A love letter to Eugene Lee Yang

From a fellow queer Asian creative

von reyes
7 min readMay 24, 2024
Screenshot of the video Love, Eugene on the Try Guys YouTube Channel

If you haven’t heard the news, Eugene Lee Yang has officially announced his departure from the Try Guys after a 10-year long run of making digital content. In a silly, moving, and sincere final video titled “Love, Eugene,” he says farewell to the audience that has helped shaped his career and leaves us with some hard truths about being a public figure on the internet. I have been a huge Eugene supporter for 8 of the 10 years he’s been online, and this has only deepened my respect for him.

As a young queer and trans Asian person, there were no people like me to look to as an example. Especially not in creative spaces (publicly anyway). I have often felt like an island all on my own, even in my own communities. Just like Eugene, I’ve sometimes been the only person of color in a group of friends and I’ve struggled with my own internalized shame around my gender, sexuality, and racial identity. I’ve also struggled with being a black sheep in an Asian family, contending with their expectations for a specific kind of life. Eugene was one of the first people that I saw speaking truth to my experiences publicly.

When his series of coming out videos dropped in June of 2019, I rewatched them over and over again and allowed myself a rare cathartic cry. I released things I didn’t even know I…

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