Culture Slut: How YouTube Became an Integral Queer Archive
Words: Misha MN
Make it stand out
Picture this: It’s 2008, your parents finally have broadband internet and you get your very first laptop as a hand-me-down. You are alone in your bedroom and, at last, the internet is all around you. You go to YouTube and pause at the search bar. The entire history of the world is at your fingertips - what is the first thing you are going to look up? You check your firmly closed door to make sure no one is about to walk in and start to type. “Gay…” Gay what? “Gay Music Video” seems as good a place as any to start. Your heart flutters as the results load, and you catch your breath when you see hundreds of videos listed. You’ve been alone, isolated for so long, but now, you see that there is a whole world out there just waiting for you.
The first gay music video I watched was called Soccer Practice, the cult song put out by almost-pop star (now turned TV host and comedian) Jonny McGovern, then known as The Gay Pimp, and it was eye opening. The video shows an American frat boy type being led through a series of homoerotic sports scenes by a hilariously 00s looking gay fairy godfather, featuring gogo boys that looked like Sean Cody models and Black trans cheerleaders that danced in six inch heels. It was a mix of comedy and genuine erotica, and it made me feel things that I'd never felt before. This was more than the snatches of porn featuring men that I’d seen before - a glimpse of a Playgirl centrefold or a Butlers In The Buff calendar - this was a whole creative project, media made by gays and for gays, and it was lifechanging.
After that first gay music video came many more, some with higher artistic pedigrees, and some with much worse. I remember being transfixed by the moving visuals for the Sigur Ros song Viðrar Vel Til Loftárása, a muted slow motion epic showing the innocent first love of two adolescent boys on the same football team; a beautiful, delicate romance that quickly gets torn apart by angry parents and preachers. I remember tears rolling down my cheeks as I watched.
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This was before I found queer cinema and it seemed like the closest I’d ever get to seeing myself on screen. OK2BGAY featuring Tomboy was a drag queen fever dream that seemed less focused on making a good music video than making sure every queen on set was having a fab time.
Another favourite wasn’t a music video at all, but a clip from some American TV show. A college student is presented with a troupe of drag queens and he must identify the “real woman”, which of course he fails to do. It stands out to this day because the diversity of the queens on display was honestly miles ahead of Drag Race’s standards during their first decade of production, with Black queens, Asian queens, trans queens, and even an appearance from the New York legend Princess Diandra.
From videos like this, you were led to other early gay internet personalities and the archives that showed their queer lives in the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era. The 5NinthAvenueProject channel is an absolute treasure trove. It’s an archive of videographer Nelson Sullivan’s exploration of the New York downtown scene in the 80s, up to his death in 1989. The videos were uploaded in 2012 and feature a myriad of queer culture makers and stars before they were stars.
In the most intimate kind of verite filmmaking, we see a down-on-his-luck RuPaul stalking around a bodega and talking about letting men touch up on him for money so he could pay his rent. James St James and Michael Musto dance on the street outside a club while they wait for their friends to turn up, and a young Lady Bunny wheedles Nelson behind the camera for coke money. As I grew older and started consuming more media about nightlife and art history, this archive became more and more prescient. The film Party Monster (2003) was a perennial favourite, but here, in Nelson’s videos, you could track down the real people from that film, listen to what clubs they spoke about and who would be there. It was a deeper connection with the film, a dive into its source material, and it was incredible.
“Many may complain about dating apps and comment sections and corporate memes and brain rot, but that initial thrill of finding connection, of discovering kinship and community, will never go away.”
As Drag Race started to find its feet and become the cultural juggernaut that it is today, access to all the queer nightlife legends became more simple. The World Of Wonder YouTube channel started putting out great quality content, focusing not just on Drag Race, but on its own rich history with queer media. I recently wrote about living legend David Hoyle and his original television series The Divine David, which was uploaded in its entirety to the WoW channel. David dances his way through a video apocalypse giving Wildean pronouncements on Art, Fashion, and Fitness, amongst other things. In one of the most memorable videos - and one of the most relevant today - the camera slides into an extreme close up of David’s face, a maniacal glint in his eye, who then brings his chin down and says “The world is burning, let's masturbate!” Truer words were never spoken.
One of the greatest resources that WoW put out, in my opinion, was the James St James series Transformations. The premise was simple, every week a different make up artist and/or drag queen would come and put James in a new look whilst being interviewed by him - each episode was gold everytime. The format allowed James to shine in the way that a great interviewer can, bringing out the best in his subjects, allowing the more introverted to talk about their visual art practices and the more outgoing to elucidate on the importance of nightlife and costume.
The range of guests was also a triumph, a wide mix of young up and coming personalities, and legends of the scene. Mathu Andersen, the creative director of RuPaul’s look from the 90s to the mid 2010s made multiple appearances, alongside luminaries like the Infamous Boom Boom, Ridge Gallagher and Ryan Burke. One makeup application that I remember so clearly was done by the artist Boychild, who subverted the idea of it being a straightforward makeup tutorial and made it instead an ever-evolving painting performance piece whilst talking about art. The series was so important because it not only was very entertaining, but it gave internet queers the gift of knowledge. You could enjoy a ten minute video from an artist and then explore them on your own time, delve into the deep rich history of queerness that pervades our world, despite conservatives best efforts to wipe us away.
Queer presence on the internet is important and will never go away. No matter what threats we face as marginalised people, or as an intersection of oppressed identities, the internet will document it all for the rest of time (we hope). Many may complain about dating apps and comment sections and corporate memes and brain rot, but that initial thrill of finding connection, of discovering kinship and community, will never go away.
To know our history is important, both in the grand sense of dates and timelines of historic events, but also to know what it looked like going to a nightclub in 1987, how drag queens addressed each other in 2005, what was considered funny and sexy in the year you came out. Queer art is forever evolving, as is queer life, and nothing can ever take our histories away from us.
