a brief introduction into bye sister
I was talking to mono just now and dropped a Bye Sister reference just to realize that his straight, clueless ass had no idea whatsoever what Bye Sister meant. So I thought I would do the Indie Web a service by spreading the word about Bye Sister, why it’s a huge deal and why it’s relevant to this day. I’ll try to keep this brief, but I won’t make any promises since this was 9/11 for my gay teen ass.
So a bit of history and context: Jeffree Star has been on the internet since the Myspace days and has been involved in controversy after controversy. He was always doing drag and makeup, even made music and played live for a while. He had plenty of connections, but what really brought in the money was starting his own makeup company and later buying a yak ranch in Wyoming. Now he’s a gay mouthpiece of the right for their transphobic campaigns. Shane Dawson, on the other hand, is also queer. He was known for his documentary series, although I couldn’t give less fucks about those. He was accused of bestiality which as far as I know were lies.
Then we get to the main characters: James Charles was at the time a young beauty guru on YouTube who rose to the stars basically overnight, making lots of other gurus jealous of him. He had lots of people who wanted him gone for various reasons, among them his popularity and how the legacy gurus needed him to stay relevant.1 He was guided by a legacy guru, Tati Westbrook, who was his YouTube and makeup mentor. She wasn’t altruistic despite her claims. She was someone double his age and already established in her niche as the mother of makeup. This was charity and PR work for her, nothing more, nothing less.
It was all good and well until James Charles promoted a competitor to her vitamin supplements2 in exchange for VIP tickets to Coachella because he and his friends were being harassed by fans. This popped something in a lot of senior gurus’ heads because now was the time to shoot him down. Tati posted an Instagram story of her crying which garnered a lot of attention, especially from Jeffree Star and Shane Dawson who were pushing Tati to drop the bomb that was Bye Sister. That prompted James to post an apology video of himself crying the next morning.
Bye Sister had her recapping their personal history and James’ supposed problems. Among them the iconic birthday party sex talk where James Charles was allegedly hitting on a straight waiter and telling Jeffree Star all the things that he would do to him. When told by Tati that the guy was straight, he allegedly replied that it didn’t matter because he was a celebrity which for all we know was a lie. Later on, the waiter turned out to have been experimenting with his sexuality, but that wasn’t the full story. Tati was appalled at the detail with which James Charles was discussing sex in front of his parents on different occasions in addition to how he was behaving at her birthday party. This next to some other rather irrelevant stories was the gist of the 44 minute long Bye Sister video.
In the meantime, other beauty gurus hopped on the toxic gossip train and ran down their own exposés of James Charles. One notable example was Jeffree Star, the one of two who were behind the entire scandal. He basically said what Tati did while insidiously portraying himself like a saint as he always did and does. What really heated up the feud was James’ No More Lies which exposed showed receipts that shut down the allegations in addition to an admission by the waiter that he was bi(-curious). James Charles was back in the internet’s good graces again.
A year later, Tati Westbrook would reappear after vanishing from the internet because of the No More Lies backlash. She was now a right-wing hippie who wore no sunscreen,3 drank only bottled water, and made sure not to consume any seed oils. You could smell the incense sticks reeking from the video. It’s safe to say that Breaking My Silence produced almost as many memeable soundbites as Bye Sister did such as having a heart attack on camera. Anyway, this was mostly irrelevant except for Shane Dawson’s Instagram livestream on which „[he was] losing [his] mind“ because Tati exposed the whole scheme, how Jeffree and Shane made her do what she did by telling her lies about James.
The significance of this internet feud is much higher than you’d think. Bye Sister was among the first influencer led social media lynching campaigns. The name of the first video alone was made to be catchy, memorable and hashtaggable, and it kept people who only cared about the makeup (or those who ware vaguely aware of the creators behind the feud) on their toes because their favorite creators were losing credibility. It’s also significant because all this took place over sponsorship deals that fractured the illusion of influencing being anything remotely authentic. Tati Westbrook, Jeffree Star and James Charles would frequently collab on their respective channels with their own challenges and would appear quite friendly to each other, even calling each other friends on camera. That illusion of community was broken by Bye Sister.
What we learned and later confirmed from this is that a certain celebrity is sexually deprived and would harass minors on Snapchat because he couldn’t otherwise get dick, it seems. …Or he’s just a pedo.
In the end, Bye Sister spilled over to how feuds are started, spread, and made effective. It provided organic tactics for PR companies to construct narratives with bots that can pursue legitimizing one of the parties. We’ve seen this clearly in the Debb v. Heard case as well as the Lively v. Baldoni case. So I hope this provided a somewhat coherent introduction into the world of beauty guru drama. I don’t follow that world anymore, but I used to do so vigilantly.