"I'm Gay." The title of the Try Guy's latest video is simple, but it's a momentous coming out for Eugene Lee Yang.
"I finally felt safe," Yang tells PRIDE. "I feel like every queer person has the moment where they are elegantly perfecting the craft of withholding just enough, and I realized I was doing that with the audience."
Yang, who rose to digital fame with the peak of BuzzFeed, has been creating queer content from behind the camera for years, even launching their Queer Prom. He's been comfortable with his sexuality but didn't want to make it public. "Imagine maybe it's you and your friends hanging out with your family, and your parents don't know, and you're kind of just making an aside at the table during dinner, that's kind of how I felt like I was with the audience."
He felt particularly guarded with his personal life and constantly had to edit himself, especially when he began to become more of a personality in front of the camera with the Try Guys.
"I do feel like yeah I always had a very particular wall up, and that it was totally because of personal protection," he explains. "There were relationships that could become tenuous should they know the full extent of my sexuality."
For certain people close to Yang, "the word gay for them is very toxic. It's the word that scares them. It's so silly how it all comes down to vernaculars, and people are very simple that way. But if I do enact this terrible negative reaction from people I didn't want to have that from, I then thought, 'How much of a positive reaction on the other side can I enact by saying that I'm gay?'"
The benefits outweighed the cons for Yang, and he's ready to share his truth.
"Knowing that I am explicitly and I have always been 100% a gay man, and not being able to completely show that, or tell that, or express that, and then seeing the impact I was able to do while dancing around something, I do feel like I owe it also just as someone who's been in front of people's eyes for over five years now, to give them more to connect with, and hopefully more to potentially take and learn from."
There are very few openly-queer, Asian-American people in media. Yang knows the power representation has, and he's willing to share his story and lead the way for other LGBTQ Asian Americans who might be struggling.
"We feel obligated to still abide by this patriarchal system," Yang says of Asian-American familial structures. "It's something that makes people feel like they have to be a certain way, or look a certain way, or act a certain way. And that becomes this sort of not only a personal vendetta for me to sort of help break that."
"That sort of persecution of otherness in my background is something that I just personally detest. There's a lot of issues not only for Asian Americans or even for other people of color, but also people who I think grew up with a hardcore Christian background, or had very, very strict rules set in place, and essentially your life was sort of predestined.
"I'm a gay Korean American man from Texas. And I think that even saying and having to feel compelled to say that I'm just LGBTQ Korean American from Texas, it's again I'm trying to help a culture of questioning why we feel we have to be covering ourselves to begin with or conditioning ourselves to begin with. And if I condition myself in any way, then I am inherently detracting from my work and my messaging."
In just two days, Yang's coming out video has been viewed over 6 million times. It features a stunning dance sequence, written, directed, and choreographed by Yang.
It begins with him surrounded by a family. We watch Yang interact with them, but wanting to put on lipstick and dance in line with the girls. He quickly gets scolded by the men. He learns to hide and march in line with everyone else.
The next scene is a church, where Eugene uncomfortably rehearses obedience. He begins a romantic dance with a woman until a shirtless guy twirling past him catches his eye. He struts over and their dancing quickly falls in sync together. He says goodbye to the girl and lays with his new partner.
Then we cut to a club scene, where Eugene kikis with his community, including Drag Race stars Kim Chi and Mayhem Miller. The fun is cut heartbreakingly short when a gunman walks into the space, a nod to the Pulse Nightclub shooting.
We then see Eugene bruised and bloody on the ground, kicked relentlessly by anonymous people in white. His family comes to help him up but they're too preoccupied fighting amongst themselves to truly help him while he's down.
At the end, Yang dons a gorgeous, purple gown and as a boisterous crowd rages behind him, he walks up to the camera. A choice dances behind his eyes: stay silent amongst the chaos or stand strong in his truth.
"The first video is not just really about me," Yang explained. "It's kind of my creative exploration of one's journey of being anything under the LGBTQ umbrella, and so ideally by exemplifying moments in my life, and expressing it through dance and movement, and through cinematography, and styling, hopefully that it speaks to a lot of people, and that it could represent parts of what they went through."
Alongside the video, Eugene and the Try Guys launched a campaign for The Trevor Project, the largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention for LGBTQ young people. At the time of publishing, they've raised over $68,000.
Eugene is forever grateful for his platform with Zach, Ned, and Keith. "They've known that I'm a gay man since I walked into the offices of BuzzFeed," he says. "Even though they are not people of color, even though they're not gay, they are inherently sympathetic because the nature of being even a digital personality is pulling back every single layer and using your own personality and your own life to fuel work and concepts in videos, and that's a very stressful position to be in."
No matter the consequences, Yang knows he has a loving family of his own behind him every step of the way.
"If I'm afraid of some people I know having a less than glowing reaction to a gay proclamation, then I have people like the other Try Guys who can fill that void because they are like brothers to me. They're kind of a testament to a community that I have that helps to this idea that I have security and safety regardless of anything that happens to the people I know. And I think that is always going to be a through line of when I discuss this moment, which is look at those people that you clearly see hold me up and I have that to fall back on with decisions like this that can actually have darker, deeper implications. But those implications now are outweighed by the family I have obtained."
The Try Guys’ book Hidden Power of F*cking Up is out June 18. The Try Guys' Legends of the Internet tour kicks off June 21.
Photos by JD Renes Photography
