YouTube star Ricky Dillon comes out in emotional video: “I am 1000 percent sure I’m gay”

The 27-year-old singer-songwriter Ricky Dillon has over 3 million followers on YouTube.

Now they all know that he is gay.

In a new 18-minute video, Ricky details his past struggles with his sexuality and admits he is “finally okay” with publicly identifying as gay because “it’s been a long journey to get here.”

Here’s the part that I could really relate to and that fills me with compassion for this young man: He had struggled so much because, “I grew up in a family, in an environment… where being gay is so wrong. I grew up Christian, very religious – I grew up in Alabama – and I was taught that being gay is a horrible sin, it’s so bad, it’s the worst thing you could be. It was drilled into my brain from an early age that being gay is one of the worst things that can happen. It was ingrained in my mind that being gay is a sin, it’s wrong, so therefore I can’t be gay. There’s no way that I’m gay because I’m a Christian, it’s wrong – there’s just no way I can be gay.”

He added: “Telling my family is going to be by far the hardest thing I’m ever going to do in my life or have ever done so far.”

Dillon had felt “inauthentic and disingenuous” following his 2016 video announcement in which he identified as asexual: “I started to slowly realize that I’m gay a couple of years ago — I would say 2017 — and ever since I’ve slowly realized it more. Fast forward to this day, I am 1000 percent sure I’m gay.”

Best of luck to Ricky. He’s taken a big, brave step and he will never be sorry.