The Earnest Generation
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I’ve watched only one—his coming-out video—and he is adorable, with a charming boy-next-door appeal. He radiates a sweet, Midwestern wholesomeness, and you can see why in high school he was elected Homecoming King. With his swimmer’s body and hair streaked blond from lifeguarding in the brief Minnesota summer, who would guess there was a homo lurking just beneath the surface? He is just the boy you would trust your daughter with. You’d think that, as the doctor’s son, he would put on airs, but not Connor. He wants to be everybody’s friend even if he is one of the cool kids. Now that he’s living in L.A., he retains his humility—stardom means nothing to him. It’s all about the love and support he gets from his crowd of well-wishers. He tells us in the close of the book when he addresses his readers directly that “the amount of support I receive on a daily basis is heartwarming, and I wouldn’t be where I am today without it.” Connor is not afraid to show his vulnerability. He needs a daily tub of love to keep him fresh and clean.

But being 22, Connor doesn’t have a whole lot of experience to put into a memoir. He’s a small-town boy who has been isolated from economic worry, social hostility, or parental abuse. His luck is part of his charm, but it also gives him a vacuousness that makes him a popular teen “vlogger.” One of the telltale chapters is about an incident when he was in the ninth grade. He wanted to get a laptop, but he wanted a MacBook instead of a PC like the rest of the family. He also wanted his father’s approval even though he didn’t need it; he had the necessary $1,000 saved up, and his father’s advice that another brand would cost half as much fell on deaf ears. The lesson for the reader is not that he got his own way, but that you need to “know what you want and follow your gut.” I am delighted that at fourteen he had $1,000 of his own money to buy his heart’s desire, but it begins to throw light on a privilege he has no awareness of possessing. It’s all right for Connor to follow his gut and get what he wants, because he’s nicely cushioned from the consequences if things go wrong. But there are lots of kids who might follow their gut and not have loving parents and an indulgent police force to set him straight. (Connor tells us he was pulled over twice in high school for speeding. In parts of Baltimore, where I live, that might lead to a bullet in the head.) The MacBook taught Franta a lesson for life: “You are your own individual with your own particular set of dreams, desires, and aspirations. … So know what you like, know what makes you happy, stick to your guns, and state it with confidence. You’ll walk taller, and as long as you follow your gut, you won’t stray far in life.”

But then we learn that for years he’s been lying to himself about his sexuality. He’s been ignoring his gut or another part of his anatomy. From a business point of view, it must have been difficult coming out to his millions of video friends. Yet, from my one and only viewing of his blog, I can’t imagine that it came as much of a surprise to his fans. Connor is pretty fey as well as corn-fed. The first person he tells is his mother, who doesn’t miss a beat: “Oh, honey, it’s okay. It doesn’t matter to me. Are you seeing anyone?” I can guess what she was thinking: “Thank god, he’s figured it out at last!” But his mother pushes him in ways he is not willing to go, at least with the reader. She wants to know whether there’s a boyfriend, because you need to form relationships. At the very least, you need to suck some dick.

I’m not suggesting that Connor go porno, but you’d think he would mention kissing a guy after repeatedly chronicling a passionless embrace. In the chapter, “Where I Find Happiness,” he teasingly speaks of “Playing with, petting, holding, or cuddling a cute animal. Any. It just has to be cute.” This is about as close as he comes to suggesting sex. Connor’s sexuality stays relentlessly disembodied, an idea that viewers can ignore as long as they understand the bigger lesson: “to help others in a similar position.” Because he feels that “with a large audience, I often feel a certain sense of responsibility to guide, inform, and nurture whenever possible.” And what has he taught his young viewers? It is all right to label yourself as long as you keep it abstract, unphysical, disembodied. Not the lesson I would have taught.

The other lesson that Connor markets is “Don’t allow yourself to settle for just anything in your life. Strive to obtain your every want and desire, as long as you’re not hurting others.” Failure is always your own fault. People only fail because they didn’t work hard enough, didn’t persist for long enough, didn’t want it enough. Never mind that this creed of self-reliance goes counter to his expressed need for his millions of fans. Consistency is not one of Connor’s strengths.

There is something pernicious in this conservative philosophy. It blames the victims. It’s your fault that you couldn’t get over being raped. If you’d worked a little harder, you wouldn’t have ended up on the street. Studies have shown that college graduates who have trouble getting jobs don’t blame the economy; they blame themselves. Well, it is the economy, stupid! There are systemic inequalities that stump the best efforts of everyone but the exceptional. Of course, Connor wouldn’t know it. The crosses he has had to bear in life are being a middle child, having a bump on his forehead, and winning the god-awful Homecoming King contest. His success on YouTube has shown him that with a little hard work and patience, even he can be famous.

Where are our young gay voices today? You don’t want to know.

 

David Bergman, poetry editor for this magazine, is professor of English at Towson University in Maryland.