Just a quick update.

Hi there everyone,

I hope you all had a great weekend. Mine was, well, not great. As anyone who follows me on Twitter will probably know. 

The Reader's Digest version is: I criticized Nebula on Twitter, in an admittedly clumsy way, and multiple creators who are on Nebula took offence and vehemently defended the company. There were no horrible arguments between any of us and, as of last night, things seemed to be on their way to being cleared up (even though some pretty major YouTubers popped up falsely accusing me of plagiarism. I'll go into some detail regarding that below this message if you're interested). I did set my Twitter account to private though, since I was getting some harassment.

Then early today I checked my work e-mail, which is public in my Twitter bio, and found 44 e-mails from fans of the other creators involved accusing me of trying to destroy the livelihood of marginalized creators (for criticizing Nebula), insulting me in any number of ways, and even threatening me. Some of the typical death threats anyone on social media has had to get used to, but some very specific threats as well. Some threatened to badmouth Nick and I to potential sponsors, and one person, who identified herself as a woman, threatened to accuse me of sexual harassment on social media. Even though I have no idea who she is and... I'm gay. So she obviously doesn't know anything about me other than someone they follow had a disagreement with me.

So I've taken some steps to TRY to get this under control. I've spoken with authorities, who are going to look into the matter. They've asked that I not speak with any of the creators involved until they do an investigation into whether it was targeted. I don't think ANY of the creators actively sent their fans after me, to be clear. I really, really don't. That's just the process with the police. And I've also disabled any invite links to the Patreon Discord for the time being. I can still personally send invites, but any links listed here are dead for now. 

If you have any questions about any of this, PLEASE feel free to ask. Oh, and there's a podcast coming out in the morning that was recorded before any of this, so Nick and I were in MUCH better spirits lol.

The Plagiarism accusations:

1. One of my earliest videos (Queer Baiting in TV, Aug 2020) originally had a section covering the TV show Merlin, in which there was a highlight real of queer moments from the show that I took from a much larger highlight reel video on YouTube. It turned out that clip was actually from a video from the channel Are They Gay? and they brought it to my attention. I immediately removed the whole Merlin section from the video and reposted it.

2. The FIRST section of the Queer Baiting series is directly based on the book "The Celluloid Closet" by Vito Russo, and the documentary of the same name based on the book. Before publishing the video I requested and received the right to do this by the copyright holders, which is outlined in the description of the video.

3. My original Disney video, "Evil Queens: A Gay Look At Disney History" (September 2020) is directly based on the book "Tinker Belles and Evil Queens" by Sean P. Griffin. Before making the video I received permission from the author but, as I was very new to this, didn't properly credit him. I deleted the original video within a week of release and re-upoloaded it with Sean's name listed directly in the main title sequence. 

Since then I've had opening titles for almost all of my videos, which I use for thanking patrons, as well as giving proper credits to anyone whose worked has been used in the production of the video, such as journalists with the "History of Queer Panic" video.