“The old camp performers of the mid-Twentieth century saw themselves as performers, and they weren’t in the business of revealing themselves and engaging in the audience. Crocker’s realness (whether true or perceived) helped lead the way for future vloggers to build an audience based on personality and pop culture criticism. Michael Strangelove, a lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa and author of the 2010 book Watching YouTube: Extraordinary Videos by Ordinary People credits Crocker as helping to bring camp performance to the digital realm with the attempt at being genuine. Now, YouTubers who post coming-out videos still face public criticism, but vloggers share their experiences to a more welcoming audience.īetween Crocker’s early performance and character-driven videos and the authentic “Leave Britney Alone” clip that followed, new media academics acknowledge that his influence over the future LGBTQ vloggers has been instrumental. He spoke in a soft falsetto, had dyed blond hair and, at the time, was not presenting as fully male. A decade ago, the online LGBTQ population had not yet emerged on the video-posting platform, and anonymous commenters left harsh messages and death threats on Crocker’s videos. This combination proved accidentally successful for Crocker and opened the floodgates for the YouTubers of today, especially those in the gay community. With the video, now 10 years old, Crocker incorporated pop culture and an inflated version of self, which hit the sweet spot in terms of comedy and perceived authenticity. “That moment was a slice of the real me,” Crocker says. “If anything ever happens to her, I’m jumping off the nearest fucking building,” he said in the video, titled “Leave Britney Alone.” Following Britney Spears’ unfortunate “comeback” performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, where shoddy lip synching and sloppy dancing caused her to face public ridicule, Crocker, sitting against a backdrop of a white sheet, thick bands of black liner tracing his eyes, broke down in tears defending the star from critical bloggers like Perez Hilton. That is, until he released pair of videos in early September 2007. I never planned on being my authentic self.” “Everything you did was to make people laugh. “YouTube was where I could play a character and be able to tell it like it is,” Crocker tells Rolling Stone on the phone from Tennessee, where he still lives.
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