Out on YouTube: queer youths and coming out videos in Asia and America

Abstract

Coming out videos have become an increasingly popular genre on social media among queer youths and YouTube celebrities, and a few most popular ones have generated tens of millions of views combined that have also caught wide public attention from traditional mass media. This paper considers and compares two (sets of) coming out videos on YouTube from the Rhodes brothers in the United States and the Huang brothers in Taiwan that both became landmark social media and mass media events. It questions the normative narrative of coming out and the uneven flows of youth cultures and celebrity cultures online, where the visibility of certain social groups has masked the invisibility of other marginalized people. The critique extends to the "YouTube celebrity economy" and video-based female queer fandom, as well as the parents' responses and reactions to their children's coming out that have been recorded on video-an important part of coming out that is often overlooked in queer studies and youth studies. This paper offers a unique lens that connects online stardom and fandom to parental responses to coming out, shedding further light on global youth cultures, YouTube economy and queer celebrities, and parent-youth relations in Asia and America.

Stretched Kinship: Parental Rejection and Acceptance of Queer Youth in Chinese Families

“…Apoorva Ghosh (2020b) recently reviewed existing studies conducted mostly in Anglo-European countries on parental responses to young queer people's coming out, showing the complexity of the process from initial parental reactions to long-term attitude change that involves various forms and degrees of rejection and acceptance of queer youth. His observation parallels previous empirical studies that focused on the psychological identity transformation of queer people and their parents in the process of coming out (see Chrisler, 2017 for a summary) as well as emergent comparative studies on parental responses between the East and the West (Ghosh, 2020a;Wei, 2021) that have highlighted both the connections and the differences between the two.…”

“…This reframing is crucial when the very concept of stretched kinship has been adopted to understand young queer people's kinship negotiations in Western societies (e.g. Boyd & Wei, 2022), and when the issue of queer kinship has caught resurged academic interests both in the West and in other ethnic Chinese societies such as Taiwan, as discussed earlier in this paper (see Chrisler, 2017;Furstenberg, 2020;Furstenberg et al, 2020;van Bergen et al, 2021;Wei, 2021). The current study hence contributes to the recent developments in our understandings of gender and sexuality, kinship and family, and issues of mobilities and immobilities.…”