I don’t usually write about internet drama because a) that’s not really what I do here and b) I’m always paranoid about attracting the wrong sort of attention. I’m just a little guy, over here in my corner writing up my weird stories and random thoughts about popular culture, I don’t need any heat.
But I’m going to do it today because I’m not exactly writing about the drama, more about something the drama has exposed. It has caused a revelation, of sorts, and forced me to look inward and examine what’s there.
I don’t fucking like it.
Holy Shit, This James Somerton Guy is a Piece of Work
Briefly, just in case you’ve somehow missed this (it’s a big internet, after all), James Somerton is (was?) a video essayist on YouTube producing hour long videos. A gay man, his focus was on queer media studies, with videos exploring queer theory and meaning in stuff like Disney, horror, and anime. I question whether he’s still going to be on YouTube for much longer because on December 2nd, YouTuber hbomberguy released a video with two full hours documenting how Somerton has been plagiarizing other creators, just, like, wholly lifting text from other books and articles and reading them straight-faced into the camera like he wrote it. Less than twenty-four later another YouTuber, Todd in the Shadows, released a second video, also almost two hours, revealing that every time Somerton isn’t ripping off other people, he’s making up the most poo-flinging, bugfuck crazy lies you have ever heard in your life.
Todd in the Shadow’s video is here.
If you think I’m embedding a four hour and a two hour video into this article, you’re insane.
You owe it to yourself to even just skim Todd’s video, because after I finished hbomberguy’s video I thought, ‘oh, this Somerton fellow is pretty unscrupulous and lazy,’ but after I finished Todd’s video that changed to, ‘Oh, this guy is crazy crazy.’
Which made it feel all the worse that I had recently started watching Somerton’s videos and hadn’t noticed anything.
It’s All the Algorithm’s Fault
I watch a lot of video essayists on YouTube. A lot of them are made by queer creators. And I love vampires, although I’m not sure exactly how YouTube caught wind of that. Maybe I just listened to the Olivia Rodrigo song on repeat too often, I don’t know, however it happened about two weeks before hbomberguy’s video YouTube started recommending a video called “Vampires, and the Gays That Love Them.”
(While Somerton has practically nuked the rest of his online presence, including his Twitter and Patreon, all of his YouTube videos are still up, albeit with the comments disabled. I’m still not going to link the videos myself because honestly, fuck that guy, you can find them yourself if you want.)
The thumbnail was Nadja from What We Do in the Shadows, a show I love. I still resisted for a while, because the video is close to an hour long and that’s a lot of time to risk on a guy I had literally never heard of before, but eventually I had the time to try it and gave in.
And I liked it.
Worse, I believed all of it. Despite being into vampires I’ve never actually read any of Anne Rice’s stuff, so when he said vampires in her books can’t physically get erections I just took it at face value. I even repeated it to my husband later as a fun little tidbit.
The Todd in the Shadow’s video linked above goes into how not only is this incorrect, apparently the wording of the books might mean that Rice’s vampires are erect all the time? I don’t know, but given five seconds of thought ‘always erect’ makes way, way more sense than ‘never erect’ in Rice’s universe.
I watched two other videos, “Neil Gaiman & Queering Fantasy,” and “The Campy Sensibilities of Barbie,” and still nothing really stood out to me, even though that first video also has some bullshit debunked by Todd about how Good Omens came about. Before I had the time to watch any more, the bomb had gone off.
In My Defense
I will say, none of his lies in those three videos are as completely insane as what he says in others. If I had first been presented with Somerton’s video “The Gay Body Image Crisis,” where he insists American GI’s signed up for WWII specifically because they were jealous of how hot Nazi soldiers were, I would have immediately recognized how insane that thought process was and been turned off
Or, if I had seen “Evil Queens: A Queer Look at Disney History,” one of the videos that started all of this and is now not-so-suspiciously absent from his YouTube page, I would have been put on high alert because this time I know the topic being discussed. When he claimed Gay Days was put on by Disney I would have recognized it for bullshit. I lived in Orlando for thirteen years and was a Disney Adult before that was even a term people used. I know a lot about Disney World history, and his claim that Disney had any official LGBTQ events would have jumped out at me, as it did to others, because Disney has been walking a very fine line with their queer fans and their parks for fucking decades. All queer events at Disney have been completely unsanctioned, organized by others, but never actively blocked by Disney, either, because this way they could gather that sweet, sweet cash from both their queer and bigoted fans. They held their first officially sanctioned Pride Nite this fucking year (2023), potentially because they wanted to kick Ron DeSantis squarely in his oddly-shaped balls (citation needed).
In the three videos that I watched, there was nothing nearly as insane as ‘American joes weren’t turned on by Soviets in their puffy coats,’ and there was nothing I was already knew, so all the lies just sort of…flew by me.
But that doesn’t make things better.
I Think That Makes It Worse, Actually
There’s a reason that the way we describe people falling into conspiracy theories and the like is with terms like ‘pipeline’ and ‘rabbit hole.’ You can’t just knock on a person’s door, start screaming in their face that the moon is actually a sentient being who watches us all and causes us to die of old age and if we blast it out of the sky we could all live forever as gods, and expect them to fucking follow you to your van to join your anti-moon army. You have to work up to that shit. Lure them in with something that kind of, sort of makes sense if you squint, and then take them deeper from there.
So that’s what was happening with me, right? I watched some of his more normal, not-fully-insane videos and thought they were okay.
And while I’m mostly focusing on his insane lies here, it’s important to note that part of the reason myself and other people were willing to believe all that shit is because he stole well-written words from other authors to make himself sound serious and trustworthy. His videos are about 95% salient points stolen from other people bridged with 5% “I’m pretending I don’t but I really hate women.” And before you have time to process that 5% he’s back on the stolen goods sounding better than ever.
I could have just kept going through his backlog, and maybe by the time I hit some of his more unhinged points I would have just rolled with it.
And that fucking terrifies me.
I Am Not Immune To Propaganda
I have known this on a factual level for years. It is so, so easy to see other people falling for things that are, to you, obvious and outrageous lies and think to yourself, ‘that could never happen to me.’
But it can happen to all of us. All of us. Just because you can recognize some propaganda as transparently obvious doesn’t mean you’re not falling for another form of propaganda at the exact same time.
And this guy was tailored to fly under my bullshit radar. At surface level, he’s very much like a lot of the other YouTube creators I watch. I had his videos on in the background while I played a game, so I wasn’t watching the screen the whole time and missed that his sources, when he bothered to pretend he was presenting them, weren’t presented correctly. He talks calmly, and with authority, and honestly a lot of the stuff he lies about it’s like…why would he lie about it? It’s like when that picture of the Pope in a puffy coat was floating about and then it turned out to be AI generated. I saw that picture and believed it because why would someone lie about that.
And even if I eventually had hit a video that made me realized he was full of shit, at that point I would have been full of his other lies and maybe I wouldn’t remember where I had heard them. I would still carry a lie as a fact, telling it to other people, propagating it, all because I didn’t remember I had heard it from the shit-seller.
At least now I know one of the ways I might fall for some bullshit, so that’s a silver lining. It still sucks I watched any of his content and believed it, and I only got three videos in. Because as much as its important that we all know we are not immune to propaganda and have to constantly be vigilant, constant vigilance is exhausting and it’s so much more fun to imagine that we are above it all, too smart for any of the conmen and grifters to touch us.
Unfortunately, that line of thinking gets your wallet stolen at the gas station.
High Urban Fantasy Jazz 