Local Celebrity Discount and Other Perks of Very Niche Internet Fame
Recently, I went to the Big Gay Market to take some pictures and videos for social media, and despite swearing to myself beforehand that I absolutely 100% would not buy anything, I unfortunately saw a shirt at a vintage clothing booth that I decided was meant for me. The shirt was $15, but upon going to pay for it, someone working the booth turned to the person checking me out and said "Make it $10. Local celebrity discount."
This is one example of the lavish life I now live thanks to making a lot of silly videos for Diversity Richmond.
I get stopped often, which is the funniest thing to me, partly because the videos for the thrift store are a pretty small part of my work at Diversity Richmond (someone has to put these newsletters together!) But another part of it that feels surreal to me is that those videos are relatively genuine representations of my real personality and the way I talk about things. I actually found that they performed better as I made them more genuine.
I was a very awkward kid and was largely very uncomfortable with myself. I felt like the girls and women around me had some manual for understanding social cues that I was somehow born without, and I moved through the world with this fear I couldn't quite articulate that I would one day be found out for pretending to know the rules. Knowing this about myself but not knowing how to change it, I became very quiet to try to avoid unnecessary attention altogether.
I've grown a lot more comfortable with myself in my personal life as I've accepted my gender expression and become friends with other LGBTQ+ people. But I think if I could have known as a kid that the very same qualities that I was desperately trying to suppress would be the qualities that would help me become successful on social media, the same qualities that would lead to someone (jokingly or otherwise) referring to me as a "local celebrity", I think that would have meant a lot to me.
Skyler Foley (he/they)
Communications Coordinator
