Do we like Dan Howell?
Our score: 8 out of 10. No harmful words or acts turned up, and there's real good on the record, but the evidence is thinner than for someone with decades of public advocacy.
Dan Howell is the British YouTuber behind the old danisnotonfire channel. He built a huge audience over more than a decade with chaotic, self-deprecating humour, much of it alongside Phil Lester as Dan and Phil. By the 2018 world tour he was meeting fans in person who shared very personal stories with him.
The defining moment came in June 2019. He posted a 45-minute video called “Basically I'm gay”, in which he said he had told his family a month earlier by email. It had nearly three million views when PinkNews covered it, and he joked “I'm here, I'm queer” in it. For a creator with millions of young fans, that mattered.
Later he talked about why it mattered. He told PinkNews that the “radical bravery” of fans at meet-and-greets pushed him to speak up, and he argued that queer role models on YouTube would have helped him as a kid. That's a bloke using his platform for other people, not just himself.
On the harm check, there's honestly not much to find, and what turned up is on the right side. Searches on LGBTQ+ issues, climate, vaccines, racism and politics found no harmful statements, no culture-war grievance and no dodgy collaborators. He hasn't been in court, and no allegations against him turned up. Absence of evidence isn't proof, but that's the whole list.
The good stuff is real. In January 2024 he and Phil Lester ran a livestream that raised more than $83,000 by the end, and over $100,000 within 19 hours, for the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund. Where you land on that depends on how you see the cause, but it was a lot of money raised for a humanitarian group. He also took part in YouTube's Pride 2021 stream, which raised money for LGBTQ+ and HIV charities.
In October 2025 the pair confirmed their relationship in a video, and Dan said the news had become so big they could not ignore it. He later said posting it felt like a huge relief. Now they're back on the road with the Hard Launch tour and a weekly podcast.