Hard launch
CONTENT WARNING: mentions and discussions of homophobia and mentions of transphobia
(Shot from Dan and Phil's hard launch video, specifically the intro cinematic made by PJ and Sophie, taken from PJ's patreon)
Recently youtubers Dan Howell and Phil Lester announced that they have been in a relationship for 16 years, and they rebranded their gaming channel from DanAndPhilGAMES to just Dan and Phil. They also announced a podcast they're doing together called "hard launch", I'll explain why they picked that name later.
These news were huge for many people (including me, since I've been watching their content for over a decade at this point) but none of my friends watch Dan and Phil and I don't want to bother them so I'm going to ramble about it here instead!
Why do people care if two random guys happen to be dating? Why is this a big deal? And why did it take them so long to announce they've been together? After all it's been 16 years already, right? I mean you could watch their video to hear the story from them, but I want to provide my personal perspective of why this was so emotional and felt like huge news to me.
When I started watching their content I must've been around 14 to 15 years old, I had no idea I was queer, it wasn't that uncommon to hear people using "gay" as an insult or making casual homophobic remarks. I was definitely one of those kids who thought politics weren't that important so I didn't bother to look too much into it. Naturally I internalized a certain amount of the bigoted rhetoric I would hear everywhere, so despite not actively disliking queer people I had a long way to go in terms of my acceptance and allyship.
So back then Dan and Phil were pretty huge on youtube, and they were seen as just two nerdy guys who are socially awkward, and as someone who thought of herself as a "socially awkward nerdy guy" I gravitated towards their content, I thought they were funny and relatable and this was also around the time when they launched their shared gaming channel, and I liked let's plays a lot back then so I remember spending a lot of time watching their videos.
Interestingly their audience was predominantly female though, and it always made me feel a bit weird whenever I thought about it, it wasn't until way later that I eventually confronted those feelings but the more important thing to this story is the fact that it was kind of hard to avoid noticing that people really liked shipping the two of them together. I was always kind of indifferent to the shipping and I thought it was mostly just jokes but I certainly noticed it.
I did eventually meet a few queer people in real life, and it definitely helped me move left politically and allowed me to feel comfortable enough to explore my own sexuality (I ended up identifying as pansexual for a while) but it was still something that I didn't bother to think about too much and I still had a long way to go in my journey.
Now, when you watch people on youtube or twitch you inevitably start forming a parasocial relationship, and in fact if I remember correctly the way Dan talks about parsocial relationships has shaped the way I think about them: they're kind of inevitable, it's just a thing the human mind does so it's more important to be aware of what's going on rather than guilting yourself over feeling parasocial about a content creator.
I do feel a bit attached to these guys, they're complete strangers and everything I know about them comes from the specifically curated stuff they decide to share, but I would be lying if I said I didn't care about them, hearing them being able to be happy or excited makes me feel happy.
On the 13th of June of 2019 Dan released a video called "Basically I'm Gay" and on the 30th Phil released his video called "Coming Out To You" and it was a complete shock to me, despite all the people shipping Dan and Phil together I never thought they'd actually be gay or that there was any real possibility of them being together.
I think seeing two creators who I looked up to and respected come out as gay was important in my journey towards becoming more progressive and also allowing myself to explore my own identity with less shame, especially because in Dan's video he explicitly mentions the existence of trans people in a positive way, which was not something I was used to.
Sidenote: a lot of people will point out that them announcing that they're in a relationship isn't the most surprising because, well, based on societal expectations it makes sense right? They've lived together for many years and they're both gay, but it's important to point out that similarly to when people come out to you as gay or trans or whatever, responding with "duh! we know" or anything along those lines is not particularly helpful or empathetic.
For one, you don't know, you speculate, but there's no way for you to actually know what's happening behind the scenes, even if your speculation turns out to be right you don't actually have confirmation until they tell you. And also, more importantly, if someone has taken a long time to tell you something like this it's probably because it took courage, because it was difficult, and what you don't need to hear when you finally gather the courage to tell someone about your sexuality or gender is a dismissive "yeah whatever", it's really disrespectful.
In any case, I then learned that many fans would spend a lot of energy speculating about the relationship between these two, to an invasive extent, like, the speculation is already disrespectful, if people are not telling you something it's probably because they don't want to talk about it, but it got to the point of scrutinizing every little thing and I can't imagine how stressful that must've been, especially for Dan since in his coming out video he talks about how much homophobia he had to go through in his childhood and teenage years, which left him with a lot of trauma to deal with.
After Dan's coming out video he went on a hiatus, he stopped uploading to youtube for 3 whole years, (if I remember correctly he didn't upload a lot before his coming out video so the hiatus was probably longer) he would occasionally appear on Phil's channel but Dan's channel was paused for a long time, and there was no explanation or anything so we didn't know if he was ever going to upload again or what was going on.
In that time my egg cracked, i.e. I realized I was a woman, and I even got into my first long term relationship with another trans woman, things had changed so much from how they used to be and despite the world becoming more and more scary I felt happier than I had ever been.
One day on the 4th of May 2022 Dan returned and uploaded a feature-length video called "Why I Quit YouTube" and that was the start of a new era of Dan and Phil, there was a livestreamed event on pride month of the previous year but that wasn't the end of the hiatus because Dan disappeared once again afterwards.
At this point being in a predominantly female fandom didn't feel weird to me, not just because I was a girl now so it felt like I stood out a bit less, but because I felt welcome in the community, Dan would mention trans people in a positive way every now and then, and I distinctly remember during a show Dan was doing the audience shouted "FUCK TERFS!", and that was unironically really helpful to me being able to feel more comfortable with who I am and more confident in my womanhood. Here's a quote from Dan from that same event:
Pride is literally just feeling accepted, it is not what happens around us on the outside but also how you feel on the inside (...) Pride is truly accepting that the way that you are is ok, and that you decide what your journey is, and that you do things in your own timeline, on your terms.
I'm really grateful for that.
A big thing that felt different in this new era was the fact that they were openly joking about the fan speculation now, they went from being very uncomfortable with the fans shipping them and scrutinizing every little detail of their videos to making jokes like when they accidentally brush against one another in a video they would go "oMg ThEy tOuChEd!!" or joking about the conspiracy theories the fans would come up with.
Their audience grew up with them of course, so now instead of a lot of people doing creepy speculation in their audience you had a lot of people being more mature and engaging with these jokes.
A funny dynamic that developed is that Dan and Phil would make some sort of joke about Phil being a power bottom or something like that, the fans would then be like "TMI, I DID NOT NEED TO KNOW THAT" and Dan would be like "you fucked around and now you're finding out", but it's all clearly in good fun, they would heart a lot of comments and reply to tweets and include jokes about shipping and stuff when they showcased fanmade content. The vibes had changed and they were immaculate.
That's where the whole "hard launch" thing comes from actually, I don't know when it happened or how exactly, but again, it seemed reasonable to assume Dan and Phil were in a relationship, so fans kept talking about a mythical "hard launch" when they would announce unambiguously that they are in fact dating, but as far as I can tell people in the community had no actual expectation that this was ever going to happen, the longer it had been since Dan's return from the hiatus the more unlikely it seemed that they were ever going to address it.
Eventually they announced that they were going to rebrand the DanAndPhilGAMES channel so it wouldn't have to be attached to gaming and they could branch out to other types of content as well, but people were just expecting them to like, change their logo and stuff, in fact there were some people a bit confused (myself included) on why it was taking them so long, they mentioned the rebrand a while ago but hadn't done it yet.
Then one day Phil tweets "if you've ever been into dan and phil you might want to be online in an hour or so" and everyone gets hyped because we think he's talking about the rebrand.
Then they drop a video titled "Is Phan Real?" (phan being their ship name, and also the reason the Dan and Phil fandom is called "the phandom") or alternatively "Are Dan and Phil in a Relationship? The Truth" (since there's that thing where youtubers can give a video multiple titles and it shows up differently for people, whatever) the point is, that... is not a topic I thought they were ever going to address, I had no idea why they wouldn't address it, I just figured if they were going to do it they would've done it by now since it's kind of the elephant in the room, but they actually did it, they did the hard launch and it was completely unexpected.
So not only was there a lot of shock in this being a thing that happened in the first place, but also it really highlights their growth, they went from actively hiding their gayness in the early days of their career to coming out, to joking about shipping and relationships, to eventually straight up saying "we are in a relationship", not because they felt pressured to but because they felt comfortable enough to share that with us.
That's really the crux of it, and they mention it in the video as well, this happened because they are comfortable to finally open up about this part of their lives, despite all the negative feelings they have around the speculation, despite how invasive people were back in the day, despite all of the homophobia that Dan faced and the trauma he developed as a result, he is finally at a point in his life where he feels comfortable enough to openly be in a gay relationship, and I think that's beautiful.
Phil mentioned if it was up to him he wouldn't have had an issue being open about it sooner, or even coming out as gay sooner either, but it's also so sweet to see that he waited for so long – over a decade and a half – because he knew Dan wasn't ready, because making sure his boyfriend could feel safe and do things in his own timeline, on his terms, was more important, that's love.
And they did also mention they don't want people looking at their relationship with rose tinted glasses because of course that puts a lot of pressure on them, but even if they're not perfect just seeing a display of queer love means a lot to me, especially considering my romantic life hasn't been going fantastic lately and I can sometimes feel a lot of negativity when I think about romance, seeing that a healthy relationship like theirs exists genuinely makes me so happy, not even because I think I could be in a relationship like that one day but just because it's wonderful to see other queers being happy and in love, it makes the world a better place.
So not only were these news impactful because I'm a bit parasocial about these internet strangers, but also because it's such a wonderful example of queer joy, you can see so much growth, you see Dan going from being someone who struggled so much in his youth to being someone who is very successful and in a happy relationship. When I look at Dan and Phil I see joy and I see a refusal to be hopeless in a world that wants us to be hopeless, I see healing from the wounds left by hatred and bigotry, and I see love.
I am acutely aware of the fact that a lot of their success and the opportunities they've had to get to this point were at least partially influenced by their whiteness, and as a trans lesbian of color I certainly feel a lot of fear when I think about my future, about where the world is going and the types of things that might happen to me one day, but even if things are going to be a lot shittier for me than they are for them I am not going to let that stop me from having hope and celebrating every bit of queer joy I come across. I am grateful that stories like theirs exist, and I hope we can see more examples of queer joy in the future.
To anyone watching this that isn't out, it's ok, you're ok. You were born this way, it's right, and anyone that has a problem with it is wrong.
Based on your circumstance you might not feel ready to tell people yet, or that it's safe, and that's fine too.
Just know that living your truth with pride is the way to be happy. You are valid, it gets so much better.
And the future is clear, it's pretty queer.