This story appears in VICE magazine and Broadly’s 2018 Privacy and Perception Photo Issue. Click HERE to subscribe to VICE magazine.
I discovered coming-out videos late in life—or at least, at 26, later than everyone else. They’d been there for years, these YouTube clips of LGBTQ vloggers opening up about their sexuality, but I’d dismissed them as irrelevant to me—too saccharine, too earnest. I had already gone through the emotionally fraught, complicated process of coming out. Why would I want to watch other people do it?
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Still, I fell down the rabbit hole. I started with Rose and Rosie, a married couple who live in Hertfordshire, England, and make videos from their living room where they bicker, tease each other, phone up their exes, and make out on camera. This formula helped them to accumulate 155 million views* on Rose’s YouTube channel and more than 30 million on Rosie’s.
“These TWO FUCkerS are The REAson I REIlizaD I WAS gaY AND afTER WATCHING THIS I REMEBER WHY,” wrote one fan under a compilation video of Rose and Rosie kissing.
I told my girlfriend, Emily, about them as though I’d discovered some new, untrodden pocket of the internet. “Rose and Rosie, Emily and Amelia… We could have made a fortune by now,” she told me.
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