#ttlmt

since you said you were having a tumblr hiatus at the time, let me give a little context to the landscape of the phandom circa 2017-2019 (glass closet era leading up to BIG). the overwhelming majority of phannies knew/believed dnp were gay in that "we know you know" way, and a lot of people (at least from what i remember) had assumed they would never officially come out, that they would just kind of wink at the audience in the way they continue to do to this day. so, when ttlmt came out, those of us who had already accepted dan (and phil, but this is a dan video, so i'll focus on him) as gay took it as the baby step toward coming out that it was. i mean, "stuff coming in and out of my mouth" is pretty clearly a joke about sucking dick, imo. but antis (and homophobes) were biggg mad that we were sort of celebrating this and taking it in, i believe, the way dan intended. another wink-wink nudge-nudge at us before he was ready to officially come out, if you will. there was the usual speculation discourse, which i can go more into detail about if you like, but im sure you can assume the kinds of things that were said bc that discourse still rears its head every now and again (for some godforsaken reason idk). imo this wasn't speculation so much as it was reading between the lines and interpreting the joke exactly as dan meant it, but i digress.

the second part (which, from my memory, was less prevalent, but still notable) was about the assumption that dan "i have no friends and i never leave the house" howell would only be having sex with one person: phil. i feel like this made people more mad tbh because the backlash went past "don't speculate about people's sexualities" to "don't shove phan down their throats" which, of course, is an old wound in phandom discourse. i don't super recall how exactly it all fizzled out, but it's safe to say it was no longer a big deal by the time dnp came out.