Dear Tyler Oakley,
Today, you relinked to your video about National Coming Out Day 2008. I’ve been subscribed to you on YouTube for about a year and following you on Twitter for several months, and I’ve always loved your content, but today I really felt a difference. I’d seen that video before, having watched all your videos at one point or another, but seeing it again after a such a long time seemed like a new experience. You’ve been known to make me laugh and make me consider different viewpoints, and today took that to a new level.
I am straight, but even as a kid I never understood why “gay†was bad. I found the whole concept fascinating and unique, not strange and awful. I was a fairly sheltered child, so it was often difficult to differentiate between the truth and what other people told me. But for some reason, I knew that being gay wasn’t a problem, and that’s an attitude I’ve kept with me since.
One of my closest friends is gay, something I only found out about a year ago. He/she is still not completely “outâ€, but is planning on revealing his/her sexuality to his/her parents soon. He/she was afraid at first to come out to even me, afraid of the judgement at hatred that comes with living in a fairly rural town. It hurt me that he/she was so fearful about revealing what he/she cannot control, and from then on, I’ve become more and more involved in the civil rights agenda.
My school newspaper that I am a reporter and an editor for had to ask me to stop writing articles about gay marriage, because it was upsetting a lot of students and I wrote about it too much. I’ve been in countless arguments with the people who tear down “GSA†(Gay Straight Alliance) posters and people (ok, boys) who find nothing wrong with female homosexuals but everything wrong with males. I hate the hatred, not only because it is unwarranted, but because it doesn’t make sense.
I admire you for standing up for what you believe in through a media that is known to be so volatile; the internet. I admire you for not only speaking your beliefs but also not being afraid to show your face as you speak them. So many people hide behind the anonymity of the world wide web, nothing they say seems real. But you are real. I don’t just admire you, however. I thank you. I thank you for including and accepting everyone, no matter their sexuality, their gender, their race, or their age. I thank you for giving people hope. And I thank you for giving so many teenagers, myself included, the strength to find themselves, because it’s not an easy road, but it’s the only one worth traveling.
Regards,
Bri
