Come Out Come Out Wherever You Are

As I noted during June, YouTube has become an important venue for celebrating Gay Pride month, particularly in response to this video by William Sledd, which has since received over a million views, generated tens of thousands of comments, and inspired hundreds of response videos in return, many of which show young people frankly coming out as gays and lesbians.



This month the YouTube political calendar was marked by National Coming Out Day with a series of videos from the channel for the Human Rights Campaign. In the obviously professionally video above, you can see many YouTube conventions being observed, including the obligatory from-below camera angles and the use of seemingly quick and dirty cutting in service of the schtick. What makes this video from Mary C. Matthews particularly noteworthy is that this talking head also includes her YouTube video debate question to the Democratic presidential candidates about gay marriage in her remix.

In addition to capitalizing in interest in user-generated content by doing video blog-style shows about dating nightmares in New York and American Idol contestants, Matthews also makes Video Pancakes, which recently featured the adventures of a hapless staffer posing as a volunteer offering his services to political campaigns of either party, although get-out-the-vote efforts apparently don't pick up the telephone on the weekend.