I have no idea who this man is, and I suspect that learning about him would only infuriate me - especially if (when?) the legal process turns out to be slow and inadequate.
TLDW: James Somerton is a gay man and a YouTube content “creator” who has recently been outed as a plagiarist by Hbomberguy and Todd In The Shadows. He primarily steals content from other lesser known queer content creators which just makes his plagiarism all the more insidious.
He has also strangely been proven to be guilty of spreading pseudohistory in which he changes details of historic events.
He has also been accused of a Patreon scam by making a (now deleted) video pleading with his subscribers on YouTube that he can’t make ends meet and he’ll have to stop making videos if he doesn’t get more Patreon subscribers. He got 1200 new patrons from that video. He apparently immediately purchased an $8000 camera afterwards which people describe as a “bizarre purchase” for someone who was just in financial dire straits. Also, there was no evidence of him having suffered a drop in subscribers that he claimed was the reason for his financial situation.
He has also been accused by YouTuber and Nebula creator Jessie Gender of transphobia. She says that James Somerton has gone out of his way to erase any queer content creators who were not cisgender gay men, and that he intentionally misgenders other transgender content creators constantly.
It seems like the inciting incident for all of these YouTube and Nebula content creators to go after him was James’ application to become a Nebula content creator. I suppose they started gathering evidence to provide against his membership and they ended up finding so much that they created these videos and levied formal accusations.
Here’s a slightly more in-depth read from Wikitubia for anyone interested in reading further: https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/James_Somerton#Controversies
THANK YOU! I like long video essays but plagiarism drama is not worth this much of my time.
The only video I’ll miss from Somerton’s channel is the video on “LGBTQIA+ alphabet soup vs reclaiming Queer” (whatever its actual title), because I think it is a genuinely important contribution to queer discourse which too often refuses to say “queer” as not to offend a small subsection of older queer Americans…
But the alternative is an incomprehensible jumble of letters which necessarily in its attempt to explicitly include everyone always excludes someone (and anyway “LGBTQIA+” may or may not include all of “agender, asexual, aromantic” so how is that any more descriptive than “queer”?).
At least “GSRM” is not inherently exclusionary, but unlike “LGBT” or “queer” it’s not widely known and doesn’t roll off the tongue so I still much prefer “queer” outside of academic discourse where “GSRM” belongs IMO.
