Also some of the most famous Nickelodeon alumni are literally black, so he has no clue what he’s talking about.
@@TacticusPrime I went to the Nickelodeon hotel once in 2013, a few years before it shut down (I was like 7), and Aang was literally plastered everywhere in that hotel. On the front check-in building, on the waterpark complex, etc.
@@canyounotmydude9155 Is your brain broken? Avatar aired from 2005 to 2008. In 2013 Legend of Korra was airing. If they were supporting Avatar, then it should have been Korra who was everywhere. By 2013 they had been forced to accept the popularity and quality of the original show, obviously. They were making a sequel show, though they also disrespected that show too.
@@TacticusPrime Korra was getting mixed ratings, but it was not because Korra was bi lol. Ratings were high in the first season, but began declining because Nickelodeon moved the show around time slots…. And also the channel itself was generally declining in viewership at that point. And also you included the original show in your argument. Aang’s inclusion at the hotel was just a tip of the iceberg rebuttal
Also the claim that only the ""interesting"" gays got AIDS. Newsflash, James: you don't have to sleep around to get AIDS. That whole segment was so fucked on every single level
Seriously, I cannot imagine having to survive the aids epidemic and being a pariah on top of that. I feel like a lot of people these days don't realize how absolutely horrifying it really was.
He also fails to understand how the trauma of the AIDS epidemic led to push for marriage equality. Imagine watching your partner of a decade slowly die and as they get worse you have no legal recognition of your relationship with them. You have no say in their care, their final wishes, or anything. You can't even see them in the hospital because you aren't actually family. Instead, family members who haven't been a part of their life since they were 18 control everything. You don't even get to hold their hand and tell them you love them on their death bed. Imagine how traumatic that was to an entire generation of queer people. Of course they would fight to their relationships legally recognized and protected after that.
"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
As someone who lives in a country where gay marriage is illegal I find it insufferable the way he constantly harps on the gays who just want to get married.
@@CuriousKey He totally is. He's even worse than your average homophobe. He's a wolf in sheep's clothing who says and does harmful shit to queer people under the guise of progressivism.
I also cannot stand his general smugness about things he does not know about. Like in thr aforementioned "boring gays are the ones who survived drivel here. and the way he has talked about children and youths in some videos. Like in the killing Stalking one, shitting on teenage girls because he THINKS they are the ones at fault for romanticizing abusive relationships in media and in J.k Rowling one, saying shit like "petty as an 8th grader. Oh but I'm sure there are a few good ankle biters here and there" Fvck off! This kind of bigotry is unnaceptable just as much as if I said "dumb as a black man, but I'm sure that there are a few smart ones here and there." Or conservatives blaming rap music for police brutality. A)He knows as much about youths or teenage girls as a starfish knows sbout string theory. B) He really ought to hold his fvcking tongue and use his apparently idle ears more when it comes to lived experiences of other people.
@@CuriousKey kinda like Kissinger saying basically "if not for the misfortune of being born Jewish [he'd] be antisemitic" :/ (not an exact quote, but the effect)
What shocks me about Jame’s mistruths are how many are based on jealousy. This is best seen in the “The Gay Body Image Crisis”. In that video he mentions his struggle with weight, and how much he’s been rejected because of it. While this is understandable and relatable, it really casts the prior “facts” in this and other videos in a different light. Instead of just being a misunderstanding or just laziness, it’s purposeful, self-serving misinformation. All those fit gays who rejected him were actually inspired by N*zis. The “soft bodies were desirable but only if it was correctly distributed” is simply self-affirming lies. “See my body type used to be desirable! That’s how it should be.” This can also be extended to his perspective on “boring” gays. He mentions in a podcast that he hasn’t been in a serious. relationship in over a decade. So all those boring gays (aka the ones in committed, long-term relationships) were just elitist, unsympathetic rich people, fighting for marriage equality just because they wanted to have weddings. A much more eloquent way of saying “that fact I’m not in a long-term relationship means I’m interesting artist and fighting for the common man!” Of all the videos he made with false information, the “boring gay” video is probably the most obviously intentional misinformation. James is about the same age as Todd, therefore old enough to have lived through the 90s. Even as a Canadian kid/teen he would have seen the activism for protected rights on the news and at least have a slight understanding as to why gay marriage was so damn important. So he KNEW he was misinforming the young queer people in his audience, and didn’t care because he was jealous of what he didn’t have. And if he is in any way a similar person in real life to his online self, the weight is probably not the true reason he’s been single for so long. Being a boring, disingenuous, self-absorbed jerk is.
@@marychouvarda6875 I didn’t think of it that way, but you’re right. He hates women, hates attractive/ fit men, blames others and society for being constantly rejected, thinks he is a lot more intelligent then average, and seemingly has no self-reflection whatsoever. I really hope this experience leads him to better his life and truly change to become a better person. But I doubt it.
@@kikicogger2284I mean, he is gay. I don't think it's entirely fair to imply that he shouldn't blame society for being constantly rejected. Sure, a lot of it might be due to his selfishness and aggression, but he probably is coming from a background where he was unfairly rejected. This comes across as a little bit like victim blaming marginalized people.
His statement about the Rocky Horror Picture Show is such a bad lie. The movie is infamous for how it bombed brutally but got a cult following years later. That's arguably the most well known fact about it. Him saying that it saved Fox... Who would fall for that?
Actually that section contains another massive inaccuracy. People who don't bother to check these things assume that Cleopatra was a huge box office bomb. Actually audiences flocked to see it and cinema owners were overjoyed with its performance. The film was just so absurdly expensive to make that Fox has no chance to make its money back, especially since its length limited the number of screenings possible per day
Young people who weren’t around at the time of either the original or subsequent runs. Common thread, he’s trying to get clicks from younger queer people who don’t know any better.
@@brandelynnefreleng7597 to be fair, I have geek parents, but I absolutely knew of Rocky Horror as a cult classic. Maybe I wasn't aware of it being an infamous bomb, but I knew it wasn't an instant hit either.
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 RU-vid, and Joel and the bots make it a LOT easier to watch.
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
I can say with some confidence, that never in judicial history has a jury booed anyone. Who the hell boos people outside of a theatre? Oh, of course, James Somerton, the archetypal theatre club bully.
Somerton switches from "gay people are so oppressed" to "gay people are always being pondered to" not even from video to video but segment to segment, it's what would catch him out (for me anyway) in those particular videos...so many contradictions.
@@gRinchY-op5vr i mean from certain perspectives this is certainly true, because often gay people do not get treated as equals (especially globally etc) and are only valued in conversations when they are being marketed to, but i dont think James would or could ever talk about that nuance. he just uses that to go "people hate gay people" and "gay media/products bad" when the discussion goes much deeper than that and many people and companies only view LGBTQ people as human or valuable when they can squeeze money out of them or they can be of use, but that wouldnt fit james narrative
@@carolinemcgovern4488 Like, if he'd said the jury booed the murderer after he was sentenced, then it would still be a lie, but at least a believable one. "The jury voted the man guilty then booed the judge when he was declared guilty" is such a 180 I'm surprised no on e called it out sooner.
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.
1:21:38 "Girl how much sexuality do we have to rub in your face to be acknowledged exactly?" is such a clunky phrase I'm just assuming he stole it from somewhere and rewrote it to sound different. Also what the fuck was that delivery?
19:11 hi, it’s my tweet he’s referencing sayinf im a heterosexual woman offended about gay sex. firstly, thank you for clarifying i’m in fact not a heterosexual woman, the assumption and erasure of my sexuality really set me off when this all occurred on twitter. also, at that point i hadn’t even seen the movie, it was in response to a tweet about that specific scene. i then went on to watch the movie cause the tweet blew up and felt i should probably get educated, great movie imo! if he looked at my replies at all he’d see id said i appreciated a more tender approach to a gay relationship rather than the ones i think are seen in modern media. (only found out this all happened cause my friend told me but just wanted to comment on it in case you see to say thanks cause acc who does he think he is??)
girl honestly that tweet was funny but lowkey answered my question too as someone without the anatomy 😭 you didn’t do anything wrong sorry somerton caught you up in all this, you seem lovely
you are icon girl, your himbo energy in the tweet is so funny. see, you simply asked a question about something you don't know about, but that offended James tremendously bc he would have just made sh1t up
a screenshot of that tweet came up on my tl during rwrb season and i remember thinking it was so funny 😭 thank you for giving me a laugh you’re an icon
You can now cross the "I made an innocent question on Twitter and then someone on RU-vid with an agenda made it part of his content before he got exposed as a fraud." off the list!
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.
@@kwarra-aneven 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.
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
"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.
@@navyblue9355 You'd think it's the other way around anyways since lesbophobia is a combination of homophobia AND misogyny. It's a double whammy of bigotry for gay women. Meanwhile, homophobia against a gay man has NOTHING to do with the fact that they're men and EVERYTHING to do with the fact that they're gay. Sexism just really doesn't play a part there. He knows this, too. He knows how good he has it compared to the rest of the community, and he needs a way to keep justifying his hatred. The truth is, he's envious of people who are more oppressed than him. He's so out-of-touch about how oppression actually works that he thinks we can just hide behind our oppressed status and say whatever we want. It only works when he does not because he's not truly oppressed- he only ever knew how to create the illusion of being so. I'm glad the rest community is ousting him. He never deserved to be as big a part of it as he was in the first place. Real queer folk don't tolerate intolerance, even when the call is coming from inside the house. Simple as that.
A misogynist, a bi-&-trans-erasing fantasist, a plain old racist, and a massive raging narcissist. Forever punching down on those he says he respects and cares for.
he also seemingly has never taken even a little peek into fandom circles (duh he stole all his content), that alone would have disproven his point about "straight women" clutching their pearls over gay content. ironically enough the movie royal blue he brings up has a 5 star rating. i've seen movies on amazon tank completely, and often for fickle reasons (often it's black movies for example) royal blue did super well, what in the world is he talking about??
Okay no one's going to see this but Tolkien WAS disliked in Oxford academic circles... because his research output after 1937 was minimal and it was felt that he should get out of the way for a younger academic with more energy. Tolkien's inability to publish anything substantial in his field meant that he was frequently strapped for cash (well, for an Oxford don) and had to spend his summers doing the grunt work of grading essays. His friend and fellow medievalist CS Lewis regarded him with some bemusement. No one in his inner circle took umbrage at the themes of LOTR. They were annoyed that he was a professor at the most prestigious university in the world in a very rarefied field and instead of writung monographs on Old English prosody he was wasting his time on elves. He was also an infamously disinterested lecturer, and even Tolkien studies people today admit that he kind of lost the plot after the seminal essay Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics. This is very thoroughly discussed in Norman Cantor's Inventing the Middle Ages, and I guess James might have read a sparknotes version of the Tolkien and Lewis chapters because he did get that the rest of Oxford didn't think much of him, but I suppose it's easier to make things up about LOTR than it is to parse through even the meager output of a dead expert in dead languages to see if the contemporary criticism was warranted
The idea that Tolkien would have been forced out of his position by his colleagues, the generation that fought World War I and sent their children to fight World War II, for including some messages about how war is bad in his novels is absurd.
Somerton uses "Ulysses" as an example of what the Oxford board would've been negatively comparing him to... I don't know the reception of Ulysses in the 1950s but it was highly controversial in the 1910s-20s on style and subject matter what with all the stream of consciousness, explicit sexuality and themes about Irish identity under British rule. My gut tells me that the upper echelons of _1950s Oxford_ would not look kindly on that book, but I'd need to do further research on it.
@@ralphjackson2518 Well, as the world's expert in Old English, he could have maybe published a Beowulf translation when he was alive? I've seen letters between him and the Icelandic scholar Sigurður Nordal and it's like dude you could easily just convert this conversation into an article. Really did waste all his time on elves lol
Criticizing people for Jeffrey Dahmer fetishizing, while at the same time doing the same in multiple videos about the Nazis is pure cringe of the highest degree.
He also argues that women fetishize Dahmer because he was gay, and later mentions women who fetishized Ted Bundy (who was not gay). I guess his lie contradicted the facts he stole.
I've read DisneyWar a few times and I have to say, while a minor note in it, I found it pretty touching how surprisingly accepting Disney was of Howard Ashman's orientation. Remember the 90's was particularly bad for gay folks, and you'd expect a bunch of corporate Disney suits to be awful to him but no. Jeffery Katzenberg in particular deserves mention; While Howard was getting treatment, Disney by Katzenberg request built a production unit near his home so he wouldn't need to travel to work on Beauty and the Beast and could keep being treated. Like Todd said Katzenberg asked Howard's partner to accept his Oscar. Beauty and the Beast is dedicated to Howard in the credits. Everyone at Disney loved Howard and respected him for the talent he was. It was a nice feeling and nice reminder for a queer person like myself that people can surprise you and most folks are more accepting of your orientation than you might think. So of course James takes that and injects his made up garbage that paints it as another "the straights hate you" story. Hbomb brings that up in his video that James videos have this underlying tone of "If you are LGBT you will not be accepted, the straights (especially women) are out to get you, nobody will accept you, you are isolated and alone". Dude has a persecution complex and wants everyone else to have one too. Its a pretty unhealthy message to send to young queer folks imo. James Somerton is such a nasty piece of work. There's a documentary from 2018 called Howard thats worth watching. It's clear in that how beloved Howard Ashman was.
