I think that this video /was/ him coming out. Disguised by him finding happiness. Like he was saying. To be happy he had to be true to himself and to he true to himself was to come out. And of course he did it in a very Dan way and made it offhand but lingered at the camera long enough for us to /know/.
I object to that because I object to the general idea that you have to have a coming out in order for it to be accepted that you aren’t straight. What makes this a coming out when all the other things wasn’t? Why is this a coming out when Dan literally saying in 2009 that he was bisexual wasn’t? Why is this a coming out when him talking about wanting to sleep with the male and female characters on ACS wasn’t? Why is this a coming out when Dan talking about watching anime for the male swimmer’s abs wasn’t? Why is this a coming out when his line about blurry sexuality in his diss track wasn’t? Why is this a coming out when picking male and female people in the Tinder video wasn’t? I could keep going for ages listing example, because Dan has been throwing this shit out there for years now.
I mean, I get where you’re coming from, and I do agree that this was Dan doing something a bit more than he ever has before and in a very Dan way. But to say that this is his coming out means that you rejected everything he’s done previously as not enough to verify his non-straightness - none of which was all that subtle and all of which seemed to be Dan lowkey trying to say please tell me you get this please say you understand what I’m doing here because this is the way I’ve chosen to do this. And a lot of people get it - but it’s suffocating how many people don’t believe someone’s sexuality as non-straight until they file some official paperwork on it. Because it’s a reminder that most of the people in the world are going to require you to come out before they accept you, that you never get to just hint and have people take it in stride. That as a queer person you will always, for your entire life, have to endure either people defaulting you to heterosexuality or you’ll have to go through the exhausting, vulnerable, potentially dangerous process of clarifying in explicit terms unendingly. Which is a reality - like, that doesn’t stop because I say I don’t like it. But it’s still something I want to try to fight against in whatever spheres I have influence.
