In case you doubted how much Phil loves Dan...
So I’ve seen a lot of people talking about Phil’s coming out video and how it’s so casual and low-key, and how it’s obvious that he was just waiting until Dan came out to post it, but idk if people really understand what a big deal it is that Phil JUST posted it now, in 2019. Like ok, I’m 25 and a YouTube grandma, and I can go ahead and attest that in the early days of YouTube, coming out videos really weren’t a thing. YouTubers started out being primarily creative types. Even vloggers didn’t share a lot of genuinely personal info. There was kind of an open understanding that some people were Not Straight, but it wasn’t really a big deal until Troye Sivan made his coming out video in 2013. That WAS a big deal, because a lot of Troye’s fans were girls who had crushes on him, and he had been really closeted and pretty vocal about liking women right up until he posted the video. So post-2013 was really when the curtain fell and a lot of YouTubers became much more open about their personal lives. That was also when a lot of YouTubers felt like they had to make public “coming out” videos. There were a few (Tyler Oakley for example) who had been vocal enough about their sexuality from the beginning and never really made one specific “coming out” video, but most LGBTQ+ YouTubers did drop some sort of “sexuality announcement” in the early to mid 2010s.
So with that being said, I don’t know how many people actually know this, but Phil was…kind of already out when he first started his channel. Like he said in his new video, he came out to his friends and family while he was at uni, which was when he started his channel, and he never really tried to hide his sexuality in those older videos (although most of those old videos are private now). Like a lot of YouTubers’ older content, Phil never really had one video where he was like “Hi, in this video, I’m going to explicitly tell you that I’m gay!”, but the friends he hung out with used to talk about dating, and it was always assumed that Phil was dating guys. I believe there’s also some old, old receipts of an ex-boyfriend talking about dating Phil. All of this was pre-Dan. (This also makes Dan sliding into Phil’s DMs make a lot more sense. He wasn’t taking a totally random long shot. Everyone who watched Phil kind of already knew that Phil liked guys.)
The original Phan shippers didn’t come from nowhere. OG AmazingPhil fans knew he was into guys, and Phil had this one guy who came to visit him in 2009, and then they moved in together, so everyone just kind of assumed they were dating and went on from there. It wasn’t until Dan’s semi-public “I’M NOT GAY” breakdown in 2012 that we all went, “Oh, ok. Whatever’s going on here is…private, and we really shouldn’t talk about it publicly.” I think there’s an obvious reason that Phil didn’t make a “coming out” video with all the other old-school LGBTQ+ YouTubers once that became expected. He knew that coming out publicly would automatically put the spotlight on Dan, and he wasn’t willing to do that.
All of this to say, Phil didn’t wait to come out of the closet until 2019 because he was nervous, or didn’t want people to know. Phil started his YouTube channel already out of the closet. Phil WENT BACK INTO THE CLOSET for Dan. To make sure Dan was safe and protected and comfortable, Phil didn’t talk publicly about his sexuality for TEN YEARS. Whatever they are to each other now, whether platonic or romantic, that’s genuine love. When Dan says they’re soulmates, he’s not exaggerating.
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