It was the end of Obama’s first term and the world was becoming miraculously small. People were logging onto the internet to learn the proper ways to slap ridiculous amounts of foundation on their faces; people were pony dancing to their first K-Pop breakout hit; people were advocating en masse for the arrest of a specific Ugandan leader in protest his recruitment of child soldiers. A Dallas-born Tri Delt at the University of Oklahoma and frequent Tumblr user started a YouTube channel to talk about her life while coming out as lesbian—if not initially to help other queer people connect to one another, at least to open herself up to communities far outside the ones in her immediate proximity in the middle of the Bible Belt.

Thirteen years later, the world as Shannon Beveridge—one of the epochal sapphic Youtubers and content creators of the digital era—once entered has coiled unto itself; the once comforting immediacy of the online sphere having flattened into a singular dimension; online nearly indiscernible from reality. Beveridge has born witness to it all; in a little over a decade, Beveridge moved to Los Angeles, garnered millions of followers across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, was named the LGBTQ+ YouTube Channel in 2017 by the Shorty awards, and received LGBT+ Celebrity Rising Star Award recipient at the British LGBT Awards. She’s even migrated platforms, now hosting podcast Exes and O’s where she invites guests to chat about queer relationships, sex, and dating. Through everything, Beveridge’s ethos has held true to the earnest era of the early internet: where there is conversation, laughter, and a platform on which to share them, there can be community.

“When I started, I didn't know lesbians existed. [It was like] I'm the only one who's ever felt this way. Me and Ellen DeGeneres, the lone soldiers,” she laughs. “I think the internet was a temporary solution to a bigger problem.” We’re speaking about her recent live tour with her Exes and O’s podcast (Hard Launch), in which she visited different cities and brought together fans of the podcast, creating a space outside of bars and restaurants for queer-identifying fans in the local area to meet, laugh, and listen to stories told by podcast guests. “I don't want to spend my life looking and finding community through a lens. I want to see it in my day to day life. It's been historically hard for the lesbian community to keep these spaces open…[a great sect] of our spaces are drinking or club or party nights. Like, can we have a book club? Can we have a coffee shop?”

Beveridge acknowledges that the internet of today has homogenized subcultures (“I think it's [the way] the internet evolved after COVID that made more people crave connection,” she reasons) but she doesn’t think the shift has been necessarily as dramatic for the LGBTQ+ internet, plus she’s not one to complain about the gift that her platform has given her—in fact, her goal for the future of Exes and O’s is to make sure that her platform is equitably shared: “I think it's time that I can start shifting the stories even more away from myself,” she tells me. “I can [now] hand the mic to people who don't look like me, who don't sound like me, who don't come from where I come from, and highlight them.” 

Thus far, some of Beveridge’s guests include G Flip, Tegan and Sara Quin, Devery Jacobs, and Hayley Kiyoko: “You can learn so much more, I think, from having a conversation with someone than you can from reading a book or watching a movie…. I've learned so many invaluable things in the past year. I couldn't even tell you how many things. Everyone's so cool and different,” she shares.

Over the course of the years, Beveridge has made an effort to keep herself open and honest to her audience—”the meet and greets were my favorite part of the tour,” she grins. She notes that her demographic has “skewed,” after interfacing with live audiences across Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Denver, and other cities on the Hard Launch tour. “As I've grown, obviously my audience has grown too. There were so many wives. There were so many people who got a babysitter [to come to the show].” She’s proud of this particular growth, especially being able to bear witness to these sorts of pockets outside of the “bubble” that is Los Angeles.

“I'm from Dallas, so for the first few years that I first moved to LA, I was still really aware of what was going on back home, but being in LA, you start to think, ‘Well, things are getting better, things have to be getting better,” she tells me of the ever-terrifying divisiveness and homophobia in American politics. “Then I would go home. I was at a restaurant while at home for Christmas a year ago.The people behind me spent the whole lunch talking about trans people in sports, and I wanted to turn around and be like: ‘Name one trans person. Do you know one?’”

She continues, “But it is always nice to go home, in a way, to remind myself that the work is still really important and that these stories are really necessary. It's not how it is here and in New York, everywhere.”

This sentiment is what buoys Beveridge in the turbulent sea of content creation; she feels compelled to keep using her own voice to elevate the voices of others across the country—the world even. “There's a huge gap between actual, authentic queer representation and queer joy,” she says. “We have so much queer strife, we have so much of the coming out, the rejection, the politics of today, there's so much sadness or hardship. Creating that joy is finding that balance.”

In Shannon Beveridge’s earliest video still available on her YouTube channel, she sits in front of a stone fireplace. The video was released on January 4th, 2012, and has that endearingly smudgy DIY 2012 webcam quality; she has the long hair trademark of a proper southern sorority sister. She’s answering a Q & A. “In your opinion,” she reads, “What is the greatest thing one can accomplish in life?” She giggles and looks off to the side. “That’s such a hard question,” she mutters. “Ummm… I mean to be happy and confident about who you are, I guess?” 

Thirteen years later, Shannon Beveridge has come off a tour in which she communed with audiences across the United States, giving herself and them space to laugh, mingle, and embrace each other. She sits in front of me on Zoom, clear-eyed, hair cropped, a smile spreading across her face, and unknowingly repeats to me almost verbatim what she uttered on that camera all of those years ago. “I'm very confident in who I am now compared to when I started my YouTube journey in my queerness and my identity,” she tells me, almost offhandedly. Shannon Beveridge’s journey has been highly public; long, and sometimes difficult—but a joyful one. She is here to help you along yours.

Photographed by Dillon Howl

Styled by Ariana Velazquez

Hair: John Blaine at Celestine Agency

Makeup: Archangela Chelsea at Celestine Agency

Location: Hotel Covell