Like a lot of people who post videos of themselves on YouTube, Kristina Cecil wants the world to know a few personal facts:
She is an avid hiker.
She is a Minnesota Vikings fan.
She is a member of the United States Air Force, which is the fulfilment of a lifelong dream to serve in the military.
And she is gay.
“It’s really nice to say that now, because the whole ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ has been repealed,” Ms Cecil, a 22-year-old with short-cropped blond hair and a tattoo on her right arm, said excitedly to the camera. “I’m just really happy to say that I’m gay, and I’m an American airman.”
Ms Cecil’s on-screen declaration, shot in her disheveled bedroom, is one among a wave of coming-out videos posted by gay soldiers on YouTube in recent weeks. With ‘National Coming Out Day’ this past Tuesday, less than a month after the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was repealed, the genre of military coming-out videos gained force this week.
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Eric Marlowe Garrison, an author and clinical sexologist based in Manhattan and in Richmond, Va, who counsels many gay soldiers, said he personally knew “12 to 18 people, possibly two dozen” members of the military who planned to come out by video on National Coming Out Day. Some planned to make their YouTube videos public; many intended to make them available only to viewers of their choosing, at least for now.
Some videos are by people simply sharing their coming-out stories; others are part of a process, falling somewhere between coming out to one’s loved ones and, ultimately, to anyone with an Internet connection. With a few exceptions, most videos appear self-produced with a single fixed camera filming the subject speaking directly into the lens. Editing and scripting is absent or minimal, and the sound is at times out of sync. Nearly all are charged with emotion, as the soldiers work to express and control a complex sequence of feelings that run from joy to defiance.
“I’ve never been able to do anything like this before due to the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ thing,” said one 21-year-old Coast Guard member (username “dthurst121”) about making a video as an openly gay man.
Pfc Hugo Valencia, a 21-year-old Army reservist, said in an October 11 video that he had thought that staying silent about his sexuality would be easy. Over time, he discovered he was wrong.
“It used to feel like you were walking around with a piece of tape over your mouth: you couldn’t say anything,” he said. Now, “I can put a picture of me and my boyfriend on Facebook, once I have a boyfriend, and it’s safe. Everything is better.”
YouTube has been a hotbed of coming-out activity of late. Many video makers, military and civilian, point to Randy Phillips, 21, an airman stationed in Germany, for inspiration. Mr Phillips’s videos of his phone calls home to tell his parents he is gay have garnered more than five million views in just a few weeks.
According to a YouTube spokesman, more than 5,000 videos identified by the term “coming out” were uploaded to the site in the week leading up to October 12; more than 12,000 were uploaded in the month leading up to October 12.
The coming-out video may owe its existence to the new social norms belonging to a generation weaned on reality television and social networking, said Dr Joseph Cilona, a Manhattan-based clinical psychologist. “In many ways, teens and young adults of today have literally been bombarded with the normalisation of the disappearance of stigma around sharing personal information,” he said.
For soldiers effectively sequestered on military bases far from home, coming out online has its logistical advantages. It is efficient (everyone can watch the same video) and comfortable (viewer reactions are hidden). Sharing news into a camera is already second nature to soldiers accustomed to online video chatting with services like Skype.
But there may be dangers inherent to coming out online, Mr. Garrison said. “I don’t think some of these people understand that this is still the World Wide Web,” he said. He pointed to his previous experience as a high school coach and teacher, a job that, despite his being out, he believed demanded a bit of personal and professional discretion. One’s “grocery list” of whom to come out to — and when — benefits from careful curating, he said.
“On YouTube, you don’t control that grocery list anymore,” he said. “Everyone becomes an A-list invitee to your coming-out process.”
Still, coming out, through whatever means, is crucial to self-actualisation and growth, Mr Garrison said. For Marcus Prince, a soldier in the Oklahoma Army National Guard, it was a matter of survival. In a video celebrating the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” he revealed that he had been consumed by suicidal thoughts before coming out. “I constantly was always thinking ‘life would be better if I was not here,’ ” he said.
Coming out changed that. “I’m not hiding who I am anymore,” he said.
