I watched many of Somerton's videos and there was something just off about them. He sounded so pretentious, but it wasn't just that, his videos went nowhere and had no real conclusions or analysis. They seemed so disjointed, like many articles plastered together, which now makes a lot of sense lol I always thought he was putting more effort in the credits than in the actual content of the videos, and it turns out the credits were not even original, they were bought! my god I can only laugh.
So, this is particularly bad in context that a few months ago Somerton had put a short video up where he was on the verge of tears. He said he wasn't making enough money from this to support himself and would likely have to quit if he couldn't get more patreon subs.
Oh you are selling it short. The thumbnail was a literal "THIS IS THE END" in all caps. It was such a wild video, I immediately smelled a scammer. It was all the more damning when the video was deleted and he continue posting new content, with no update whatsoever about the situation. The way he talked about it really tug the heartstrings of people, I remember reading the comments and many fans mentioning they just had made a Patreon donation to help, how awful.
I think part of it is such detailed dives into history of queerness in arts, cinema, and entertainment are the kind of stuff a lot of LGBTQ people are really looking for because there still isn't a lot of it being packaged and presented for a modern audience. There is real hunger for the subject. That he was stealing from well-written pieces helped make him look serious as a scholar.
This hits it right in the head, as a queer person you are just thirsty for material, the hunger is absolutely real, even in this day and age. As a gay guy anything remotely queer gets a view from me when I surf Youtube, just out of principle. I watched the Celluloid Closet ages ago when anything remotely queer was very rare and I loved it. The documentary does address this, how we hunger for this representation. When Somerton did his video the plagiarism was so obvious, but I thought nothing of it at the time, because it had been a while since I saw the original, which is based on a book, so I naively thought Somerton just read the book! lol
I'm glad HBomber recommended Matt Baume and Khadija Mbowe, they are delightful.
I don't get why somerton was so confident he'd only plagiarized "by mistake" once when like everything he ever did was stolen. lol so weird.
This goes back to Tallarico as well (from the previous HBomber video). These scammers/con artists/etc are basically pathological liars, narcisists if you will. As Hbomber said they see nothing wrong in what they are doing, the creators they are taking credit from are just beneath them.
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