“I wanted it to be out so that they couldn’t tell me to stay in the closet,” he told me recently. Within a week, the video, titled “Coming Out,” had been covered by Business Insider and the Huffington Post and had been viewed nearly eight hundred thousand times (the number now exceeds eight million), drawing comments such as “i love you troye omg” and “Troye you adorable muffin.” But the video failed to mention an important detail: Sivan was in negotiations with the music label EMI Australia, and he had not discussed his sexuality with the company’s executives. “But it shouldn’t have to, and that’s why I’m making this video.” He signed off with his signature wink. “I know that this could kind of change everything for me,” he said.

His family was “a hundred per cent fine,” he went on, recalling that after his mother told each of his siblings they had come into his room, one by one, to hug him. One night when he was fifteen, he said, he was talking about religion with his father, who raised him and his three siblings as Orthodox Jews: “I said to him, ‘If there was anything about religion you could change, what would you change?’ And he said, ‘To me, the whole gay thing, it really doesn’t make sense why a religion would kind of be against it or whatever.’ ” Grabbing his larynx and pretending to zip his lips, Sivan mimed the “physical locking of my throat” that he had experienced before blurting out to his father that he was gay. Sivan spoke for eight minutes, striking a tone that was part sleepover, part press conference. “But I feel like a lot of you guys are, like, real, genuine friends of mine.” “It feels kind of weird to have to announce it like this on the Internet,” he continued. Three years earlier, he explained, he had told his family that he was gay. “This is probably the most nervous I’ve ever been in my entire life,” he said. His new video, filmed in his family’s home, in Perth, was more confessional. Sivan, a goofy, self-confident eighteen-year-old, had amassed nearly half a million YouTube subscribers in six years, with videos such as “Funny Halloween Costume Ideas” (in which he put on an orange wig, held up a bagel, and declared, “I’m the Ginger Bread Man!”) and “Life’s Unanswerable Questions” (in which he wondered, “If there was an earthquake on Mars, would it be called a Mars-quake?”). On August 7, 2013, the Australian vlogger Troye Sivan fixed his bright-blue eyes on his camera and pressed Record.

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