Video transcript is on the left. Misinformation is highlighted For more info, see how to read this site

[James speaking directly into the camera, which is either smudged or overexposed, as things are a little foggy.]

Uh, just a disclosure: this video is monetized, but revenue from it will be sent along to HBomberGuy's team to be dispersed to the people whose work I plagarized. Uh, if his team won't accept it, I'll be making monthly donations to Wikipedia and Trans Lifeline going forward.

Uh, you may have also noticed that a few of my past videos have gone up on the channel again, and revenue from those, as well, will also be sent along with the revenue from this video.

Over the last couple of months, I've been getting in touch with the people who I plagiarized... to apologize one-on-one, instead of a mass apology. It's a bit difficult because many of them don't have public email addresses, so I'm still working on it. But it is a top priority of mine.

I've heard back from a few of them, and they were actually incredibly nice. Um, accepting my apology and just imploring me to do better in the future. So I want to thank them publicly for that. There's... plenty that I haven't heard back from, and I completely understand that. In many cases... uh... I wouldn't want to talk to me either.

I also want to apologize to my audience, though. You trusted me to be a good representative of the queer community, and I was not that. I tried to be. I tried to be a voice for every member of the queer community, but that was a... failed endeavor... before it even started. I'm a cis white gay man. No matter how much I try to be a good spokesperson... I can never really truly understand the life experiences of other far more put-upon members of the queer community. This is one of the reasons that I would use the their own words. But I should have made it very clear that that's what I was doing.

I never... ever... thought that I was the only voice out there, as some have said, but... being a cis white man, I thought I might be able to win over some people who... wouldn't otherwise listen, unless it was someone who looks and sounds just like them.

And so I tried speaking for everyone. And this was a horrible mistake. What I thought was being inclusive, ended up... leading to a lot of people feeling left out and even offended.

This fell upon Nick, as well, as a non-binary person on the ace spectrum, they wanted to include asexuality and non-binary representation in our videos. But because Nick's experience is not universal... (there is no universal experience...) people felt that we were de-legitimizing their own experiences... because we focused on Nick's, and I apologize for that. And I'm sure that Nick does as well.

Um, I'd also like to extend a personal apology to Jessie Earl, better known as Jessie Gender. Out of everyone that I spoke to who was... also a YouTuber, Jessie was by far the kindest person— I think Jessie might be one of the kindest people I've ever met— or ever encountered; we never actually met in person. Because of my hot headedness, I... drew her into just this... anger spiral of mine that was... unwarranted and... absolutely ruined a possible friendship.

Jessie was actually doing her best to kind of... mitigate my frustration an-and everything, a-and uh... at that moment, and... I just... wasn't allowing her to do that, and I really truly honestly want to apologize to her for that. Again, if you ever get the chance to speak with Jessie one-on-one, or if you have gotten the chance, you'll know just how nice she is, and how kind, and... I was a... a real asshole... for, uh... dragging her into my... reactionary... unwarranted frustration. We— obviously, we haven't spoke since all of that happened, um, but Jessie if you are watching this video, um... I do want you to know that I am honestly sorry.. for that. I hope... truly, honestly, I hope everything... goes as well as possible for you, because you deserve all of it.

There was a misunderstanding between Jessie and I, um, after that happened that I do want to clear up. Where someone who at least claimed to be a fan of Jessie's... you know, did an internet and threatened to kill me, which is... you know, being a person on the internet, death threats are unfortunately not uncommon. At the time though, uh... I was in a very panicked state and so I did report it to the police. I did not report Jessie to the police, which is the misunderstanding that people, um... came away with. I did not report Jessie to the police. I would have no reason to do that. And it did end up that this person had a prior record with the police, um, of violent acts. And they actually lived quite near me. Um, so the police took it very seriously. They took it so seriously that they implored me not to... speak to Jessie, which I took their... advice on, which I shouldn't have, honestly. I should have at least clarified to Jessie what was going on, and not just left her hanging. And so, I want to again apologize to Jessie for that. But in that state, I listen to the police, which is... you know, maybe not the best decision all the time, because the cops don't usually have the best interests of people at heart, so...

Jessie, I want to apologize for that and everything else that happened. Completely understand why you would not want to speak to me ever again, but I just want you to know that I am sorry.

But now back on the original topic: the work Nick and I were doing on the channel, we wanted it to be... you know, for everyone. We wanted it to be a channel where every queer person could feel welcomed... And we failed at that. That is something that, in hindsight, I think is impossible to create. And that's why it's important for there to be many different queer voices in spaces like YouTube, and there are. What's more important is that those voices are discoverable, which is something that I should have been helping with.

I often shared other queer creators on Twitter, but... this was when I only had, you know, eight-hundred, a thousand, Twitter followers, and these creators usually had a whole lot more than that. It was a weird... thing, because usually they would have infinitely more Twitter followers, but a whole lot less YouTube subscribers. I'm not sure what created that dichotomy, but something was definitely off with the algorithm there.

There is a part of my brain that says YouTube kind of went "oh, you know, white male queer! Let's push him!" and... you know, ignore everyone else in the community, whereas people were able to actually discover, uh... other queer creators on Twitter, and then make their way to YouTube. But the YouTube algorithm, kind of... that's the most negative interpretation I have of it, which unfortunately may be true.

Uh, in any case, I should have done more to share the voices of other queer people. Certainly the people whose works I used, both credited and plagiarized... in my videos. But also just other creators on YouTube. It's important for us as a community, as vaguely defined as we are, to support each other. And... I didn't do that nearly enough.

From day one, I was very taken in by the idea of being a YouTuber. As soon as my videos started to get recommended by the algorithm, after not releasing a new video for like two years, I... felt like I had a short period of time to get the next videos out, as soon as possible... which is why so little work was put into the writing of them. And so much was taken from other places— plagiarized.

Early on, I thought crediting authors in the opening credits alone was enough. Especially since the videos weren't monetized early on. But I understand now, especially after speaking with some of the people who were— who I did plagiarize, that that was just... I was wrong. That was not the way to go about it. They should have been cited properly within the text of the video. They should have been called out in the video at least once, verbally, as well as, you know, having citations on screen. If there were a whole lot of them, like, with — you know, one of the examples that HBomberGuy used in his video was the Deep Cuts video — there were a whole lot of people who I, you know... credited in the opening credits, but really, it's... plagiarism. They should have been cited... on-screen with actual citations of, you know, links, where you can find this stuff. Maybe there should have even been a bibliography that you could have gone to like on a Google drive or something like that. Because, you know, although I might have stated that the scripts were based upon the work of these authors, it in many cases wasn't just based on their work, it was their work, word-for-word.

In some cases, I did get permission, like with the Evil Queen's Disney video, I'll put the email up on the screen that I got from Sean Griffin, um... where he did give me permission to... publish the video.

[The following email is shown on screen. James does not read it out.]

Griffin, Sean
Re: Tinker Belles and Evil Queens Video Essay
To: James Somerton
[Sent: September 10, 2020 11:45 AM]

Hi James-
I did get a chance to watch your video. While I am perhaps not as pessimistic about the relationship between Disney and LGBTQI culture as your piece is, I recognize (and largely agree with) the issues you are raising about where things have gone since I wrote my book. And, I'm grateful for the "shout-out" on the title card--it was the one thing that I was going to request: that you give me at least a bit of citation!

It's a very thoughtful video, and I hope your audience gets a lot out of it!
All the best,
Sean

[James continues talking behind this image]:

I sent the finished video to him, and he watched it and he gave me permission. But... in most cases, I didn't get permission, and thought that just putting the author's name in the opening credits was enough. I was much more interested in the production of the videos than the writing of them at this point.

So after three or four videos, I brought Nick on as a main writer for the channel. The idea is that they would write the vast majority of the scripts... I would film, voice, and edit the videos, and we'd split the money that came in.

We were roommates at the time, and Nick didn't have a job, so I figured it would help both of us. This is actually when we had some of our biggest videos. Uh, like the ones talking about Wiccan and Hulkling, where we lucked out because it came out right in time for WandaVision to hit. And then the Killing Stalking video, which became our... biggest video by far. Uh, the Sadism of Class was another one. These videos weren't plagiarized, and we loved making them.

Uh... it didn't take long for the channel income to start growing. Lucky timing, really, because this was around the same time that I was laid off since the company that I was working for downsized once Covid hit its second year. Nick and I had both grown up poor. So we started doing what we could to try and stabilize our income as much as possible. This meant putting out more videos, which meant I had to take over more of the writing duties, but since filming, editing — usually doing... multiple edits because of YouTube copyright issues — as well as managing the channel... and dealing with my mom's recent cancer diagnosis. All of that was already taking up so much of my time and attention.

This led to a lot of... copy and pasting... blocks of text into scripts. My intention, at the time, was to use these as a jumping off point once Nick and I sat down to edit the script, because that's what we would do: I would sort of put in my parts, Nick would put in his parts, and then we would sit down at a table, read through the whole script, and kind of try and make it seem cohesive.

But — and here's something... I'm sure a lot of people will call a bullshit excuse — I have memory issues... because of a head injury from when I was a child. Uh, they're actually getting worse. I've talked about it on streams and in videos, so yes, it is real, but... some people will call it a excuse anyway.

The head injury is actually what led to me having epilepsy, which is why I can't work in any job that involves physical labor. Employers can't get insurance for me to, like, lift things or operate vehicles and stuff like that. I actually did marketing for a restaurant group for a little while, but got let go when they found out that I was epileptic because, at least according to them, I couldn't be insured to be in the kitchens... where I needed to be to film videos and take photos and stuff like that. But anyway.

When it came to editing the scripts, I couldn't remember what I'd written and what had been copy-pasted. We should have just chucked out everything that I had put into the script and filled them in with wholly original thoughts. Or I should have been taking notes on where things came from so that we could at least cite them in the video, if nothing else. But I never did that.

According to my... therapist, my not thinking to do that probably stems from my recently diagnosed ADHD, but I don't know if I'm willing to... say that really. Maybe it was? Or maybe it was just plain laziness. Maybe I thought that this was somewhere that I could cut a corner because I was torn in so many other directions. Honestly, I can't remember — like I said, memory issues. But, yes, we should have just thrown out my contributions to the scripts and filled them in with original writing... but we felt like we had too much of a time crunch. We felt like we had to get videos out more often to feed the algorithm.

And then my mom died... and I became completely useless. I couldn't think straight, at all, so Nick had to completely take over writing duties, while I dealt with things you deal with after a person dies. My dad, you see, he can't read or write, uh... he was very poor when he was a kid, so he had to leave school really young to work in order to feed his many brothers and sisters. So I had to deal with all the legal stuff after my mom died, as well as making sure that all my dad's bills were paid and whatnot. Especially after his income was basically cut in half.

There was supposed to be a buffer here, money-wise, as my mom had a life insurance policy that was going to be split between my dad and myself. But the insurance company (RBC Insurance so if you have insurance with them, maybe rethink that) uh, refuse to pay out the policy because my mother never mentioned that she had family with diabetes. She didn't have diabetes, but because she didn't think to mention that she had family with diabetes, it apparently voided the policy. All they did was refund a year's worth of premiums that she'd paid even, though she'd been paying them for about 15 years...

One of the things — the main thing, really — that I was supposed to do with my portion of the insurance money was I was supposed to make a movie. These were direct instructions from my mom, herself. She'd been very much behind me when I decided— when I was about 10, that I wanted to be a filmmaker. And she wanted me to finally have the opportunity to do that, even if she never got to see it. So when the life insurance... went bust... I decided to try and crowdfund it. At least enough to make a short film or two.

This is what... Telos grew out of.

So, what happened with Telos? Let me break down the timeline:

When we launched the campaign in February of 2022, we hoped to raise $3,000 to produce a short film that we hoped that we would then use as a sort of proof of concept to attract investors, either private, public, or through Canada's telefilm program, to produce a feature. Some people online have stated that $3,000 never would have covered the cost of a short film, but these were not going to be unionized movies, and we were very clear about that upfront. We wanted to be able to pay actors as best that we could, but we never expected to be able to reach typical union wages.

The crew was going to be made up of people that I had gone to film school with. Everyone (including Nick and myself; we were roommates at the time, living on the East Coast) were more than happy to work behind the scenes for free. We planned on writing a movie with a small cast and only one or two locations, ideally ones that we could get access to for free. Again, we assumed all the money would go to the actors. Uh, we kind of looked at this is a sort of Community Theater troop, but for filmmaking.

After the campaign launched, it did infinitely better than we could have expected and our ambitions grew. We started planning to make a feature instead of a short film. And the plan was to take this around t0, uh, film festivals. The feature we settled on, entitled "Final Girl", was about the lone survivor of a slasher movie-type massacre 10 years after the fact, as she was publishing a book about her ordeal, drawing attention from people online convinced that she had actually been the killer all along. In the end, we would find out that the killer was the boyfriend of the girl who the main character had secretly been dating at the time of the killings. And most of the people he killed were, in his eyes, collateral damage as he made his way to our main character. Because he was not happy that his girlfriend was cheating on him with a girl.

And to those who say that I plagiarized the plot from the novel Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix, read the book. It's nothing like the plot of the movie. And the final girl is a trope in horror movies. So if using the Final Girl trope is plagiarism, then basically everyone who's made a slasher movie since Texas Chainsaw Massacre owes the Toby Hooper Estates some money. But anyway.

Nick and I planned out the movie, but I didn't want to start writing it until the campaign ended and the money was actually deposited. Uh, after the insurance debacle, I didn't want to count our chickens before they hatched. When the money was officially deposited, I immediately began work on the screenplay. I finished it that summer, soon after Nick had left to spend two months at home in Ottawa, Ontario with family. I sent the script to him to read right away, because I was proud— very proud of it. But Nick didn't want to share his opinion on it until he got back to the east coast. So in the meantime, I put out a preliminary casting call on local job boards.

When Nick got back, uh, he... believed that the script needed a page one rework. This is also when he told me that he'd be moving back to Ontario permanently soon, as he wanted to live closer to family and live in a bigger city with more opportunities. This was a punch to the gut for me. We'd been living together since 2015 and had become quite dependent on each other. I felt like there was no way that I could make this movie without him. And since I had received... not that many replies to the initial casting call, I took this as a sign that Ontario would be a better place to launch Telos. Even though all my profisional— professional film connections were on the East Coast.

That was a mistake. There I had free access to the campground that would serve as the setting for a good portion of the movie, as well as easy access to any number of houses apartments and even offices that friends of friends would let me use to shoot. In Ontario, I had none of that. Which immediately put the breaks on Final Girl since there was no conceivable way of filming it, at least not within the budget that we had.

After Nick and I moved to the Toronto area, he decided that he actually wanted to move home to Ottawa... uh, to the Ottawa area, about 5 hours away. At least for a little while. In the meantime he would take a train to the GTA (the Greater Toronto Area) once a month... uh, to work on YouTube videos for a few days and then head back.

This went on for... [Doing mental math] ...a little less than a year. So, I began brainstorming new movies that we could film in Ontario. This is where the multiple posters and teaser trailers came from. I was trying to create something tangible to show that work was still being done with Telos. I wrote multiple treatments for movies over the next few months. And Nick and I eventually landed on one called "Antisocial", a murder mystery about a former social media clique, who had gone their separate ways on very bad terms and they were coming together for a reunion at a sort of VidCon event. Um, they were all sharing a house and then some of them were going to start showing up dead.

Around the same time, summer of 2023, uh, Nick had moved to the GTA full-time. Uh, he and I spent weeks working out exactly how the murder mystery would parse out in the movie. We had a bunch of whiteboards up on my wall and we were just breaking it down piece by piece. Uh, I'd put out a new casting call in the GTA and received hundreds of responses. So, I was planning on casting as soon as the script was finished. But after trying to work out the numbers as far as paying actors went, plus locations, food, costumes, as well as the equipment that we'd already purchased, and the legal costs of setting up Telos as a business, we realized that we'd gone way too big with this movie.

Uh, the movie had too many characters and too many locations... and it was just way too complex to be able to pull off... with the budget. So I started working on a script for a movie called "The Listener", about a true crime podcaster focused on the mysterious deaths of homeless gay men in his city. I was a fair way into the script when we realized... it'd be about a year... before we could even film anything. Since winter was on its way and the story relied heavily on a summer setting.

So we went back to the drawing board yet again, finally settling on a modern-day adaptation of The Vampyre, based on the book by John Polidori. Uh, it's one of the original works of published vampire fiction. It's never received a proper film adaptation, and was in public domain, so we thought it would be a great choice. And the cast could be kept down to basically five characters, with only two of them being on screen most of the time. Nick and I both wrote treatments for it, which we plan on— planned on melding together into a final treatment, that we would write the script based off of.

We'd had a meeting about it, and we were talking about how best to move forward, how fast we could get the script written, how long it would take to cast, how soon we could start shooting. We knew that it had been a while since the initial funding of Telos came in, and we wanted to get something concrete out as soon as possible. After the meeting, we went to dinner... and while at dinner, I started getting messages about the HBomberGuy video.

We were in over our heads once we left the East Coast. But the intention was never ever to take the money and run. I was so insanely excited about getting to make Telos a reality. I was excited about getting to make a short film, let alone a feature. It's always been my dream to make movies. So Telos meant... and means... the world to me.

For Nick, it was a very exciting project, but not his passion. Nick wanted to write novels, he still does. Nick looked at this as a good creative outlet that was way more fulfilling than writing video essays. I should have stayed where I was, and not gone to Ontario. The move uprooted... everything that was solid about Telos, and it took a whole year to get it back onto even anything close to stable footing.

But I am working with the producer now. So you can expect an actual product from Telos this year. It will likely be a short film, to start off. But there is going to be something coming out of Telos this year.

I know I've lost your trust. But I will make nothing financially from this project. The money that is there will go wholly to paying queer artists to work on a queer film. I am not, nor have I ever intended to be, one of the people paid by Telos. Neither was Nick; we made this very clear to everyone who asked.

During our work on Telos is also when the YouTube channel started getting sponsors. Which, as I said, as someone who grew up poor, I basically accepted all of them. Except for a few that I didn't think lined up with the message of the channel or had some... bad... news surrounding them. There were a couple that had some anti-trans stuff going on in the news and I just didn't want to associate with that. But by accepting as many sponsors as we did, which became very important when Nick and I started living apart and suddenly had two rents to pay, we ended up needing to produce even more videos. Which along with the work on Telos, and making sure everything was okay with my dad while living thousands of kilometers away... meant I had even less time for writing. Putting more stress on Nick and leading to even more copy-pasting from me. That's what led to us putting out... I think six videos in one month at one point? It might have been five. But in any case it was way too damn many videos to go out in one month.

We tried to take the summer off from YouTube in 2023 to work on Telos exclusively, but even that went up in smoke because my housing situation... just... I won't go into it here. I've talked about it ad nauseum on streams and stuff. If you followed me on social media, you know the cluster I ended up in... that led to me moving twice in two months.

In the last couple of months, I've received a lot of emails, as you can imagine. Uh... many from people who were rightfully let down. Some from people threatening everything from doxing to violence, because the internet. Some with the kindest words of support I've ever heard, and others simply asking why I made it so difficult to contact me and if I was okay. They wanted to know why, as they put it, I "nuked" my social media presence.

...To be frank... it's because I didn't want to exist anymore. If you watched my... honestly... horrendous... apology video back in December... you know I tried to make that happen. The not existing thing. But it was more intense than... taking too many pills. It's not that I didn't want to be alive anymore. It's that I wished I'd never existed at all. That everyone I'd ever known would be better off... had I just never been there. Very George Bailey. Which is fitting given that it was Christmas time.

It's only thanks to some very very dedicated doctors and nurses... and one very good friend... that I'm... even here able to film this right now. I'm not going to name her, because I don't want to expose anyone else to the small, but... seriously unstable group of people who watched the "Plagiarism and You(Tube)" video and thought... "well, he should be dead".

Like I said, it's a... it was a very small group. But when they find out your address... and some of them are actually in your city... they can be terrifying. And they did find my address. And at least a couple of them showed up... while I was at the hospital. Um... my neighbors did report them to the police, uh... and I-I won't go into any more details than that. I'm not sure if I legally, even, can but... there's a reason I left Ontario within a week of getting the okay to do so from the doctors.

So what's next then? Like I said... you'll notice that a few of my videos are live again on the channel. These ones don't come from plagiarized content. And, for the most part, are written entirely by Nick. Nick lost three years worth of work when everything on the channel was taken down. And that's... simply not fair... to Nick. He worked hard writing those videos and deserves to have something to point to when he's looking for new writing work.

I've also done some heavy editing on other videos that did contain other people's writing, um... breaking it down to only original content, again, so that Nick has an actual portfolio of work. As mentioned at the beginning of the video, revenue from these will be going to the HBomberGuy team to be sent out to the writers I plagiarized from, or donated to charity. However it works out in the end.

These edited videos will be going back up on the channel in the next few days, I think, um, along with two completed video essays that we didn't actually get to release before everything happened. There's also some recent videos that didn't have any plagiarism that the sponsor asked to be taken down, and their ads removed. Um, so they'll also be going back up without the sponsors, obviously.

And soon I will be releasing a new video... written entirely by me... properly cited... with all sources credited. Maybe no one will watch it. But I hope you do.

I want to prove that I have the ability to do this without abusing other people's work. It's a very different kind of video... than I used to make though. I'd say it's more of a documentary than a video essay. You won't find my "opinions" anywhere in there, just cited facts.

I'd like to keep making videos like these new ones, about people and events in gay history. And definitive gay movies, that you maybe never heard of. Stuff like that. It's actually something that I planned on doing this year anyway. There would be two videos a month. Nick would write a video essay and I would write one of these documentary-style videos that would fulfill the two videos per month sponsorship deal that we had at the time.

I have no sponsors now, so... probably not going to be two videos a month. It'll probably just be the one. Which will give more time for research and citation and crediting and making sure that there is no misinformation in the videos. Uh... which I know... I know that misinformation... made its way into, uh, our past videos. That was not... something that we intended. In some cases, it was information that I was told by people that I considered experts, um... In other cases it was information that we had researched, uh... In other cases, it was... things that Nick had learned in university.

The point being it was never malicious. We didn't... we weren't trying to lie about things, despite what a lot of people think. We were not trying to spread misinformation. That was not ever our intention. And that's something else that I want to apologize for.

As for my Patreon. everyone can stop worrying about me relaunching it right in time for a billing cycle. That will not be happening. I don't want anyone who... either doesn't know about the plagiarism or simply forgot to unsubscribe to get billed. So... I'm going to start from zero. I have put together a new patreon account.

So if you want to support my documentaries about gay history... fantastic. Honestly, your faith in me after everything... means the world to me. If not, I completely understand. Like I said... I've lost your trust... I'm going to work my ass off to earn it back, though.

And I know for some of you, I'll never be able to do that, but I'm going to try anyway. You know, there's a link in the description to the patreon if you want to join it, where you'll be able to see the two yet-to-be-released videos right now, as well as, you know... take part in other stuff that will be on there, like a book club, podcasts, uh... voting on upcoming videos, all the usual Patreon stuff.

But this video is not about promoting myself. This video is about... me apologizing. And I am incredibly sorry. [sigh] It was never my intention for anyone... to feel hurt, or left out, or excluded. It was never my intention to spread misinformation. And I'm really... really sorry that that happened. And, you know, as as much as I've tried to explain myself in this video, you know, the memory issues, the ADHD, um... the personal things that were going on in my life with my mom getting sick and then dying and trying to make sure that my dad was okay following that and everything... those aren't excuses. There is no excuse for what I did.

There are lots of people who make videos on YouTube. There are lots of people who make podcasts, TV shows, movies, documentaries, who... have... shit going on in their lives that's very stressful. And they don't plagiarize people's work. There is no excuse for what I did. For everything that happened, whether it be... with my mom or the memory issues, there was something I could have done to mitigate that. There's nothing I could have done about my mom getting cancer, but...

Knowing my patrons as I did, in hindsight, I'm pretty damn sure that if I had said, "guys, I need to step away for a couple of months to deal with this"... I don't think a whole lot of people would have fled the Patreon. A part of me thought they would at the time, because I catastrophize... but I really don't think that would have happened.

Even in the very beginning, when I was like, "oh, I got to get as many videos out as possible", if I had said to those people who subscribed to the channel early on, you know, for the next video, I want to make sure that it's fully correct and I want to make sure that, you know, it's as high quality as it can possibly be, I-I don't think anyone would have you know unsubscribed or not watched the next video because it didn't come out a couple of weeks after... the algorithm decided that I was important for some reason. I convinced myself of these things. But I don't think, in hindsight looking at it, I don't think any of that would have happened. And so there is no excuse for the misinformation. And there is certainly no excuse for the plagiarism.

I... fucked up... bad... I stole people's... words and thoughts and opinions... that they worked incredibly hard writing and publishing and finding someone to publish... their thoughts and opinions and research... hard research that they had done. And you know in some cases I put them, their names, in the opening credits which I thought was fine, but... like I said, I've spoken with some of these people now, and I understand why that was not okay. Because putting someone's name in the opening credits— you know, okay, here's a list of people, here's you know seven or eight people who are—

Even if it was, you know, everyon— even if it wasn't, you know, taking giant chunks of their work... paragraphs at a time, even if it was just a sentence here or there... putting their name in the opening credits doesn't tell anyone where their work is in the video. Nobody can say, "oh, I really like that opinion" or "wow that's a really, you know, smart observation! I want to read more from this person!" And then, you know, to find something you found interesting, you have to go play detective.

And so, yes, just putting their name in the opening credits was wrong. I thought it was cool and, you know, cinematic, but it was wrong. Citations should have been done properly. There should never have been just chunks of text being put into videos. There were times, like with uh the queer history of Hollywood videos that I released this past spring. They were based directly on The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo. The book, not the documentary. I expanded on it quite a bit, but it was based directly on Vito's work, and I credited him in the opening credits. And I thought it was okay to just do that? Because... the book was out of print... and Vito had passed away unfortunately from HIV complications due to HIV and AIDS. And I looked at it more as "extending his legacy", making sure that people knew about the work that he did.

But I don't think I ever mentioned his name in those videos. He was cred— like I said, his name's in the opening credits. But I don't think I ever... verbally mentioned his name. Someone who I have so much respect for, who's kind of an idol of mine, and... I never mentioned his name. It wasn't because I didn't respect him or anything like that... and it also wasn't because I wanted people to think that this was all me, agai— if— if that was the case I wouldn't have put his name in the in the credits. I never... wanted people to think that this was all me.

So that's actually one of the videos I want to make... I want to make a... documentary-style video talking about Vito Russo... and his life, and everything that he accomplished. 'Cause he didn't just write The Celluloid Closet, he did a lot more than that. He's someone that people should know about.

Obviously, people can research him, uh, there's books about him. But I know, you know, it's easier to sit down and watch a 20 or 30 minute YouTube video than it is to read a book. I'd like to make a video about Vito Russo, properly cited, and not just, you know, copy-pasted from a book. I want to do the work.I want to prove, not just to you, but to myself, that I can do the work. And that's why I've started making these documentaries, working on these.

I can't... [long moment of contemplation] I can't really put into words how sorry I am. I've tried. I've tried writing... like a blog entry... to say that I was sorry for about two months now... and I just can't... I can't get across how sorry I am. And I know actions speak way louder than words. And I hope, with my actions, that I can show you... that I am sorry.

I'm sorry to everyone I plagiarized. I'm sorry to... everyone I've hurt. I'm sorry to people who feel lied to. I'm sorry to people who... feel like I abused the queer community. Was never my intention.

Again, I'm sorry to Jessie. There were actually... several other YouTubers who, uh, were very nice to me. But I feel like with everything that went down Jess— Jessie is the one that I should apologize to the most.

I'm sorry for the people who felt scammed. Who thought that Telos was a grift. It was not. It is not.

I am very sorry...

And I hope given time... and... my actions proving it... that you can believe me.

[Video ends promptly without fanfare.]