To me, what’s really an important difference between traditional entertainment and digital – on YouTube specifically – is that people thrive when they’re authentic about themselves. – Tyler Oakley
YouTube has always been a diary for me. I’m here to share what I do, share my life, and if people want to watch, more power to them. But regardless of my intention, if people are looking at what I do and am treating it like I’m a role model, it doesn’t matter whether or not I want to be. – Tyler Oakley
I’m essentially working from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. It’s my biggest hobby but also my favorite career that I could ever have. Every single platform is important. – Tyler Oakley
I spend all day replying to tweets and reblogging posts and sharing fan art. I think it’s the most important thing I can possibly do, to stay involved in the community as a part of the community, not ahead of the community. I’m very much the same level of them in it. – Tyler Oakley
I used to joke that I wanted to go to the moon, but I actually do. Like, some day I think I’m going to go to the moon. That would be cool. – Tyler Oakley
I want people to get a better sense of who I am, whether they’ve seen every video or zero videos. – Tyler Oakley
Nowadays, if somebody in America is feeling alone and wants to find a coming out story, they just search ‘coming out,’ and they’ll find millions of first-person examples of people telling their story. – Tyler Oakley
I found a vlogger named William Sledd who talked about his life – it was very minimal edits. It was one of those things where I discovered him, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m obsessed with him.’ I felt like I was friends with him. And he was a huge inspiration for why I made my first video. – Tyler Oakley
You don’t go to your 9 to 5 and share every story with your coworkers, and in the same way, not every YouTuber shares every story with their audience. – Tyler Oakley
There’s something about YouTube, where you’re not being anybody but yourself. You have the opportunity to start as yourself from the very beginning. From the very first video, you choose what you say, and you choose what’s right and wrong for your presentation of yourself. – Tyler Oakley
For any YouTuber, if you’re too nervous to have somebody else document, it may be that what you’re putting out there isn’t authentic. – Tyler Oakley
When it came to ‘Binge,’ it wasn’t my intention to get on a little soapbox and have a teaching moment. It was more, ‘Here are things that have happened to me; here’s what I’ve learned from it. If you’d like to learn from it too, great; if you just like the entertainment aspect, that’s fine too.’ – Tyler Oakley
With everything that I’ve done with YouTube and podcasts for so many years, it’s been: you can record it, edit, and then upload that day. With the book and documentary, it’s been such a longer process. – Tyler Oakley
In middle school, I was really into the ‘Redwall’ series, about anthropomorphic rodents in medieval times. I had a bowl cut, too, if you need the full imagery. – Tyler Oakley
I initially thought I was going to be a teacher. Maybe like an elementary teacher or something like that, which would be fun. Maybe someday. – Tyler Oakley
A lot of YouTubers get that mainstream celebrity, they get these big deals, maybe a book deal or a TV deal or whatever it is they aspired to do, and they kind of abandon ship on what got them to that point. – Tyler Oakley
Every video I make, I want to make sure that it’s doing something entertaining or hopefully inspiring or maybe teaching somebody something or sharing my mistakes so that they can learn from them or anything that will make a positive impact in the world. – Tyler Oakley
There’s no Hollywood tradition of maybe not telling people that you’re gay to protect your future ambitions. The YouTube world is a little unprecedented. I think what people are seeing is that the more true to yourself you are, the more an audience will connect with you. – Tyler Oakley
I remember a distinct moment when it was my junior year of college, and the content I was making was changing and not really myself, and I tried to switch back to just putting me out there. I’m happy that happened really early in my career, because that was before I started doing podcasts or writing. – Tyler Oakley
I’m trying to leave more of my calendar open for the spontaneous things. A lot of fun stuff that happened in previous years were things that were like, ‘Hey are you available next week?’ I wasn’t really open unless it was planned months in advance. I’m excited to play it by ear and let a lot of stuff happen as it happens. – Tyler Oakley