I could be both gay and nerd at the same time without being shunned for being one or the other.
I wish I had the time to write a dissertation, oh my God.
I started down the (short) path to becoming a Nerdfighter about a year ago--saw the videos, had seen some in the past though they didn’t really register in my mind--because what I saw before me was a lot of things.
I’m a literature student, and I’d actually heard of John Green as a writer before I’d heard of him as a Vlogbrother. I know how preposterous this sounds, at least to me, as the Nerdfighter movement easily transcends his novels. In fact, I had bought The Fault in our Stars as a Christmas gift for my sister: I saw it on the top Amazon books of the year in 2012, recognized the author as someone I’d wanted to read for a while, and saw the label “Young Adult.” I knew she was into young adult fiction, so I bought it for her, hoping she might lend it to me once she was done. She really liked it, of course (and we’ve made promises to see the movie together when it comes out [or will make promises, I’ll see to it {Don’t you just love convoluted parenthetical passages that end with three different kinds?}]), and then I read it and also really liked it. Really there wasn’t much more to it for me; maybe it wasn’t life-changing, or inspiring, for me. It’s just a really damn good novel, with a positive role model for a subset of people who deserve the kind of representation this book gives its readers. So, I read it, and I loved it. And then I started watching the videos.
I’m one of those few (?) Nerdfighters who decided they wanted to trek through every single Vlogbrothers video of the past. Now that was a huge challenge for me, because imagine watching a TV show that had over a thousand episodes, even if they were all four minutes long. That’s still 70 hours or so of TV, which, believe it or not, is a whole lot longer than most current TV shows get in the limelight. And as a gamer, in gameplay terms that’s longer than most common JRPG’s. Going through all of those videos was a real time investment for me, but I like to think it was worth it, because what I saw was this winding narrative, this plot consisting of two brothers and their community of do-gooders, fun-havers and fans. Watching the Nerdfighters grow from this little YouTube community to something as large as it is today is truly an experience to behold. I find myself wishing I could have been a part of that peep-eating, book-clubbing, brother-punishing, forum-posting, wonderfully awesome people that started and launched the Nerdfighter group. Sometimes I wonder if Hank and John remember or think about those times when they were so small, when they began each video with “Brothers on a Hotel Bed” by Death Cab for Cutie.
That community broadcasts a message of acceptance I’d never really seen before. If you were gay, whatever, that’s cool. Nerd? Obviously you were accepted. And I am both of those things.
Part of the issue I face both in the nerd and the gay communities is that, if either of these communities have anything in common, it’s a disparate and distant relationships; they have nothing in common, and it might not be too wrong to state they actively dislike each other. Slowly they’re starting to come together lately: comics and video games are utilizing more LGBT- friendly characters, and I’ve started to meet more and more “gaymers,” too. But the Nerdfighters space was the first group where I found I could be both gay and nerd at the same time without being shunned for being one or the other. It is literally the most accepting community I’ve come to find myself in.
I don’t really know what else to say. The Nerdfighters and the Vlogbrothers mean a whole lot to me. And, yeah, Hank and John make me laugh.
-Zachary Armstrong (bad-wolfos.tumblr)
