YouTube star and beauty guru James Charles has hit out at TikTok creators for making jokes at the expense of the LGBTQ community in their April Fool’s Day prank videos.
James Charles has built a massive following of over 17 million subscribers on his beauty channel and has quickly become a role model for many in the LGBTQ community.
During April Fool’s day many creators often look for new ways to surprise fans with entertaining prank videos, however, James Charles was not happy with certain TikTok stars who made jokes at the expense of the LGBTQ community.
The YouTuber posted a short video revealing that he had discovered videos on his “For You” page where TikTok creators made videos pretending to come out as gay, and was not happy with what he saw.
“I just looked at my For You page and apparently several straight TikTok boys thought it would be hilarious and groundbreakingly funny to make April Fool’s day prank videos coming out of the closet,” he explained, clearly disappointed with the creators.
James explained that even in his own community, people still face challenges to openly admitting their sexuality and that the jokes were quite insensitive. “I’m here to tell you it’s not funny, you know why it’s not funny? Because people in my community die for coming out of the closet,” he said.
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“It is a very serious and hard thing that people in my community go through and it is not something to make a joke out of just so you can get likes and get on the ‘For You’ page on TikTok,” Charles added.
James also explained that he was fine with people expressing themselves in other ways for April Fool’s and even applauded some of the memes made about him, however, he had seen enough of the fake “coming out” videos.
“I’m even here for the James Charles memes because sometimes they are funny” he admitted, “but what I’m not here for is queerbaiting, it is ridiculous, harmful and you can get likes in other ways.”
The beauty YouTuber claimed that some of the videos were “especially ridiculous” before revealing that many of the people making the prank videos had ‘slid into his DM’s’ and issued them a warning to cut it out.
James Charles has previously hit out at TikTok creators for trolling him on the app when users baited him to get more views on their videos.