Archive of Our Own

“Semantics is about the relation of words to reality—the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.” - Steven Pinker, 2007.

“If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” - Junot Díaz, 2009.

~bisexual~

Most people can’t pinpoint the exact moment they realised they were queer. There might be a dramatic moment of acceptance, sure, but realisation?

For Phil, it is two thirty seven on the morning of the April Fools Day of 2003, and he has just for the first time stumbled across the Wikipedia page for bisexuality. At two thirty six, he hadn’t known it was a word. At two thirty eight, he knows this is him.

This is the word, he thinks.

Words are everything. They are the sum total of everything you can know and think and say and be and want and have and lack. It’s only through words that we can define ourselves, because everything and everyone is defined with reference and in contradistinction to everything and everyone else. Before he knew ‘bisexual’, a guy liking a guy and a guy liking a girl were definitionally opposed, separate, mutually exclusive. In two years’ time he’ll learn about minimal pairs and semantic components, about words that differ in only one block of meaning (homosexual versus heterosexual, man versus woman - he won’t realise how terrible these examples are for a while yet) but at two thirty six on April Fools Day he just knows that ‘gay’ cannot coexist with ‘straight’. At two thirty six he knows that since he has a girlfriend and isn’t pretending to like her, the way he likes boys must be different.

At two thirty seven, he realises that he is wrong.

At two thirty eight, he says the word out loud to himself for the very first time, and redefines his own sexuality.

~okay~

He tells his Mum on the second of April - it would have been a poor joke.

She still doesn’t believe him.

“But you’ve never shown any interest in boys!” is her first objection, and of course she is right, because Phil has never shown his interest to his mother. His mother has not seen his eyes linger, has not gone through his internet history, has not hopped inside his brain to find the connotations that come with his words.

“And you were going out with that lovely Amy girl!” She picks up a tea towel and wipes a non-existent spillage off the counter.

“I still am,” Phil says. “I’m not gay, Mum. I still, y’know, like girls.”

(Later, when he’s replaying this conversation in his head and considering how he could have gone about it better, he’ll wonder at his use of the word ‘still’. Nothing has changed by way of having this conversation, except no, that’s not true. Something has changed; he has changed in his mother’s eyes. The words she uses to define him have changed.)

But now her eyebrows raise; she puts down the tea towel. “Phil, if you are gay, you know that’s okay with us, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but I’m not.”

“Lots of people go through a stage of calling themselves, you know, bi, or thinking they are, and then later sort of settle down as one or the other, so if this is just a phase, that’s okay, alright?”

He hasn’t yet learnt to detest the words ‘just a phase’. “But it’s not.”

“Okay. Okay then.” Suddenly she hugs him. “Sorry, I’m just in a bit of a frazzle this morning. I love you, okay?”

“Love you too.”

But he’ll replay that conversation over and over in his head and realise that she has said it’s okay if he’s straight, it’s okay if he’s gay, and it’s okay if his bisexuality is a phase. The only thing she hasn’t explicitly said is okay is the truth. Of course it is fine with her, or at least it will be fine with her, but...

There are lots of different arguments as to the provenance of the word ‘okay’ but the theory that Phil remembers best is the military one, which goes like this: in some unspecified war, perhaps the American Civil War, commanders would write down the number of people killed at the end of each day, and the best days were the ones where they wrote down 0.k. None killed, zero killed, 0.k. But an 0.k. day could come in two forms. They could be days of marvellous bloodless victories or they could be days where nothing happens, where no one dies but nothing is won either.

This, his first example of coming out (oh, and what a lie that phrase is: you don’t step out of a closet but wrench open the door and invite people inside, and not once, but time and time again, person after person grasping at your identity and dragging out their own reactions, be they soft and gentle or harsh and grating) is an 0.k. day.

~queer (1)~

It’s a word Phil’s grown up with, although not a word he’s ever used much. “There’s nowt so queer as folk,” the more northern of his grandmothers would say in response to pretty much everything, truth be told, and his grandfather would mutter indistinctly, whether in agreement or annoyance, Phil could never tell.

He has never worried about being different. “You’re an odd child,” he was told on a regular basis. “You’re a queer one.” In years to come he’ll build a whole persona on it, showcase his differences to the world, invite them to define him as weird, to add that word to the entry in their mental lexicon marked Phil Lester.

But that’s not what ‘queer’ means in the dialect of the playground.

“He’s a queer!” they hurl at each other. “He’s a fairy! He’s gay!”

It never mattered what Phil said in response to the jeers when they came his way, because those lads (almost always lads) couldn’t have cared less about his sexuality. All they were doing was throwing words at him, words that were leached of all meaning until they were just synonyms of ‘bad’; words like bastard, retard, girlie. You’re such an insert insult here.

It’s amazing how much worse they hurt when there’s a grain of truth to spice the insipid uniformity of the placeholder insult.

In his first term of sixth form, before everyone works out that they actually have to study for this, a boy swaggers into his English classroom ten minutes past the bell. “Sorry I’m late sir, photocopier was being gay.”

Mr. Rowlingson closes his eyes in resignation at what must follow. “A photocopier does not have a gender, Gordon, it cannot be gay.”

But that’s not what Gordon meant. Gordon meant that the photocopier was broken. That it wasn’t working. That it wasn’t right. That it was gay.

(Mr. Rowlingson leaves at Christmas, having had to assign detention to five Lower Sixth Formers and a whole class of year elevens for refusing to do their homework on the basis that ‘this book is gay’. Phil never does find out if the obvious rumour is true. If he had to guess, he would say yes, based on the moment of silence before he unleashed the storm, a silence that nevertheless spoke, and spoke the word ‘again’.)

A queer affair, all in all.

~community~

When Phil arrives at university, it feels less like living a new life and more like learning a new language. Linguistics isn’t a subject you learn in school, and although Phil knew enough to know he wanted to study the science of how language works, it’s like learning a new jargon, dialect, variety, a whole new lexicon and syntax for the essays he’s never really had to write before.

And undercutting all of that, the new reality of who he is and can be.

Morphology: the internal structure of words. (When he finally told his year eleven girlfriend that he was bi, the confused response was “but how do you know?” He absolutely did not say that, well, ‘bisexual’ breaks down into ‘bi-’ meaning ‘two’ and ‘sexual’ meaning exactly what you think it does, and therefore the word means ‘sexually attracted to two genders’ so how do you think I know?)

Phonetics and phonology: the sound patterns of speech. (His father has never spoken to him directly about his sexuality, and Phil’s actually kind of grateful for that because it really shouldn’t be a big deal, but for the last couple of years there has always been an infinitesimal pause before he says any word from the LGBTQ initialism.)

Historical linguistics: language change, the evolution of sounds and words. (‘Queer’ used to mean odd in Phil’s mental lexicon, and then it meant gay, and now... Now he’s not quite sure, because there’s a move to reclaim it, a move he’s hearing about from the fringes of the YUSU LGBT events, and it has shades of difference but also celebration and above all community, and this is why it’s like learning a second language, because he has to deliberately commit this new meaning to memory when his heart and his gut are telling him that it means something different, and something horrible.)

He tries to explain to his brother over Skype how he feels about those LGBT events - how they’re sort of welcoming and sort of not, how the friendly atmosphere is laced with defensiveness and fear - because Martin was supremely cool in the face of Phil’s coming out and he can’t exactly talk about the university community to people within that community.

“Can’t we talk about something else?” asks Martin.

Phil blinks. “Sorry, I’m making you uncomfortable,” because after all he is essentially discussing his sexuality with his big brother, and this is to be expected, and he shouldn’t force this on people.

“No, it’s just - it’s like it’s all you ever talk about.”

And perhaps it is. This is a part of him, and it’s a part of him he can’t talk about with anyone who has the choice to drop him. You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family. Martin cannot stop being Phil’s brother in the same way that Amy stopped being his girlfriend.

“Sorry,” he says again.

“Like, it’s fine and everything, but it’s not the only thing about you, y’know? Don’t fixate on it.”

“Yeah.”

He looks guiltily away from the computer. His gaze flickers over his desk, passing the pile of books about phonetic acoustics that no one wants to hear about and landing on his camcorder, but Martin watches his videos; there’s nothing new to say there. He thinks about the seminar on grammar he attended yesterday and how he learnt syntax’s one and only joke (“Three syntacticians walk into A’.”) which will mean nothing to Martin. He spent a while today on reddit talking about memes, but that’s boring, that’s irrelevant.

“So,” he says. “How’s your job going?”

And for the rest of the conversation, he just listens. He’s a good listener, has become a better one since beginning his degree because he leaves every lecture wanting to hear the things he’s learning about. After an intro to psycholinguistics, he starts paying attention to slips of the tongue, to which sounds and words are swapped or skipped or supplanted. Phonology has him listening out for where people add in ‘r’s between vowels and change ‘n’ for ‘m’ when followed by a ‘b’ or ‘p’ or ‘w’ (people say lesbiam porn not lesbian porn and they sing Hosanna-r-in the highest).

Listening to what people do say goes hand in hand with hearing what they don’t say.

The first YUSU LGBT event he goes to is a drinks evening; there’s a great deal of truth to the stereotype that socialising is synonymous with boozing at uni. A couple of hours in, the LGBT rep stands on a table, wobbling precariously.

“Welcome to GaySoc!” he shouts.

When Phil gets back to the flat that evening, a history student called Vicky is baking cupcakes in the kitchen.

“Didn’t pick yourself up a nice boy?” she asks.

And yet when he goes home for Christmas, the first thing asked of him is whether or not he’s got his eye on any of the girls.

In January he begins a module on sociolinguistics.

“It can be quite hard to distinguish someone’s motivations for using different varieties of language,” says the lecturer. “For example, in Labov’s famous case study of New York department stores, it was found that the middle class of shop workers altered their pronunciation to a more prestigious variety when asked to repeat a phrase. Sounds simple - they wanted to be posher, right? But consider this: in order to be part of a group, you have to exclude other people. Putting yourself in one class takes you out of another. So were those shop workers embracing the high prestige variety? Or were they avoiding the low prestige variety?”

Inclusion demands exclusion. The next week he goes to another LGBT event, a meal out which quickly dissolves into drinking games and a move to the nearest club. The boys talk to each other, the girls stick together; there are no trans*people here so far as he can see. He leaves before he can get too drunk and break boundaries which should not exist.

~gay~

Phil has not had a relationship - a proper relationship, a relationship where he felt able to acknowledge the other person as someone important to him - since he and Amy split up all those years ago. It’s not seemed worth it. The problem with being at university is that he’s not always there, that he is divided between home and York, family and friends. He has enough in his life, he thinks.

The reason he knows that Dan Howell is different is because he suddenly knows that no, he doesn’t.

It starts like many a friendship these days, words on a screen. Everything is words in Phil’s life, and there are words enough that go between them, tweets and DMs and texts and Facebook messages, but suddenly he wants more. He wants to hear Dan’s voice, he wants to see his lips shape the words they’re sending back and forth, he wants to watch his eyes light up with the passion that Phil can practically hear from the written word.

And more than that: Phil finds himself wanting to know things which cannot be captured in words. He wants to know the precise shade of Dan’s skin, not so he can describe it but so that he can see it when he closes his eyes. He wants the body memory of hugging him close; he wants Dan’s warmth to seep into his bones to rest there for when he’s cold and alone.

He should probably be more cautious interacting with someone who is, after all, essentially a fan but he sees little point in caution when every word between them makes it clearer that they both want more.

Phil has never had much in the way of a gaydar and thinks the idea is rather stupid anyway: you don’t need to know if someone identifies as gay. What you need to know is if they’re interested in you. He does wish he were better at reading bodies for that purpose because he’s so completely sure that Dan wants him, too, but when they first meet, when Dan first emerges from the ticket barriers at Manchester Piccadilly station...

“Hey,” Phil says. He’s grinning so hard that his cheeks will start to ache in a minute.

“Hey,” says Dan. His smile is smaller, tentative. The corner of his mouth pulls upwards as if against his will.

There are people weaving around them, adjusting their courses so as not to bump into these two young men who are so caught in the moment, in a bubble, in a tiny fraction of time and space which contains only the two of them. Phil lurches forwards into a hug, and Dan responds, of course he does. But -

He pats Phil on the back. He shifts away. He drops his arms.

Phil has never been so mortified. He’s wrong, he must have been wrong, Dan doesn’t want him like that, he just wants a friend, he’s thinking Phil’s too old, he’s - how has Phil got this wrong?

But he can’t apologise because that would just draw attention to it, so he steps back and tries to smile and says “It’s so good to see you!”

“You too,” says Dan. “Weird, though. I think I’d convinced myself you only existed in 2D.”

“I am secretly a cartoon. This whole city is a static background illustration.”

When Dan laughs, it’s a small sound, a small movement of his head and shoulders, but Phil can almost visualise the tension dissolving from his body. He hadn’t noticed that Dan was tense.

“So what are we going to do in your static background illustration?” he asks.

Naturally they start off in Starbucks, but they do some other stuff too; they ride the Manchester Eye, they wander round the shops and take photos in an Apple store, they dive back into Starbucks when it starts to rain. Throughout, Dan stays carefully away from Phil, and so Phil stays a careful distance away from Dan. It’s impossible to be too upset about this in the face of Dan being right there, right next to him, and Phil does have a wonderful time but if it’s impossible to be upset, it’s also impossible not to feel disappointed.

So as they drink their second caramel lattes of the day, Phil can’t help but broach the subject, however indirectly.

“So, do you, like, have a - I mean, are you, um, are you with anyone?”

Dan looks at him strangely, and to be fair he did specifically tell Phil three months ago that he’d split up with his girlfriend, whose name Phil can’t quite remember.

“Not since Victoria. Obviously.”

Victoria, that was her name. “Why’s it obvious?” Phil asks.

Dan glances around, but it’s three o’clock in the afternoon and the only people in the café are students, staring at their laptops with headphones firmly on. Still, he just shrugs.

“What about you?”

Phil shakes his head.

He takes Dan to the Skybar, where he’d secretly hoped he could ask Dan out, like, properly, but doesn’t dare. It’s not til they’re walking to the bus station to go back to Phil’s parents’ house that the subject is broached again.

“I broke up with Victoria when, like, when I knew I was gay,” Dan blurts out. “And I haven’t had a, y’know, boyfriend because it’s like. I mean. I’m leaving home soon. Like, all the idiots from school. So. Yeah. I’m not, like, in the closet, but no point giving them ammunition, right? And I’m leaving next year, so.”

It’s Monday October 19 ^th 2009. Dan still has almost an entire year left before he goes to university, and although he’ll be going travelling for bits of it and Phil knows he’s planning to do an internship or two, that’s still a lot of time in Wokingham. A lot of time spent avoiding attractive guys, a lot of time spent in the fear of looking like he’s -

This is the point when it clicks in Phil’s brain.

Does he need this? he thinks. Does he need to pursue a boy who won’t touch him in public, a boy who won’t admit to their relationship (if they ever have one, he reminds himself hastily), a boy who is beautiful and brilliant and - oh, who is he kidding? Of course he needs this.

By the time Dan goes home on Wednesday, Phil knows the exact shade of Dan’s eyes, and hair, and skin. He knows how their bodies fit together, where his hands naturally rest on Dan’s waist, how their lips move against each other, how their feet tangle in their sleep; he knows the softness of Dan’s hair against his neck and the warmth of Dan’s body pressed against his. And he knows, too, the gentle ache which comes with restraint, and the phantom cold which comes with absent warmth.

~home~

The perils of direct translation are illustrated to Phil in morphology with a discussion of the word ‘home’. The English version is used liberally, with or without an article and has many many meanings; there is a Spanish word, but it’s used much more interchangeably with ‘house’ than in English; there is no French equivalent at all.

‘Home’ lost all meaning to Phil when he went to university, when he tripped over the word as he tried to tell people he was leaving the bar for the night. “I’m going home,” he said, and blinked foggily at his own misuse of the word.

There’s such a difference between house and home, such a distinction to be drawn between a flat-pack bedroom with a functional but bare kitchen and a house filled with people and memories. But when Phil goes back to his parents’ house, that’s not it either; it doesn’t feel full enough for the concept, doesn’t satisfy the definition, because there are too many parts of him now which are not contained within this two-up two-down old-fashioned house. There are his friends from university, all the videos that weren’t filmed at his parents’ house, and Dan. For all that Dan has spent time at Phil’s parents’ house, there’s far too much of him that exists elsewhere, and so Phil must exist with him, and with his friends, and with his family. He must be pulled in three different directions.

When Phil rents out his first flat, Dan comes with him to look round various apartments, his parents come to help him move in and a few of his friends immediately throw him a flatwarming party which feels rather ill-advised, given the size of the place, and it doesn’t feel like he’s being pulled apart but rather that he’s being put back together. All the pieces of his life are settling into their respective places and creating a whole new picture. He still finds himself missing all the places he’s previously called home, but he feels more settled now.

It’s probably significant that the first time he recognises this feeling is when he wakes up one morning to find that Dan has already left to go to uni but has left a hoodie slung across the foot of Phil’s bed.

True to his word, Dan seems to consider going to university as synonymous with leaving home. He rarely goes back to his parents’ place during the holidays, instead choosing to stay with Phil, or in his own room at uni if he has work to do. The day he found out he was going to Manchester was such a joy for both of them; Dan because of his achievement, and Phil because having Dan close means less pretence, less care, less turning a relationship that felt like home into the semblance of a house. It’s a loss of vague tweets for a gain of soft kisses.

But only in private, of course. Only in darkness, of course.

Phil doesn’t really mind. He’s not one for public displays of affection, and a life on the internet has taught him the value of privacy. He’s perfectly happy, as it turns out. The fly in the ointment is that Dan is not.

As they both become more prominent on YouTube, people start asking with increasing fervour whether or not they’re together. Phil just ignores it; they don’t need to know, and what they think has nothing to do with the truth. Dan reacts against it; he lies and rants and tries to control what people think. Phil asks him why.

“Because so far today I’ve had twenty comments and... three vYous with the word ‘faggot’ in them.”

They’re in Phil’s flat, of course, sat on the tiny sofa and mindlessly browsing the internet. 

“But - so what?”

Dan shakes his head. “You don’t understand.”

“So tell me,” Phil presses.

“Y’know, I don’t get why it doesn’t bother you,” Dan says. “All these people throwing words like that at you and the one thing you can’t do is tell them they’re wrong. Except you can, I guess.”

Phil blinks. “What - what are you saying?”

“Well, you’re not gay, are you? Someone calls you a faggot, you can just say ‘nope’ and be totally honest about it, take yourself out of the whole situation, just ignore the whole thing. You can go and kiss a girl to prove it if you like.”

“Dan!”

“I’m not saying you would, I’m just saying that you could. And what slurs even are there for bi people? Most people don’t even know it’s a thing, believe it’s a thing! There’s literally nothing anyone could say to you.”

“Yeah there is,” Phil says quietly. He doesn’t add, and you just said it.

~biphobia~

Phil has never been asked for a threesome purely because he’s bi. A female friend he met at an LGBT event was, though. As she told it, she barely got away.

Phil has never been asked to leave the LGBT community. It has been implied that he should though, and it has been said that he could.

No one has accused Phil of being greedy or a slut because he’s bi, but several friends have said to him, “oh, you must get laid loads then.”

Phil has seen a grand total of one bisexual character on television, and that was Captain Jack Harkness from Doctor Who. He has never read a book with a bisexual character. He has never seen a film with one, either. He cannot name a single bisexual historical figure.

Phil has never been asked to pretend he’s gay or pretend he’s straight, but he has felt the pressure to do it. He has let people’s assumptions go, because it’s so much easier. He has been gently shooed into the one closet, and then the other, and then back again, depending on who he was standing with at the time.

Phil has never heard the word ‘biphobia’ and won’t for another couple of years. He already has a definition for it though, and that definition is the way he feels when Dan tells him that he can’t understand how it feels to face discrimination.

~out (vb)~

For someone who has a career and a degree in words, Phil’s are strikingly spare; to anyone who has not seen his videos, he is first and foremost quiet. It’s not that he holds back; this is not a constraint or a limitation he places on himself. He just likes to listen more than speak, and if he knows the power and the potential of hastily spoken word, that’s secondary to a simple lack of desire to speak.

For someone whose words are strikingly spare, Phil’s shout strikingly loud.

It’s a bad day. His new video isn’t going through to sub boxes, he’s been so busy with various radio appearances and having a social life for once that he hasn’t slept properly in a week, and The Video Which Shall Not Be Named has once again been posted on tumblr.  The radio show this evening went okay but not amazingly; Phil stumbled over a few too many words and one of the callers swore live on air again, making him even more stressed.

These are reasons. They are not excuses.

There are far too many people outside the BBC tonight. When they first started up it was one or two, and then twenty or thirty, but here there are scores, hundreds maybe, and Phil’s feeling embarrassed and stressed and above all tired, and he just wants to go home. He wants to curl up on the sofa, probably with hot chocolate the way Dan does it when he’s feeling decadent, all whipped cream and melted mini marshmallows, and he wants to lean against Dan as he prattles on about the stupidity of the no-swearing policy, only half-listening to a conversation they’ve had many times before. He wants comfort, in a word.

Dan’s irritated, too. He’s got exactly the same schedule as Phil, of course, and although they’re both as introverted as each other, he’s much worse at faking extroversion, at having the same conversation a hundred times (“Hey, what’s your name? Oh, cool. Yeah, of course. Did you enjoy the show? Okay, bye. And what’s your name? Oh, that’s nice.”) so Phil’s expecting that soon they’ll go home and cuddle and watch some crappy telly and it’ll just be nice. He doesn’t want more than that, doesn’t expect their day to go from terrible to amazing; he just wants nice. That word gets too hard a time, he thinks.

But as they’re emerging from their tube station, Dan gets a text. Phil glances at him as he reads it.

“Guy from school,” Dan says. “Steven. He’s stuck in London, missed his train out and wants to know if he can stay.”

On any other night, Phil would have been perfectly fine with that, but today... “Isn’t there anywhere else? A Premier Inn, even?”

“Don’t be a dick.”

“I’m not.” Or perhaps he is, but there are reasons for it. “I’m just tired and stressed, and you are too, and I don’t even know this guy-”

“Phil, it’s one night. He’ll be gone in the morning.”

They reach their front door. Phil digs out his keys. “Fine, fine, sorry. Is the bed in your room clear?”

It takes until they’re halfway up the first flight of stairs for him to realise that Dan hasn’t replied. “Dan?”

“I’m gonna put him on the sofa bed.”

He says it in a rush, as if saying it faster makes it hurt less, and it strikes Phil that what he should probably do now is to stop and turn around to confront Dan; that’s how this story works, except they’re halfway up the stairs. He’s never heard or seen a story like this, never seen himself in any love story he’s ever watched, but he knows the conventions of the genre. For this scene, there must be space between them, and probably a door to slam. They shouldn’t go to the kitchen, he thinks vaguely. Slamming a glass door would not end well.

He says nothing. He continues up the stairs, one foot in front of the other; he watches his shoes find each new step because there is nowhere else to go.

Steven arrives after a half hour of silence. Phil does not get up from the sofa.

“Alright?” he says to Dan. “Haven’t seen you in fucking forever, man!”

“Yeah,” Dan shrugs. “Life, y’know? That’s Phil, flatmate.”

Every word makes Phil want to sink further into his seat. Dan’s trying too hard to be casual, to be cool. Phil’s used to it around fans, around large groups of people and he wouldn’t criticise Dan for his social anxiety. But this is unbearable.

“Nice to meet you,” he lies. “I’ll get out of your hair, I’m going to bed anyway.”

He sleeps badly in the empty bed, spends too long listening to Dan’s laugh - too low, too heavy to be real. At nine o’clock in the morning, just when he’d normally wake up to steal the covers back from Dan, he finds himself staring at the ceiling. Has that crack always been there?

So he throws off the covers which have remained boringly on top of him and makes his way to the kitchen. If he can’t have sleep, he can at least have caffeine.

He’s watching the Jeremy Kyle Show and has just about thrown off the figurative storm cloud over his head when Steven walks in, wearing jeans but no shirt. Phil tries not to judge, he really does.

“Alright, mate?” says Steven.

No, and I’m not your mate, Phil thinks. “Morning,” he offers aloud. “Would you like some coffee or tea or something?”

“Nah, you’re alright, I’ll get a McDonalds at the station or something.”

“Right.”

They lapse into silence. It’s awkward, but Phil’s feeling much more bitter than he is awkward, so he leaves it to Steven to speak first:

“You know Dan from uni or something?”

Phil shakes his head. “YouTube.” And he should stop there, he really should, but - “We’ve been together for nearly four years.”

Steven doesn’t get it. “What, flatmates?”

“Boyfriends. Or partners or whatever you want to call it. Boyfriends makes us sound like teenagers, doesn’t it?”

Steven gapes. “You’re gay? Dan fuckin’ Howell is gay?”

“Actually I’m bisexual but otherwise, yes, that’s about the size of it.”

He’s already regretting this but Steven laughs, albeit somewhat shakily; he glances down at his own naked torso. “You’re having me on.”

Phil shrugs. Half of him wants to push on, to tell the whole damn truth for once and sod Steven’s discomfort, and the rest of him is shouting that one thing you absolutely don’t do is out someone without their permission. Why the hell is he doing this to Dan? He does what he should have done in the first place and shuts up, just in time to hear:

“Yeah, course he’s having you on. Sorry, he’s got an odd sense of humour.”

Dan’s voice is carefully jovial. Phil doesn’t dare look in his eyes.

“So what time’s your train?”

Steven fishes his phone out of his pocket, oblivious. “Ah, pretty soon actually. I’ll just grab my shit and go.”

“Yeah, alright,” Dan says. “Was good to see you, man.”

As soon as the door shuts behind him, Dan turns on Phil, his voice shaking with disgust.

“How could you.”

Phil says nothing.

“How could you?”

“I-”

“What have I done, hm? Did I step on a fluffy animal? Have I been slagging you off online? Fairly sure I haven’t committed any major crimes recently, but y’know, maybe I got drunk and forgot.”

“I-”

“Okay, so I didn’t say in so many words please don’t tell him I’m gay but I think I made it pretty clear. What, did you think that was a joke? Did you think I liked doing that, pretending you were nothing to me, trying to act like a fucking lad, being an absolute dick so he’d think I was cool, so when he went back to Wokingham he wouldn’t take it out on my younger brother?”

“He wouldn’t-”

“Oh, and how do you know, hm? Have you ever met the guy before? Have you met anyone from my old school before? Do have the slightest clue about the shit my brother has gone through because he’s related to that camp twat off the internet?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Of course you fucking are,” says Dan. “I’m going to have a shower. Try not to out me to the world in the next ten minutes.”

~happy~

English is a hybrid language. It cobbles together its lexicon from wherever it pleases, according to who invaded when and how. The quirks of history have led to the English word ‘sheep’ being replaced by the French-derived ‘mutton’ when it comes to actually eating it, for example, because after 1066 it was the French nobles eating the animals that the English cared for. Along the same sort of lines, a lot of English words for fighting come from French: ‘battle’ from ‘bataille’, ‘army’ from ‘armée’, ‘camouflage’ from - well, from ‘camouflage’. Words for home, house and hearth come straight from Germanic Old English.

Fighting with Dan makes Phil feel like he’s been dropped into a foreign land without a phrasebook. They’ve never fought before, not like this. They’ve bickered over who ate the last of the cereal and how many cupboard doors have been left open in the kitchen at any one time, but beyond that, Phil can honestly say that they have never argued.

This shouldn’t really be a fight. He knows he’s in the wrong here - it should be a case of apologising, possibly with some penance attached, and then getting over it. Phil did something wrong but he wasn’t setting out to be truly malicious; this shouldn’t have lasted as long as it has, but...

Right up until this moment, he genuinely, honestly hasn’t minded not coming out to the fans just yet. They work alongside two of the most prominent gay men in showbusiness, and being out hasn’t hurt Nick Grimshaw or Scott Mills any, but he’s enough of a realist to know that a tiny minority will react badly. And although he may be sure that he and Dan are forever, there is always that tiny possibility to be courted, the possibility that some day they might have to ride out the tsunami of a break-up, and the longer they leave coming out, the less likely it is that they’ll have to do that.

But Dan spends every second of his life fighting, it seems. He sees people speculating over ‘phan’ and cannot stop himself lashing out. He tries to look as straight as possible and hates himself for it. He detests the society that keeps him in the closet and he loathes himself for playing along.

If Phil daydreams about coming out, it’s a daydream where Dan is happy, and that’s why the argument has lasted so long.

(‘Happy’ comes from Middle English, too. ‘Dream’ likely comes from Old English. Happiness and dreams start at home, apparently.)

Right up until this moment, Phil has only wanted to come out for Dan’s sake, but now he feels that he’s been pushed into the closet one too many times. Now he feels that he has denied himself and been denied just once too often, now he feels that sure, he could stay silent, he could do the easy thing, but he could also tell the truth. He could. He could.

They haven’t exactly been ignoring each other - they work together, it would have been impossible - but there has been an inordinate amount of silence over the past few days. When Phil says “we need to talk,” the cliché almost seems to echo around the living room. Clichés always do. They hem you in and set a path for you; the words go so well together that they cannot go with any others; they are heavy and clunky and loud.

Isn’t all language like that, though?

“Yeah?” says Dan. It’s probably supposed to sound aggressive, but it comes out with a distinct air of weariness.

Phil sits down on the sofa, a careful distance away. “Um, two things, really. The first - I’m sorry. I really, really am - we had a bad day and then I didn’t sleep and - I shouldn’t have tried to out you. And I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, okay.” Dan smiles a bit. “I understand, yeah?”

“Good. Cos, um, the other thing - um. I. Okay, so this doesn’t have to have anything to do with you, and that’s why I’m saying it right? But, um. I’m. I’m gonna come out. Just me,” he adds hastily. “I won’t say anything about you. I just. I wanna come out. I’m going to - I’m, yeah.”

A pause.

“I’m not trying to - I’m not guilting you into - into coming out too,” Phil says. “I - This is for me. I - I think. I - I’ve done it before and it was - but you wouldn’t - but I’ve got you.”

Dan doesn’t respond directly. “What happened when you came out the first time? When you were sixteen or whatever?”

Phil blinks. “Well, I told my mum, and she was okay with it-”

“No, I mean at school. Your girlfriend. What happened? You’ve never said.”

No, he never has, has he? And it’s an effort now, to think back ten years. To think - what happened? What actually happened?

“Amy dumped me,” he says. “And - um. Well. I suppose everyone found out, because suddenly it was my fault. That we split up. Like. There are always sides when there’s a break-up at school, aren’t there? But it was. It was disproportionate,” he realises aloud. “I. I mean, no one ever straight out said to me - but.”

But.

In his first term of sixth form, before everyone worked out that they actually had to study for this, a boy swaggered into his English classroom ten minutes past the bell. “Sorry I’m late sir, photocopier was being gay.”

Mr. Rowlingson did not close his eyes. He glanced at Phil, saw the way he had shrunk into his seat. And then he said: “A photocopier does not have a gender, Gordon, it cannot be gay.”

No one had accused Phil of being greedy or a slut because he was bi, but several friends had said to him, “oh, you must get laid loads then,” and somehow the idea that he’d cheated on Amy had become the uncontested truth without the words ever being spoken aloud. Amy had still been single when they left school, because she must have been a right nympho to have gone out with Phil, and it’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it?

There were the girls who were suddenly scared of him, the boys who were suddenly uneasy around him. There were whispers and flinches and leers, and absolutely nothing actually happened.

“Well, so, it wasn’t too bad?”

No, it wasn’t too bad. No one beat him up. No one shouted at him. He wasn’t kicked out of his home, he didn’t transfer schools.

He did stop speaking, and he started listening, and the silence was deafening.

“It wasn’t too bad,” he says to Dan. “And that was ten years ago. It’ll be better now.”

It even got better then. It got better gradually for two years and then suddenly when he went to university because now no one had to redefine him; they had no prior knowledge of him. It got better when his being bisexual was not news.

And yet he still wants to do this, and he’s so glad that he’s in a place where he can do this.

“Okay,” says Dan. “I’m not - I’m not saying I’ll come out. But I’ll, like, support you. I’m with you.”

“Yeah,” says Phil, and hugs him, because sometimes words are overrated.

Hey guys. It’s been a while since I did a second channel video, which I’m sure you understand, what with the radio show and VidCon and Summer in the City and stuff. I thought about putting this on my main channel but it’s not really entertaining and not all that interesting either, so here we go!

So, as you have probably guessed, I have a bit of an announcement to make, and that announcement is that I am bisexual. If you don’t know what that means, google it. And... that’s it, really. There’s no, like, story to go with it, my family and friends already know, have done since I was sixteen, but I just felt like now was the right time to tell you guys.

That’s about it, then. Hope you’re all having wonderful days filled with rainbows and happiness and lions with laser eyes, and I will see you soon. Bye guys!

The video is bizarrely easy to film and edit, probably because Phil has subconsciously worked on this script for seven years. Sometimes if he’s walking down the street, he’ll murmur the words to himself, rejig sentences slightly, come up with new ways of saying it: I’m bisexual. The words have been lying dormant for seven years, growing and evolving along with him, until now when he can finally let them loose.

It does sort of make sense for Phil to come out first. Unlike Dan, he has never actually denied those old tweets from years ago which made his sexuality clear. He’s never mentioned them again either, but he can make a strong argument for not actually being in the closet at all.

“And it shouldn’t be terrible for you, right?” Dan asks, nervously. “I mean, it’s not like you’ll be saying you’re actually gay.”

Phil swallows because shit if that’s what Dan thinks... So he doesn’t answer. He just clicks upload.

~there are too many words for this~

‘how could he do that to dan?!?!’

That’s the post that hits him hardest.

The ones he expected, the ones saying he must be a slut, or that he’s afraid to properly come out of the closet, or that he’s actually straight and just messing around - all of those, Phil can deal with, because in one way or another he’s been dealing with those opinions since April 2 ^nd of 2003. The girls wailing that this has ruined Phil forever - because somehow confirmation that he is attracted to women has ruled them out - he can overlook their stupidity and hope they’ll learn. But being accused of hurting Dan?

The criticisms take various forms. He’s clearly straight so he’s just stringing Dan along. He’s clearly gay but he can’t commit so he’s giving himself an out. Good luck to Dan trying to keep a bisexual faithful - everyone knows they’re fucking nymphos who cheat all the time.

And it hurts.

Not only because of the suggestion that he would ever do anything like that to Dan, but because it hurts to tell the world this is me and have the world shout back no it isn’t. Because he’s a liar, because all bisexuals are liars, because they don’t exist, because - oh god, hasn’t Phil done this to himself? Hasn’t he asked himself: if I’m so in love with Dan, if I’m so attracted to Dan, doesn’t this mean I’m gay? Should it mean I’m gay? Is calling myself bisexual just making it sound like I’m going to leave him? And he knows it isn’t, he knows it’s just who he is, but it hurts to have people shout it at him.

They’re not shouting, of course, because they can’t, because they’re nothing more than words on a screen, but they are a barrage of words, leaping off their screens as they scroll through the comments and their inboxes and their tags the night after the video goes up.

“Why - how is this worth it?” Dan asks.

(There are messages of support too. There are young people, so many of them, sending him messages saying thank you with all their hearts, saying they wish him the very best, saying it’s so odd and so special to have someone just come out like that, like it’s no big deal, like it’s just another side channel video, not something to apologise for and not something to obsess over. The number of messages saying I think I might be bi too - those messages make Phil’s heart ache for his fifteen year old self and for all these people who never knew it was an option. Somehow it’s always so much harder to keep the good messages in mind.)

So it tumbles out of Phil’s mouth as if he’d rehearsed it (and perhaps he has):

“Because they were wrong when they said sticks and stones would break your bones but words weren’t worth the quarrel. Because words matter, because the words that these people throw, they hurt, and they matter, and the way you stop them saying them is not by staying quiet but by speaking up. And I can speak up. I’m not going to be kicked out of my own house, I won’t be beaten up, I won’t lose my job or any of my friends. There are people out there who don’t know the words to say. There are people who don’t even know they’re queer; they just know they feel uneasy when someone says queer people are wrong. There are people whose mental lexicons have failed them, people who honestly believe that ‘gay’ means ‘bad’ and people who have never heard the word ‘bisexual’ or ‘pansexual’ or ‘asexual’ and so many more. If we want to help them, to help ourselves, we have to use those words the right way, because language change happens through language use. We have to use the right words. And one day the words will be irrelevant and everyone will just be people, but until then the words matter. Because - because we matter, too.”

“Alright, L’Oréal,” Dan teases.

“Shut up,” Phil mutters, embarrassed now at all these things which have been lying in wait on the tip of his tongue for so long, but of course Dan ignores him.

“I love you,” he says, instead. “But... I don’t want to come out. I still don’t want to come out.”

“You don’t have to,” Phil says, immediately.

“I know, you twit, just let me...” He closes his laptop. “What I want is to, like, not lie. But that’s not the same as actually making a whole announcement - like, I know how important that was for you, but it’s really not for me. It’s just - it seems like a lot of shit to deal with for something I don’t actually have any burning desire to do anyway. I mean, fighting the good fight is fair enough, but - it’s probably really selfish or lazy or something, but I just - I want an easy life, and I reckon I’ve got a right to that. There’s no, like, moral imperative to do anything really - life sucks and then you die, eternal truth. The world will carry on without my contribution to it.”

“You and your existentialist stuff.”

“You and your linguisticky stuff. That’s not a word, is it?”

Phil smiles. “It is now.”

~queer (2)~

Dan does not come out to his viewers, and that’s okay. He’s more relaxed now the fuss has died down, happier to let them speculate away, quicker to call out homophobia (and biphobia) when he sees it on YouNow. He still makes shitty comments sometimes, but nowadays he takes them back. Phil still makes shitty comments, too. Life is a learning process, and all that. There are still words to be redefined in his head, still new entries to be made in the dictionary inside his head.

When Phil was tiny, the word ‘queer’ meant ‘different.’ “You’re an odd child,” he was told on a regular basis. “You’re a queer one.” Now, it means something more like - it means that although there are differences between the various sexual minorities, they are all also part of something which makes them the same. Dan’s gay and Phil’s bi, but they’re both queer.

When Phil was tiny, ‘queer’ meant ‘other’. Throughout his life, his sexuality has been something ‘other’ even to him, something almost external, dragged outside of him by a society that wouldn’t let him just accept it. Now it’s... Well, it’s still different by virtue of being unlike the majority, but it’s different like his Northern accent in London; it’s maybe not the norm, but it’s still normal, and it’s something to find in common with people rather than to separate him out.

This isn’t a real-world change, not really. It’s just a change in Phil’s mental lexicon.

There are two parts to a word: there’s the collection of letters or sounds, and then there’s the meaning, the concept designated by those shapes on a page and vibrations in the air. The word itself is the relationship between the two. Speech is not just soundwaves and graphemes; it is the communication of meaning between the speaker and listener, even if they are the same person. Perhaps especially then.

“You know,” he murmurs to Dan one night, curled up in bed, “I keep saying how important words are, but they have to mean something, don’t they? Coming out, it wasn’t really about saying I was queer - it was about being queer, for me. Saussure’s signifier and signified, couldn’t have one without the other... It’s like, even ‘I love you’ is irrelevant without you and me and the way I feel about you.”

Phil feels Dan’s chuckle more than hears it, his breath brushing across Phil’s shoulder. “How do you manage to turn a lecture on semantics into the sappiest thing I’ve ever heard?”

“How do you manage to turn what was going to be a really romantic conversation into an accusation?”

“It’s a gift,” Dan says. He yawns, and his words come out distorted: “Amazing gift actually, called the gift of the gab. Saying stuff. I don’t know, I’m tired, shut up.”

So Phil does. He snuggles further down in the bed, shifts closer to Dan, smiles as Dan’s arm snakes over his waist. There’s no need for more words tonight. The words have been spoken, and now it’s time for their meanings to resound.