Chris Stanley’s (@stanchris) range of funny, relatable, and engaging content has made him one of social media’s fastest rising gay content creators with nearly 2 million followers across his platforms including 408K on YouTube (over 300M views), 320K on IG, 884K on TikTok, and 110K on Snapchat. One of the first LGBTQ+ creators on TikTok to go viral 5 years ago, Chris is known for his travel vlogs, meme videos, candid street interviews (called the “Gen-Z Billy Eichner”), and his hilarious, often heartfelt videos with his entire family. He’s also collaborated with people like Colton Underwood, major brands like Manscaped, and has had his content shared/re-posted by gay icons like Madonna.
Growing up with a 4.0 GPA and being a star soccer player shaped him to be very competitive and always strive to be the best at what he does. When he came out in high school, he lost the majority of his core friend group and was ostracized by his peers. This led to him turning into a loner and even quitting the soccer team. But he then began to write poems and stories featuring queer characters and this is where he pulls inspiration from when creating today.
Chris also advocates for queer acceptance, gay youth, and says he “wants to make people smile” at the end of the day. He had planned to attend college after taking a gap year to figure out what he wanted to study but after Covid-19, he decided against going to college and started creating videos instead. He wants to “give back” to the community because when he was in the process of coming out, watching YouTube videos helped him gain confidence and courage to come out to his friends and family (Chris taught himself how to edit and has posted weekly on YouTube for over 5 years).
His short form content started off with gay memes and skit videos, which eventually led him to doing street interviews, videos with his boyfriend, and now he does a combination of everything. His YouTube channel started off with Q&A’s, and reaction videos, and eventually turned into gay travel vlogs, gay advice videos, parodies, original songs, skits, and even short films as of last October.
His earliest viral video on TikTok was a gay lip sync video featuring his mom reacting to some raunchy gay parody lyrics (he loves to include his family in his videos to educate other parents and help kids who might be struggling or nervous about coming out to their family). After that, his videos that gained even more traction were playful Q&A videos with his “straight friend” Calvin (this one has over 35 million views); people loved the interaction & friendship Chris had with Calvin, showing the new generation is even more accepting than many people think.
Paired with gay Q&A videos and content around his coming out story (including posting videos on YouTube with his parents talking about his sexuality and how things went when he came out), Chris began to establish a small following which has grown exponentially in the past few years. Chris also takes notice of the harsh/strict body standards in the gay community and since he is attracted to more bearish or chubby men, he’s also made a video series talking about why these body types are attractive, in the hopes that gay people everywhere would be more accepting and confident with their body type, no matter how they look). His main goal is to show young queer people that it gets better, and anything is possible. He has some exciting projects in the works including releasing original music and developing a brand of delicious teas.
He actively seeks out opportunities to innovate and collaborate with brands and fellow creators and is poised to continue making significant contributions to the digital media landscape. He also loves to skateboard and has also been involved in the production of a queer skate film called Scraps with Colton Underwood and Director Ryan Nordin. The short film has won multiple awards on the festival circuit and is being adapted into a feature film. He also re-joined a gay soccer club in Boston to reclaim his love for the sport called the Boston Strikers. They went to Las Vegas to compete in the sin city classic and came in 3rd place this past February.