"I'm sorry" Transcript

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Hi, everyone. I'm sorry for taking so long to make this video or to say anything. I'm in the hospital; I've been here for a little over a week. I tried to do something really stupid. I'm only here now because, before I did it, I called my dad to talk to him one more time. He figured out something was wrong, called paramedics or 911, and they got here. I woke up in the hospital, and yeah, anyway, I'm not trying to make this a story; I'm just trying to explain why I've been so quiet.

I had a friend from back home checking my emails and stuff. But anyway, I want to say that I'm really, really sorry for the stuff in the videos not crediting people. For a lot of videos, I did the opening titles thing, tried to put like, "This is based on X's research or this person's book." But I know now that wasn't enough. That wasn't okay. There were a lot of times that stuff just got put in, and there was no attempt at crediting anybody. I'm really sorry. I'm not sorry that I got caught; I'm sorry for ever doing it. I honestly didn't realize that I was hurting people, and now that I know that I was hurting people, I'm just really sorry.

I lost my best friend because of this. Nick and I had been best friends since 2011 or 2012. We'd been friends online, and then he lived in Ottawa, and I moved to Ottawa so that we could be friends in person. We moved back to Nova Scotia, and Nick came with me. Eventually, we moved to the Toronto area, and we lived together for seven or eight years. We lived together for a really long time, and he hasn't spoken to me since this happened. Sorry, I said I wasn't going to make this a story. I should have got some context.

Again, I'm really, really sorry for the things that I did in the videos, copying people's work and not crediting them properly or at all. I also want to apologize for the misinformation and just outright lies that ended up in the videos. I can honestly say that I never intended for any of that stuff to be in the videos, and in most cases, I didn't write it. But I should have. It was my face on the channel, my name on the channel. I should have been more diligent about fact-checking.

There was a lot of really stupid stuff that's just so easy to check, and I just never did. I just took it for granted. I also want to thank hbomberguy and his team for setting up the fund to make some money available for the authors that were wronged and the journalists and writers. I want to help somehow. I don't know how. I've seen a lot of people online saying how much money I apparently make, and they're way overestimating. Beyond the fact that Nick and I split everything 50/50, they're still way overestimating how much money came in. The Toronto area is expensive, so there's not really any kind of savings. I'm moving home really soon without Nick; there's nothing for me here. Like I said, it's really expensive. So, I want to thank them for setting up that, and I want to help somehow.

The only thing I can think of right now is to make most of the videos public again. Every month, I can send the ad revenue from all the past videos. Yes, there were plenty that didn't have any uncredited stuff in them. I can make them public again, and then every month, I can send the AdSense to either hbomberguy's team so they can add to the fund, or I can start a fund myself. Every month, I can publicly say how much money was made on the AdSense and show it, sending that to the writers and stuff. I don't know what the system for that would be, but I'd be more than happy to do that. Some of the videos, like the "Killing Stalking" video, brought in a pretty decent amount of money every month, so that would be helpful, I think.

I also put either in the description or the pinned comment the names of the authors so that anyone watching the video knows where all the information came from. It wasn't me doing journalism; I never thought anyone thought that I was doing journalism on stuff, and I don't think anyone did. But the people who actually were doing it should have been given the credit they deserved. They did the hard work. All I did was edit a video. They deserved the credit.

Sorry about that; the phone stopped recording. Yes, they deserved credit, and when it was something like the recent history of Hollywood videos, right there in the opening credits, I put Vito Russo's name, that it was adapted from his book "The Celluloid Closet." The same thing went for the gay Panic video and the gay Holocaust video. They were adapted from two books, and the gay Panic video was adapted from a lot of journalism. I put their names right at the beginning of the videos.

But I understand that's not how citation works now. I understand that. I get it, and I want to do better. I know a lot of people hate me now because I did bad, but I want to try and do better. At some point, I'd like to make videos again. I'd like to do videos that are fully sourced, where I'll put a link to the script where you can find all of the sources so that everyone is properly given the credit that they deserve—for any kind of research that's done, credit for any B-roll that's used, whether it's stock footage or movies or TV shows or video games or anything like that. Have it all in there. I would like to become a really, really good example of giving proper credit to writers and journalists.

I know a lot of you watching this aren't really going to care and would rather I just disappear, but I would like to try to do better. I never, ever intended to hurt anybody. I never thought that's what I was doing before. I went to the hospital; I read a lot of stuff from people who were really hurt, not just authors and stuff, but people who watched my videos who were hurt by stuff in them. People think that I hate Ace people and women and bisexual people and lesbians, and that's not true. It's really not true. I'm sorry that stuff made it into videos that just shouldn't have been there, misinformation and lies. I promise you I did not write that stuff.

I should have been a lot more exacting when Nick and I would be editing scripts, but I promise you that those are not my thoughts. I specifically want to apologize to asexual people who feel like I just completely delegitimized you. Nick being Ace, I know it's kind of like, you know, no two gay people are exactly the same, and no two Ace people are exactly the same. But when it came to that, I would just kind of run with Nick's judgment and his observations and stuff like that. I'm not trying to throw Nick under the bus, which a bunch of people saying that I was setting him up, as doing which is not true.

This whole thing, Nick and I were 50-50 partners. It wasn't I hired him to have a scapegoat or something like that. I never hired Nick. Nick and I were roommates for years before I started doing YouTube videos, and then they started to people started watching them. I asked Nick if he wanted to help me write them, and he said yes. We started splitting the first the AdSense and then the Patreon and then the sponsorships. We just split everything. Nick was never supposed to be a fall guy.

God, I'm sorry; maybe I should have waited longer to do this. But yeah, I did not think those things, and I don't think Nick does either. I think it was just how fast we were writing stuff and how fast we were putting videos out was just too fast, and we weren't putting the care into them that needed to be put into them.

I've seen a lot of people on social media and other YouTubers even lying about me. But hbomberguy was not one of them. Just want to be clear about that except I was never setting Nick up to be a fall guy, and Telos was never a scam. It was never a grift or anything like that. I swear it was not. In the next couple of days, I'm going to send out a message to the supporters on Indiegogo and explain the whole situation in more detail to them because we were not super clear about everything that was going on with Telos. I understand why it seems like we weren't doing anything, but we were doing a lot of work on Telos. We just weren't talking about it because we made that initial first announcement for Final Girl, and that fell through. I'll explain that in the message I send out to the supporters, which I'm sure will end up on Reddit or somewhere.

After that, we didn't want to talk about it too much until we had something really concrete. I'll explain all of that in that message. Telos was and is not a grift. I was never going to take the money and run. None of the money that came in for Telos was ever going to be paying me or Nick. It was going to be paying queer actors and artists, musicians, things like that. I know there's been lots of talk about budgets and all this stuff, and people say I'm really stupid for thinking that a movie could be made for that little money. But there are examples of it being done, and I actually do have a work ethic.

Anyway, I do want to keep making videos, and I know a lot of you won't watch them, and that's fine. But I really liked making videos. We ended up making a lot of videos we didn't want to make because people were asking for them. So there were a lot of videos we made that we didn't want to make, and I think those videos are very clear on which ones those were. One of them never got officially released; it was released to patrons. Some patrons have shared it to other people before all the videos went private. A lot of people hate the analysis that Nick and I did on it, and so maybe it's good that that never got properly released because maybe it would have hurt people, and I don't want that. But I do want to make videos again.

Sometime I'd love to do retrospectives on important gay movies. If you watch the channel Be Kind Rewind, they're an amazing channel that does a lot of retrospectives on older Hollywood movies. I would love to do that for gay movies, a lot of gay movies people my age and younger just never heard of, things like Torch Song Trilogy and Longtime Companion and stuff like that. Movies from the '70s and '80s and the '90s, things that were really influential for gay Cinema that no one talks about. I'd like to talk about those, not just those movies, but how they got made and stuff like that. I would love to do something like that.

I swear on my mother's grave that there will be no copying people, only no copy and pasting. Every source will be cited in a document and on-screen. I actually liked doing research; I loved doing research, reading the books and articles and stuff like that. The part of me that was lazy was the copy and paste part instead of just putting it into my words and citing them properly and giving them credit. That's where my laziness came in; I wasn't trying to be malicious. That was just laziness. I promise, for anyone who does watch the videos that I make going forward, I promise that will never happen again. I welcome the highest level of scrutiny on the new videos.

As for Patreon, I'm going to reactivate it because I saw a lot of people on social media saying that I was probably going to reactivate it right on January 1st, so that everyone could get a surprise billing, and I could take the money and run. First of all, that was never my plan, and I'm not going to do it. I'm going to reactivate it now so that anyone who wants to leave, which I imagine will be the vast majority, can leave and not have to be worried about being billed again in January.

Yeah, so in closing, I, again, am incredibly sorry, and again, I'm not sorry because I was caught. I'm sorry because I honestly didn't know how much I was hurting people, how much harm I was bringing to the community because that's not ever what I intended. I wanted the channel to be a safe place. I spent so much time deleting comments that were hateful. I've recently found out that I wasn't being notified about that. I wasn't seeing comments that were in replies to other comments, so there were plenty of hateful comments in the comment section that I wasn't seeing, that were plenty hateful, and I didn't know that. But I wanted the channel to be a safe place, and it ended up not being a safe place.

For the information that kind of falls into two categories, one, I did the wrong research into historical things and other things. They're not what I wrote. Again, thank you to hbomberguy and his team for making the fund for the writers. I'd like to try to contribute to that somehow. If it's okay to make the videos public again and send all of the AdSense to the fund, it won't be all the videos because some of them had to be taken down because sponsors wanted them taken down. But I can put the videos back up with the sources properly put in, either for the videos that would be going up from zero. I could actually put sources like in the videos, which would be good. For the other ones that would just be made live again, I could put them in a pinned comment because I think people read pinned comments more than they read descriptions. Descriptions disappear a lot of places. Something like that, something so that I can try and it won't make up for what I did, but just something.

So, I'm really, really, really sorry. I hurt a lot of people that I really respect, and that really sucks. Nick, if you're watching this, I don't think you are, but I want you to know I miss you, and yeah, I want to do better. I want to do better. I don't expect anyone to just give me the benefit of doubt, but I want to show that I can do better, so I hope you'll let me do that. Again, I'm really sorry. I'm sorry about the things I did. I'm sorry that I disappointed you. I promise going forward I will do better. Thanks for watching and and I'm really sorry.