Daniel Howell on coming out, returning to YouTube, and why we’re all doomed
two years away, ‘hibernating’, as he puts it (hence the whole bear and Jesus thing), the 30-year-old delighted fans by promising to make YouTube his home once more in his new comeback video – plus he’s going on a world tour, with his show We’re All Doomed.
So how did we get here?In 2020, after a year away, Daniel returned to YouTube with what is now one of his most famous videos, Basically I’m Gay.
In the 45-minute epic, he revealed he’d come out to his family and was now coming out, publicly, to his six million subscribers (and, by extension, kind of the whole internet).‘I was feeling chaotic and excited, which is also how I feel a lot of the time,’ he recalled to Metro.co.uk. ‘I didn’t know whether people would be interested because I always have this thing that I like to tell myself, “Dan, nobody likes you.
You’re terrible. Just go crawl away to a shack somewhere. It’s fine. You’ll be doing the world a favour.” ‘Then when I post it and then someone’s like, “Hi, I enjoyed this,” I have this surprise moment where I go, “Oh my god, I literally wasn’t expecting that.”‘‘I didn’t even accept that I was gay, full stop, no matter what that meant, positive, negative, the consequences of me saying that, or anything, until I was 27 and I was writing that video,’ he added. ‘Because in the back of my mind, it was just “I am not going to think about this.” And it took me literally pulling the plaster off, trying to write something about it for people’s entertainment for me to actually be honest with myself.’Shortly after the video, however, Daniel disappeared again (a tendency of his that we decided to dub ‘the Adele effect’ during our chat) and he became convinced he would never return to YouTube.
