An Apology

dicksweredinner:

skullamity:

hbomberguy:

Hi.

In early March, a former friend, Klaus, who worked with me on videos for my channel, put a ‘callout post’ on Tumblr about me. The post contains logs of a conversation we had after he came out to me that another friend had made him feel unsafe in skype chats in late 2011.

I handled this very poorly. I encourage you to read the logs Klaus has posted. [EDIT: You can find the post here. I originally did not link to it, because I was worried people would dogpile him, but on reflection if I’m saying you should read them it’s a mistake not to make them available, and I do not want to hide what I wrote.]

I believe that there is a proper way to react when a person approaches you with a story like the one he came to me with. It is always important to be kind to people who trust you when they tell you they feel hurt. When this happened, I failed to do this. Because I knew the person he was talking about, and I had been there at the time for many of the conversations Klaus had been referring to, I immediately went about investigating whether or not the claim was true. My first real response to Klaus opening up to me about his fears was to tell him that I doubted him, and to question if he was sure he was remembering things properly.

This behaviour was wrong. I had the opportunity to respond with care and understanding and instead my first instinct was to try to ‘check the facts’. This is not a kind instinct, and it is not a good way of treating anyone, especially a friend.

I write from a position of privilege. I try my best to be a good person and see things from a worthwhile perspective, but when it comes down to it I am a straight white man living in a very secluded part of the UK where most people aren’t affected by the worst of the problems I often talk about. I try to criticise the exact perspective this can engender, but when this happened I didn’t even notice I was acting it out myself. I failed to be compassionate to a friend who was confiding in me. Even if everything Klaus had said had been untrue, it was still nothing short of cruel to respond the way I did.

I want to be a good ally and stand up for people who have been hurt, and I very clearly still have a lot to learn from others. I wish I hadn’t needed to learn this lesson at all in the first place. I know I have disappointed some people. I recently reached out to my audience, asking people who have problems with aspects of my work to get in touch and tell me what they feel I should do differently, and I want to reaffirm that I read all of the messages that are sent to me, and take them seriously. I lost a very good friend, someone who was and still is important to me, because I failed to live up to the principles I believe in, and I do not want that to hurt anyone like that again.

A couple of other members of the community have shared the callout post and their disappointment with what I wrote. I am heartened by this behaviour –it’s good that people in our little corner of the internet are willing to criticise people’s actions, especially when they otherwise agree with them or like their work or share their goals, and especially when that person is me. This is exactly the sort of community I want to be a part of, and I hope I can do right by it in my work.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, and how I dealt with Klaus’ feelings is a big one. I was a bad friend to someone who deserved to be treated better, and can never undo that – but I can, and will, do better in the future.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I can never apologise enough to Klaus. I don’t expect him to forgive me. His post relates that he shared this story because he wants me to do better in the future, and to grow as a person, and at the very least I hope it’s clear that I want to live up to his, and your, expectations for me.

I’ve been pretty quiet about all this even though I’ve been watching this unfold since before Klaus called hbomb out, partially because I only knew about and was following hbomb through Klaus’ work with him, and partially because I was wondering how this would shake out. As a creative, it’s hard for me to throw my two cents into the hat with big, ugly things like these, because I’d rather my interactions with people on social media centre around all of the fun stuff that I and others are creating, and that speaking up in situations like this opens me up for negative attention that I don’t really want.

That said, reading this apology made me feel a lot of things about this situation that I can’t really keep to myself, so:

From a mostly outside point of view, this seems like a pretty simple issue that had a pretty simple solution that would have meant that there was zero need for the callout post in the first place. But since time travel isn’t a thing, here’s where we are at:

1) Dude is creepy and makes really disturbing advances on Klaus that Klaus extricates himself from. Klaus mentions this to hbomb, nothing comes of it.

2) Klaus continues to work with hbomb despite the fact that hbomb is still friends with creepy guy and seems to have brushed Klaus’s initial recounting of the creepy advances off as probably misremembered. Klaus has to, because finding work as openly transgender is hard–Klaus needs to not be homeless so he can go back to school and start working toward a job in a field where there is actually work for him.

3) Again, Klaus tries to tell hbomb last year about creepy guy, because he feels like hbomb wrote off his experiences when he tried to bring them up previously. Hbomb is completely awful about it. Klaus cuts ties with hbomb because he’d rather have to scrape by doing something else than work in proximity to creepy guy, and also hbomb who has just demonstrated that he’s not really a trusted friend.

4) Klaus watches hbomb continue to associate with known creepy guy and allow this dude to participate in the production and  moderation of his brand, which happens to be ‘male feminist and rational, compassionate progressive youtube personality who also likes to talk about games’. 

5) Klaus, now in school for something else and able to pay his rent, decides that this is something people should know about. He no longer fears ruining his career by speaking out about it since the new career he’s in school for isn’t a creative vocation and isn’t as insular and masturbatory as many factions of internet creatives are–he’s not going to end up homeless because of backlash, so he calls hbomb out.

6) Klaus hopes that, by doing this, it will force hbomb to a) confront his own failure to adhere to his own personal politics and b) do right by his followers and cut ties with a known creeper who absolutely made some very inappropriate advances on him, back before he’d transitioned and while he was married to someone else.

So, in a perfect world hbomb would have reacted better, but also he would have taken creeper aside and said ‘look, i don’t know if any of this is true, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I’m going to have to look into it. But until I know definitively, you’ll need to understand that you’re going to have to step back from the production of my videos and spaces where you’re moderating because this looks really bad. My personal politics are how I make money, and it would be really hypocritical of me to espouse believing people when they come to you with something bad that has happened to them, and then i just completely fucked it up and did the opposite when faced with that scenario myself. You understand right?’ And then hbomb could have ‘investigated’ however he intended to investigate, and even if he for some reason decided that Klaus was making it up and they had a falling out down the line, he could have at least said that he made a solid effort to resolve the situation without leaving female fans and followers in spaces with a potential predator.

Hbomb, this apology is an apology in words only–it acknowledges your failure to adhere to your own personal politics, it acknowledges your failure as a friend, but it doesn’t address what you’re actually going to do about it aside from feel bad about it. Have you cut ties with your predatory friend? Have you removed him from all of the places you have granted him moderator powers? Do you still plan on doing videos with him? Do you intend to protect your female fans from situations in where he could creep on them, too?

You say a lot about how you messed up, but saying sorry doesn’t help anyone or solve anything. Action does.

I don’t know you. Before you totally shit the bed, Klaus had nothing but good things to say about you, and what a good guy and what a good friend you were to him. Even if I didn’t know Klaus personally and was only going by what i can read on his blog, screencaps and all, and was just into your videos for you and what you’re preaching, I’d be pissed.

You can’t blast dudes for bullshit victim-blaming and rape apology and then turn around and do it yourself. How are your fans supposed to trust that this apology is sincere when it kind of looks like your predatory friend is still a fixture in your life–you haven’t cut ties, I’m seeing people talking about you trying to shove all of this under the rug or being shitty about Klaus on discord, and now I’m reading a very wishy-washy apology with no clear intent to action. This is really shady, guy. Really shady. And if I was following your videos and had no insight into this from either side, I’d be dropping support for you on patreon and unsubscribing because right now you look like you don’t really believe something you’ve been very adamant about. If you’re making an exception for yourself on this one thing, how many other things do you make exceptions for that we don’t know about? How can people believe anything you talk about from here on out?

Klaus has nothing to gain from this. What does he gain from calling you out?Pageviews? A following? Maybe, but as far as I can tell, through his words and his actions, he doesn’t want either of those things. He’s leaving the creative community specifically to escape this weird toxic nightmare we all live in where people are afraid to speak up about shit like this if they’re a woman or a minority, because if they do they become the target of harassment, accusations of ‘doing it just so you can be relevant’, or out of jealousy. Nine times out of ten, people will side with whomever best fits the description of ‘beloved and quirky white guy,’ even if a million other hurt, abused and assaulted people come out of the woodwork talking about their bad experiences with a known creep. No one wants to talk about things like this because creative careers already feel tenuous and unstable without a million angry fans raining shit down on your head for daring to take someone they idolize to task. 

Here’s a thought: show everyone that your personal politics aren’t just words. Put your money where your mouth is. Take concrete actions and be open about them. Be who you say you are.

My brother is 100 times more eloquent and bile-less than me on this.

1 year ago / 477 
via: anti-anime-pro-equality
src: hbomberguy
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