by Dan Savage
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
PRESIDENT OBAMA - SHARES HIS MESSAGE OF HOPE AND SUPPORT FOR LGBT YOUTH WHO ARE ...
YOU WILL FIND YOUR PEOPLE
THE LIFE ALMOST LOST
IN THE EARLY MORNING RAIN
SOMETHING HAS CHANGED WITHIN ME
ACTION MAKES IT BETTER
YOU ARE A RUBBER BAND, MY FRIEND
GOD BELIEVES IN YOU
LA PERSONA POR LA QUE VALE LA PENA LUCHAR, ERES TU
THE PERSON WORTH FIGHTING FOR IS YOU
A MESSAGE FROM ELLEN DEGENERES
LIFE UNFOLDS EXACTLY AS IT SHOULD (BUT NOT AS YOU PLANNED)
IT GETS BETTER FOR A BRITISH SOLDIER
GETTING STRONGER AND STAYING ALIVE
COMING OUT OF THE SHTETL: GAY ORTHODOX JEWS
GOING BACK IN
AND THE EMMY GOES TO . . .
A MESSAGE FROM U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
THIS I KNOW FOR SURE
IT GETS BETTER BROADWAY
ROCKIN’ THE FLANNEL SHIRT
HOW IT GOT BETTER FOR AN ORDAINED CHRISTIAN MINISTER
OUT OF DARKNESS
SOMETHING SPECIAL
THE DINNER PARTY
WHAT I WISH I KNEW
FREEDOM FROM FEAR
A MESSAGE FROM PRIME MINISTER DAVID CAMERON
YOU WILL MEET PEOPLE WHO CELEBRATE YOU
AN IDENTITY UNFOLDED
A MESSAGE FROM SUZE ORMAN
BROTHERS: IT GETS BETTER
DROP DEAD, WARLOCK
GWENDOLYN GONE
GROWING UP GAY . . . AND KINKY
THE BIGGEST GIFT
A MESSAGE FROM SENATOR AL FRANKEN
TRANSSEXUAL PRAIRIE GIRL
ART FROM RAGE
IT GETS BETTER /(BTKOUN AHSAN)
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
JOURNEY TO A BETTER LIFE
THE GAY GUY IN THE BAND
WILL I GROW UP TO BE PAUL LYNDE?
FINDING WHO I AM
COMMUNITY
A MESSAGE FROM NANCY PELOSI
GUNN’S GOLDEN RULES
PERFECT, JUST THE WAY YOU ARE
WHERE HAPPINESS IS
NOT-NORMAL
BORN THIS WAY
DARN IT
LOOK AT THE MOON
CRITICAL SHIFTS
FOR AIDEYBEAR
A MESSAGE FROM JOHN BERRY
THE SHOW MUST GO ON
DEAR UNCLE RONNIE
MY OFFICE WALL
KEEP ON LIVIN’
IT GETS BETTER BECAUSE YOU’RE A LITTLE DIFFERENT
UNAPOLOGETICALLY, ME
A COLLECTIVE VOICE
I DIDN’T ALWAYS WEAR A TUXEDO
HOW I GOT OVER
A “BETTER” EVOLUTION
SAVE YOURSELF, SAVE THE WORLD
BECOMING AN AUTHENTIC PERSON
ON THE OTHER SIDE
BULLY ME
TO THE BULLIES
THE GOOD FIGHT
A MESSAGE FROM KEVIN HAGUE, MP
HATERS CAN’T HATE SOMEONE WHO LOVES THEMSELVES, AND IF THEY DO, WHO CARES
NOT PLAYING AT A CINEMA NEAR YOU
FROM “FAGGOT” TO FIELD BIOLOGIST
IT GOT BETTER
OUR PARENTS AS ALLIES
LESBIAN TEACHER BELIEVES IN YOU
STEPPING OFF THE SIDELINES
MY OWN WORST ENEMY
YOU ARE A BELOVED CHILD OF GOD
TRANSGENDERED AND SELF-EDUCATED IN MAINE
THE POWER OF “YOU”
IT GETS BETTER FOR SMALL TOWNERS, TOO
TO ME: WITH LOVE AND SQUALOR
HAPPINESS IS INEVITABLE
I WISH I’D BEEN SASSIER!
PROTECT AND SERVE LOVES SEMPER FIDELIS
THE DOORS OF ACCEPTANCE
HOPE OUT OF TRAGEDY
PATIENCE MAKES PERFECT . . . SENSE
CHRISTIAN LGBT KIDS: YOU’RE PART OF THE PLAN
TERRIBLE DAY
THE WORST OF BOTH WORLDS
CLOSETS ON FIRE
THE KING BROTHERS
COMMUNITY FOUND
FROM SCARED TO PROUD: THE JOURNEY OF A GAY MEDICAL STUDENT
AUTHENTIC SELF
YOU CAN LIVE A LIFE THAT’S WORTH LIVING
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
RESOURCES
PHOTO AND COMIC CREDITS
PERMISSIONS
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Also by Dan Savage
Savage Love: Straight Answers from America’s Most Popular Sex Columnist
The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant
Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America
The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family
DUTTON
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, March 2011
Introduction and epilogue copyright © 2011 by Dan Savage and Terry Miller
All rights reserved
Permissions appear on pages 333-338 and constitute an extension of the copyright page.
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For all the LGBT kids . . .
“You gotta give ’em hope.”
—HARVEY MILK
STAY WITH US
by Jules Skloot
BROOKLYN, NY
Okay. Listen up, people.
It gets better. Y
ou being here makes this world a more blessed place. There’s art to be made. And there are songs to be sung. There’s so much to learn about yourself. There are sexy people to make out with. Yeah.
There’s joy coming for you. So stay with us. It gets better.
Jules Skloot is a performer, choreographer, and educator working to make things better every day in Brooklyn, New York.
INTRODUCTION
One hundred videos.
That was the goal, and it seemed ambitious: one hundred videos—best-case scenario: two hundred videos—made by lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.
I was sitting in a hotel room in Bloomington, Indiana, when I began to suspect that we were going to see a lot more than one hundred videos. The video that I had made with my husband, Terry, a week earlier, the very first It Gets Better video, had been live on YouTube for just a few hours when e-mails and likes and friend requests started coming in so fast that my computer crashed. The second It Gets Better video arrived within twenty-four hours. Three days later we hit one hundred videos. Before the end of the first week, we hit one thousand videos.
Terry and I were relieved to learn that we weren’t the only people out there who wanted to reach out to LGBT kids in crisis.
Justin Aaberg was just fifteen when he killed himself in the summer of 2010. He came out at thirteen, and endured years of bullying at the hands of classmates in a suburban Minnesota high school. Justin hanged himself in his bedroom; his mother found his body.
Billy Lucas, also fifteen, wasn’t gay-identified but he was perceived to be gay by his classmates in Greensburg, Indiana. His tormentors threatened him, called him a fag, and urged him to kill himself. Billy hanged himself in a barn on his grandmother’s property in early September of 2010. His mother found his body.
Reading about Justin and Billy was emotionally crushing—I was particularly outraged to learn that “Christian” parents were blocking efforts to address the rampant anti-gay bullying at Justin’s school, claiming that doing so would somehow infringe upon the “religious freedom” of their straight children—and I began to think about the problem of anti-gay bullying.
I was aware of anti-gay bullying, of course. I had been bullied in the Catholic schools my parents sent me to; my husband endured years of much more intense bullying—it’s amazing he survived—at the public high school he attended; I knew that many of my LGBT friends had been bullied. But it wasn’t something we talked about or dwelt on.
I was stewing in my anger about what had been done to Justin and Billy when I read this comment, left on a blog post I wrote about Billy: “My heart breaks for the pain and torment you went through, Billy Lucas. I wish I could have told you that things get better.”
What a simple and powerful truth. Things get better—things have gotten better, things keep getting better—for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.
I knew that to be true because things had certainly gotten better for me.
I came to fully understand that I was gay—that I had always been gay—when I was a thirteen-year-old boy being bullied at a Catholic school on the north side of Chicago. I became increasingly estranged from my parents at a time when I needed them most because I was working so hard to hide who I was from them. Five years later, I found the courage to start coming out. Coming out is a long process, not a single event, and I tested the waters by telling my eldest brother, Billy, before telling my mom or dad. Billy was supportive and it helped me decide to tell my mother, which would be the hardest thing I had yet done in my life. Because coming out in 1982 didn’t just mean telling my mother that I was gay. It meant telling her that I would never get married, that I would never be a parent, that my professional life would be forever limited by my sexuality.
Eight years after coming out, I would stumble into a rewarding and unlikely career as a sex-advice columnist, of all things, and somehow leverage that into a side gig as a potty-mouthed political pundit. And fifteen years after coming out, I would adopt a son with the love of my life—the man I would marry—and, with him at my side, present my parents with a new grandchild, my siblings with a new nephew.
Things didn’t just get better for me. All of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender adults I knew were leading rich and rewarding lives. We weren’t the same people and we didn’t have or want the same things—gay or straight, not everyone wants kids or marriage; people pursue happiness in different ways—but we all had so much to be thankful for, and so much to look forward to. Our lives weren’t perfect; there was pain, heartbreak, and struggle. But our lives were better. Our lives were joyful.
What was to be gained by looking backward? Why dwell on the past?
There wasn’t anything we could do about the bullying we had endured in school and, for too many of us, at the hands of our families. And it didn’t seem like there was anything we could do about or for all the LGBT kids who were currently being bullied.
A bullied gay teenager who ends his life is saying that he can’t picture a future with enough joy in it to compensate for the pain he’s in now. Justin and Billy—and, as that terrible September ground on, Seth and Asher and Tyler and Raymond and Cody—couldn’t see how their own lives might get better. Without gay role models to mentor and support them, without the examples our lives represent, they couldn’t see how they might get from bullied gay teenager to safe and happy gay adult. And the people gay teenagers need most—their own parents—often believe that they can somehow prevent their children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, support, and positive role models. (Justin Aaberg’s parents knew he was gay, and were supportive.)
That fall, as I thought about Justin and Billy, I reflected on how frequently I’m invited to speak at colleges and universities. I address audiences of gay and straight students, and I frequently talk about homophobia and gay rights and tolerance. But I don’t get invited to speak at high schools or middle schools, the places where homophobia does the most damage. Gay kids trapped in middle and high schools would benefit from hearing from LGBT adults—lives could be saved—but very few middle or high schools would ever invite gay adults to address their student bodies. Acknowledging the existence of LGBT people, even in sex-ed curriculums, is hugely controversial. A school administrator who invited a gay adult to address an assembly before there was a crisis—before a bullied gay teenager took his own life—would quickly find herself in the crosshairs of homophobic parents and bigoted “Christian” organizations.
It couldn’t happen—schools would never invite gay adults to talk to kids; we would never get permission.
I was riding a train to JFK Airport when it occurred to me that I was waiting for permission that I no longer needed. In the era of social media—in a world with YouTube and Twitter and Facebook—I could speak directly to LGBT kids right now. I didn’t need permission from parents or an invitation from a school. I could look into a camera, share my story, and let LGBT kids know that it got better for me and it would get better for them too. I could give ’em hope.
But I didn’t want to do it alone. I called Terry from the airport and tentatively explained my idea for a video outreach campaign. I wanted to encourage other LGBT adults to make videos for LGBT kids and post them to YouTube. I wanted to call it: The It Gets Better Project. And I wanted us to make the first video together, to talk about our lives together, to share our joy.
This was a big ask. Terry doesn’t do interviews, he doesn’t allow cameras in our home, he has no desire to go on television. But he said yes. My husband was the first person to recognize the power of this idea.
The second person to recognize it was our good friend Kelly O, a straight friend and a supremely talented photographer and filmmaker. She had just one question after I explained what we wanted to do: “When can we shoot it?”
We did two takes. The first was a long, depressing video that we shot against a bare wa
ll in our dining room. It looked like a hostage video and we both talked too much about the bullying we’d endured in high school. We watched the video and shook our heads. Kids who are currently being bullied don’t need to be told what bullying looks and feels like. Kelly packed up her camera and we went to a friend’s bar and tried again. This time Kelly peppered us with questions: Share a happy memory. How did you two meet? What would you tell your teenage self? Are you happy to be alive?
Kelly edited the video, created a YouTube account, and called me when it was live.
Four weeks later I got a call from the White House. They wanted me to know that the President’s It Gets Better video had just been uploaded to YouTube.
My computer crashed a second time.
The It Gets Better Project didn’t just crash my computer. It brought the old order crashing down. By giving ourselves permission to speak directly to LGBT youth, Terry and I gave permission to all LGBT adults everywhere to speak to LGBT youth. It forced straight people—politicians, teachers, preachers, and parents—to decide whose side they were on. Were they going to come to the defense of bullied LGBT teenagers? Or were they going to remain silent and, by so doing, give aid and comfort to the young anti-gay bullies who attack LGBT children in schools and the adult anti-gay bullies at conservative “family” organizations who attack LGBT people for a living?
The culture used to offer this deal to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people: You’re ours to torture until you’re eighteen. You will be bullied and tormented at school, at home, at church—until you’re eighteen. Then, you can do what you want. You can come out, you can move away, and maybe, if the damage we’ve done isn’t too severe, you can recover and build a life for yourself. There’s just one thing you can’t do after you turn eighteen: You can’t talk to the kids we’re still torturing, the LGBT teenagers being assaulted emotionally, physically, and spiritually in the same cities, schools, and churches you escaped from. And, if you do attempt to talk to the kids we’re still torturing, we’ll impugn your motives, we’ll accuse you of being a pedophile or pederast, we’ll claim you’re trying to recruit children into “the gay lifestyle.”