‘My coming out story’: Lesbian, gay and bisexual youth identities on YouTube

Videos in which young lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people discuss their experiences of coming out are highly visible on YouTube. While work from Cultural Studies perspectives has long explored how LGB youth construct and articulate their identities online, few studies have focused on YouTube. Through a study of 35 YouTube coming out videos, this article argues that through these texts, LGB youth are able to articulate what it feels like to be queer in a straight world, and produce and circulate strategies for negotiating a contemporary cultural context defined by increased visibility of LGB identities, alongside the continued dominance of heteronormativity. These strategies, I argue, correspond with broader imperatives to ‘authentic’ self-representation which traverse contemporary social life, and which are emblematised in practices of YouTube video production. As such, YouTube coming out videos offer a unique vantage for exploring how the medium specificities of YouTube, and broader norms of selfhood, shape how LGB identities become intelligible in the digital arena