Daniel Howell on coming out, returning to YouTube, and why we’re all doomed

‘I don’t know whether I’m comparing myself to a bear or Jesus or which one is worse. Let’s not answer that question.’

Daniel Howell, author, performer, and all-round YouTube legend, is officially back. After , ‘hibernating’, as he puts it (hence the whole bear and Jesus thing), the 30-year-old delighted fans by promising to make YouTube his home once more in his new comeback video – plus he’s going on a world tour, with his show We’re All Doomed.

So how did we get here?

In 2020, after a year away, Daniel returned to YouTube with , Basically I’m Gay. In the 45-minute epic, he revealed he’d come out to his family and was now coming out, publicly, to his six million subscribers (and, by extension, kind of the whole internet).

‘I was feeling chaotic and excited, which is also how I feel a lot of the time,’ he recalled to Metro.co.uk. ‘I didn’t know whether people would be interested because I always have this thing that I like to tell myself, “Dan, nobody likes you. You’re terrible. Just go crawl away to a shack somewhere. It’s fine. You’ll be doing the world a favour.”

‘Then when I post it and then someone’s like, “Hi, I enjoyed this,” I have this surprise moment where I go, “Oh my god, I literally wasn’t expecting that.”‘

‘I didn’t even accept that I was gay, full stop, no matter what that meant, positive, negative, the consequences of me saying that, or anything, until I was 27 and I was writing that video,’ he added. ‘Because in the back of my mind, it was just “I am not going to think about this.” And it took me literally pulling the plaster off, trying to write something about it for people’s entertainment for me to actually be honest with myself.’

Shortly after the video, however, Daniel disappeared again (a tendency of his that we decided to dub ‘the Adele effect’ during our chat) and he became convinced he would never return to YouTube. It was partly because of the success of the video, which had racked up a whopping 12million views.

‘After I posted my Basically, I’m Gay video, part of me thought, “Well, not only do I have no idea what I’m doing with my life, but I also think I can never top this, so I can’t imagine I’d ever come back with something better,”‘ he pointed out.

‘I love panicking myself into a spiral. So I thought, “Hey, people just like it when I show my face. Why not?” You know, feed the birds like I’m a mother bird just sicking up and regurgitating the content. And they’re like, “Thank you.” That’s how I imagined it.’

It’s not a totally inaccurate image. Daniel has what is probably one of the most loyal fanbases around. After 12 years, his audience has grown up with him, and the impact he’s had on people is huge.

‘When everything is comments and likes, it’s just impossible to see how it’s real,’ he reflected. ‘But just hearing one person say, “Hey, I came to your show and no matter what was going on with my life for two hours, I had a good time, thank you,” that makes me just think of all the things that I feel stressed about, all the things that I waste my own time neurotically panicking about, I just go, “Well, that’s a complete waste of time, isn’t it?” Because here we have the one thing that is real.’

Things haven’t always been smooth, though – far from it. Before the #BeKind mantras of the past few years, the internet could be a terrifying place, particularly for someone like Daniel.

‘When I started on YouTube, it was the most toxic place in the entire world,’ he admitted. ‘It was just wild. The whole internet was wild, you’d go on a forum and you’d be like, “Hi, my Samsung TV’s broken.” And people would be like, “I hope you die, Kelly.”

‘We’ve been on this natural evolution where it is now cool to be nice. Whoa! You think about everything to do with social justice happening on the internet, and what that boils down to basically is we’re all actually just trying to be good. And the idea that that is actually the tone on the internet that we’re all trying to be better – I can’t even imagine how we got here.’

So much has changed on the internet since Daniel started out, with one part of it being how young people see themselves represented. Just recently, we saw the , based on the graphic novels by Alice Oseman, potentially change things for countless LGBTQ+ youngsters around the world.

Speaking about his own experience, Daniel explained: ‘I regret not being authentic about my sexuality sooner, because, this is something that applies to anyone. They don’t have to be some kind of gay! They could be in a job that they don’t like, they could have some kind of relationship with someone and they feel like they are avoiding some kind of truth that they know is there and they just don’t want to deal with it because it’ll be difficult. And that was very much me with my sexuality lurking in the background. But that holds you back from actually being present in your life and enjoying good times when they come.

‘I think there were lots of moments that I didn’t fully enjoy, lots of friendships I could have had over the years. And I felt like I had a wall up that was preventing me from just being real with the people around me. Even when people came to my last tour, and they’d meet me after the show, and they’d say, “Hey, Dan, you did this one thing, you opened up about your mental health, that really helped me and I just want to say thank you.” I said, this is really beautiful, but I don’t feel like I deserve to hear this because I felt I was still lying about something fundamental and massive on my end, hiding my sexuality.

‘So I really regret not just being honest with myself and the world sooner because life is incredibly short and we’ve probably only got one. So we do not need to waste years at a time running away from things on any level that we fundamentally know are true, even if it’s going to be very difficult to overcome.’

‘It couldn’t have ever happened earlier,’ he continued. ‘But I just regret that it didn’t. I wish that I had the Heartstopper dream and I was out there living that happy life since I was 14, because it would have been so much happier. So that’s the only thing – I regret it but I do accept that this is life, we cannot change the way that things go. I am grateful to even be where I am.’

So where exactly is Daniel now?

He’s always been open about his mental health and says there are definitely days where he struggles but he’s getting better at seeing the positives.

Writing his book You Will Get Through This Night helped him immensely with that, and he’s got pretty good at picking out the positives. Despite being an all-out introvert, he’s excited to get back to events – he recently returned to his emo roots to see My Chemical Romance live, which he dubbed a ‘transcendental experience’ and is pumped to return to London Pride.

‘I think one of the wildest moments was going to London Pride in 2019 pre-apocalypse, because I had never been to a Pride before, trying desperately to keep myself out of all conversations tangentially related to sexuality,’ he recalled. ‘And to be in such an environment that isn’t just people on Twitter being like “Yas, gay etc, werk queen, snap,” but just seeing thousands of people in this radically accepting environment was such a tidal wave of powerful acceptance.

‘When you go to something like Pride, and you just see thousands of people in the streets, it almost blunt forces this fundamental truth that it is okay, and that you are accepted for who you are. And that for me, it was a real mind-blowing moment.’

And of course, he lights up thinking about his upcoming tour, We’re All Doomed, which will allow him to see his viewers in person for the first time in years.

‘People are saying, “What’s the difference gonna be [compared to previous tours]? I’m scared, is it going to be incredibly homosexual and depressing?” And I’m going to say, yes,’ he laughed.

‘Maybe that’s what the people want. And really, the idea of the show is, after the last three years, I think we all have this point where we wake up, we look at our phones in the morning, and we just see this barrage of terrible things. Like okay, the ocean’s on fire, there’s some kind of solar flare that’s coming to destroy us all randomly while we sleep, the bees are dying, and you just think, “Damn, we’re totally f**ked.” Maybe. I don’t know.

‘So I thought, why not do a whole comedy show about literally all the most terrible anxiety-inducing things going on?

‘There’s a lot of scary s**t that’s happening in the world. And if you can come to my show, and spend an hour and a half laughing about it, you’ll be able to handle anything. Because maybe you’ll think there’s some hope for the future, things are gonna be alright. But at the very least, if not, you’ll think, “Well we put it all out on the table. And we had a good inappropriate laugh about it.” And now, when the flames start to rise and the moon falls from the sky, we’ll be like, “Ah, it’s alright.”‘

Tickets for Daniel Howell’s world tour We’re All Doomed