Most of us cringe thinking back on our early 20s. Very few of us have an extensive video archive of that time the way that Shannon Beveridge does. Shannon rose to prominence as one of the most popular lesbian YouTubers of the early 2010s. Needless to say, her life and content have evolved quite a bit in the past decade or more. “In the beginning of my YouTube career and making videos and content, there was very little artistry to it,” she admits. “It was just kind of like on your MacBook and posted right onto the internet. I kept so much unnecessary stuff in every video. I look back now and I can hardly watch my old videos. There will be just 20 seconds of silence and I’ll be thinking, ‘What am I doing there?’ I want everything that I make now to be more of a representation of my abilities as a director or a creative person rather than just content to be content.” She welcomes rapid change in the queer social media landscape with open arms. “When I first started posting content, the queer community of YouTube was pretty small. It was so small that you could count how many lesbian YouTubers there were. It was that little. Now with younger generations in general, so many more people identify as queer. So even content that’s not necessarily directed to be queer content is made by queer people. There’s just a lot more representation online, which is lovely and much needed. We have way more perspectives. Before it was very one note and now it’s so much more complex.”
In the present day, she’s set her sights on telling narratives beyond her own. “It came naturally from the evolution of creating videos and telling my own story so much that it got old to me. I thought, how can I continue to make content for an audience that I care about and an audience that’s so hungry for representation? And how can I do it in a way that feels less personal and less I have to be giving myself and my own life story all the time? Filmmaking feels like a natural evolution in that step to create content for an audience that’s there, but not so much about me. I can only say so much about me. I can’t really make my life up. It’s just happening as it’s happening. So it’s nice to be able to tell a different story.” After so many years of making a living in front of the camera, going behind it symbolizes an invigorating new chapter for Shannon. “It’s so exciting having a new lease on that kind of creativity because it’s a whole new thing, although it’s familiar, it’s letting me expand my creativity into something else. I feel like creative burnout for YouTuber or content creators is obviously so highly talked about now, but I was experiencing that even five years ago when no one was really talking about it as much. It wasn’t as big of a conversation and that burnout is so real, but I’m still a creative person and I’m like, I have these things I want to do and these stories I want to tell, but I couldn’t make them anymore. Allowing herself to spread her artistic wings has also rejuvenated her channel. “Now this creating, doing the short film and doing music videos, it almost makes me feel happier to make my own YouTube videos as well because I’m excited again and there’s something new that I’m working on that’s worth talking about.”
Her upcoming short film, Something Called Nine, enthusiastically celebrates queer joy in a media world that often still insists on relegating queerness to tired tropes of suffering. “I can’t wait for people to see it. The story could be about anyone. It could be about two girls, it could be about two boys, it could be about a girl and boy, it’s just a universal experience rather than being that quintessential coming out story. I feel like we don’t get a lot of queer joy or just even queer normalcy. That’s what we wanted this story to be. My friend Rose Friedman wrote it and we co-directed it together. We just wanted it to be a more universal story.” As a filmmaker, Shannon intends to follow in the gleeful footsteps of unabashedly happy queer media like Heartstopper. “I cried watching Heartstopper. It was so relatable and it felt so real. Even though there were two boys, it was so similar to my own story. I felt so connected to them and to that storyline. I was thinking about how watching that show would’ve been so helpful to high school me. If I had had that show, it would’ve changed my life. And then thinking about the fact that there are kids who are watching that and it can change their life right now. It made me very overwhelmed when I thought about it.” Her films are both a collaborative labor of love and affirmation that she truly is becoming who she has always envisioned herself as. “On a personal level, it’s growth towards making the stories I want to make. It was so empowering for me to work on an idea with someone, work out all the kinks, produce it ourselves, make it, and now the whole process of making a short film is so hopeful for me and my future. It’s what I want to be doing and now I know that I can do it. That’s what the film means to me. We’re still editing it, so I’m not exactly sure where it’s going to land. We’re tweaking a bunch of stuff in there. I’m not sure what it’s going to end up being exactly yet, which is fun too.”
Something Called Nine is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of her ambition. “I think I want to make another short film that I direct on my own. Co-directing was perfect for this first thing because I feel like I have a little bit of imposter syndrome, so when you have a team and it’s not just all on you, it was really important for this project. But I think the next thing I want to do, I kind of want to do on my own just to see and test myself and push myself into not caring so much about imposter syndrome and just believing in myself and doing it. I want to keep making films and keep making music videos. Music videos are always going to be just something I enjoy doing because it’s so much more about the vibe and I love music, so it’s a connection between all the things I like. But yeah, definitely I’d want to make, I’d love to make a TV show because I feel like for queer people, shows like Heartstopper where we get way more depth of character are so much more impactful. Short films are just so hard because you have to make someone care and then tell a story in 15 minutes, which is obviously such a challenge. The way that queer people enjoy media, I feel like we all connect with shows way more.” Even the process of putting the project out there feels like a new beginning. “Keep an eye out on my social media so you can find out where and when you can see the short film. We’re going to be submitting it to festivals. It’s weird for me to have anything that’s not on my YouTube channel. It’s a totally different distribution of media that I’ve never done before either. So it’s going to be interesting.” Shannon will make her mark on queer media by telling the stories that warm our souls.
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YouTuber Shannon Beveridge Ventures into Filmmaking with “Something Called Nine.” Photo Credit: Courtesy of Shannon Beveridge.
