by Dan Savage
So if you’re a parent reading this, talk to your kid. Just love them. Just tell them every day that you love them; that’s why I was able to come out. I knew my parents might have been disappointed, which they were at first, but they loved me.
When I was in high school I dreamed of having a family but I never thought it was possible. I met my partner ten years ago at San Francisco Pride. We now have a dog, a mortgage, and a little baby girl.
I need you young people, those of you in junior high and high school, I need you to stay around. I need you to make this world a better place for my daughter. I don’t want her to ever, ever think twice about telling people that she has two moms. So if you’re out there and you’re struggling, I need you to stay around. I need your help. I need you to be your authentic self and make this world better for my little girl.
Sara Sperling works for Facebook in Palo Alto, California. She lives in the Bay Area with her wife, her big ole Rotti, and her little princess. Her story of coming out to her sorority can be found in the book Secret Sisters: Stories of Being Lesbian and Bisexual in a College Sorority.
YOU CAN LIVE A LIFE THAT’S WORTH LIVING
by Kate Bornstein
NEW YORK, NY
I don’t always think it is going to get better. Sometimes it gets worse, a whole lot worse than I ever thought it could. And on those days I don’t think it’s going to get better. So I had to wait to write this ’til I thought it would. And this is a day I think it’s going to get better. It took me about a week to get to this day. So what do you know, it got better! Here’s the deal. I’m sixty-two years old. I’ve led a freaky, geeky life. I’ve messed around with sex and gender. I’ve done a lot of things in the world that make people laugh at me, make people want to hurt me, to the point where I’ve wanted to kill myself. I can remember six times in my life that I’ve planned it all out, ready to kill myself. Fuck it. Why go on? It’s not going to get better. And each time, I managed to find something else to do instead. I’ve found lots of reasons to go on living, lots of ways to make life more worth living. And that’s all I’m asking you to do.
I wrote a whole book about it. It’s called Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws. There are a hundred and one things in there that are better than killing yourself. Some of them are illegal and immoral, unethical and self-destructive. They’re all in the book. You don’t have to buy the book or buy it for laughs when you’ve got some extra cash. Great. Help me pay the rent but that’s not the deal.
The deal is this. Here’s all you need to remember to know that life gets better: You can do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living. Really. You can do anything it takes to make your life more worth living. Anything, baby. There’s only one rule you need to follow in order to make that kind of blanket permission work. Only one rule in the whole frickin’ book. Don’t be mean. As long as you’re not mean, you can do whatever you want that makes your life more worth living. Now, if you do the illegal stuff and you get caught, I can’t help you. That’s the justice system. It’s a risk. Sometimes all that I can think of to make my life more worth living is the illegal stuff. And if I get caught, you couldn’t help me, either.
But if that’s what you have to do, if you think that’s what it takes to make your life more worth living, do it. Take the risk. Just don’t be mean.
Now, the trouble with this kind of permission, this kind of, “Oh, I can do whatever it takes,” is that it can get you in trouble with God, especially the sex and gender stuff. That can get you in big trouble with most anybodies God you can think of. You can get sent to hell. Well, I can’t get you out of jail.
But I can get you out of hell.
Go to my blog and download a copy of my Get Out of Hell Free card. You can print it out and give it to your friends. You don’t even need the card. Here, I’m going to give you one from my heart—this is a Get Out of Hell Free card coming at ya. Take it if you want to. Put it in your heart.
So if what it takes to make your life more worth living—and you weren’t mean—gets you sent to hell, take the card out of your heart and give it to Satan. I’ll do your time for you. Yeah, ain’t that a deal? It’s a deal I made with the devil. Satan and I agreed on that one. So, you get to do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living. Anything, baby. Anything at all.
And that’s how you can make your life get better. That’s how you can look back on life and say, “You know, it did get better.”
I love you. I love you for the courage it takes to explore this stuff.
Kiss kiss, my darling.
Kate Bornstein is an author, playwright, and performance artist whose work to date has been in service to sex positivity, gender anarchy, and to building a coalition of those who live on cultural margins. Her work recently earned her an award from the Stonewall Democrats of New York City and two citations from New York city council members. Kate’s latest book, Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws, was published in 2007. According to daily e-mail and Twitter, the book is still helping people stay alive. Other published works include the books Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us and My Gender Workbook. Kate’s books are taught in more than 150 colleges around the world. Her memoir, Queer and Pleasant Danger, is due out in 2012.
EPILOGUE
My mother made me come out to her.
“I understand if you’re gay,” she said to me one day. I was twenty-one, and I had known I was gay since I was thirteen, but I was afraid to come out to my conservative Christian parents. When I told her, yes, I was gay, she said, “It doesn’t change anything. I still love you.”
Then she added: “But don’t tell your father.”
My father was dying of cancer and my mother didn’t want to worry him. I didn’t want to upset my father either, or my mother, so I never came out to him. But he would sometimes say things that led me to believe he knew. Once, after he got sick, I drove from Seattle to Spokane in a car I borrowed from my “friend,” actually my boyfriend, to visit my dad.
“What kind of car is it?” my dad asked. “A pink Cadillac?”
Dad laughed, kindly, and gave me a paternal wink.
I believe he was trying to tell me, in his own gentle way, that I was okay, that it was okay, that we were okay.
If the It Gets Better Project had existed back when I was a teenager, if there were thousands of online messages of hope for bullied LGBT kids back when I was being brutally harassed in my high school, I like to think my dad would’ve let me know about the videos. He wouldn’t have said anything directly; that wasn’t his way. I imagine my dad would have mentioned the videos over dinner.
“Did you hear that the President made one of those ‘It Gets Better’ YouTubing video things for gay kids getting bullied at school?” he would’ve said . . . to my mother, but while I was sitting there at the table, listening.
Wink.
And if I’d gone to the It Gets Better website when I was in high school, or read this book, and found these messages of hope and all this good advice from all different kinds of people—gay, lesbian, bi, trans, straight, rural, urban, famous, unknown, even the freaking President—it would’ve made a huge difference for me.
And not just for me. I had one gay friend at school. We didn’t know any gay or lesbian adults who could, by sharing their stories, help us see that life could get better. Both of us desperately needed to know that life after high school wasn’t going to be more of the same—that the bullying wasn’t going to last forever—and we needed to know that there were straight people out there who valued their gay friends and family members. If I had found my way to the It Gets Better Project, I would’ve made sure my gay friend found his way there, too.
Then we both would’ve helped spread the word.
When Dan called me from New York City in early September of last year to tell me about this idea he’d just had—to make a video, and post it on YouTube,
to call it It Gets Better, to reach out to bullied LGBT kids who might be thinking about killing themselves—I told him I thought it was a great idea, and told him to do it.
There was a catch, he said: He didn’t want to do it without me. He wanted us to do this together.
Dan had written a couple of books about our life together; one about our efforts to adopt our son, D.J., and one about our decision to get married, in Canada, on our tenth anniversary. My rule has always been that Dan could write whatever he wanted to about us, and say whatever he wanted to say on TV, so long as I didn’t have to go on TV or do any interviews or pose for any photographs.
But I agreed to make this video. I wanted to reach out to the kids I was reading about—kids who were being bullied, sometimes to death, because they were gay or perceived to be gay—because I knew that not every LGBT kid is lucky enough to have parents as loving and supportive as mine would turn out to be.
I don’t need to tell anyone reading this book what happened next. There were thousands of people out there who had the same reaction I did to Dan’s idea: People wanted to help; people wanted to reach out to bullied and hurting LGBT kids with messages of hope, love, and support. People wanted to share their stories, and their joy, and their advice for getting through it and, if possible, making it better.
So what’s next for the It Gets Better Project?
In a way, the messages in this book and the videos online are a little like those red ribbons for AIDS awareness that everyone was wearing to the Oscars in the 1990s. Red ribbons did an important job of raising awareness and giving comfort. But here’s the crucial difference between the It Gets Better videos and red ribbons: Those ribbons are gone now, moldering away in dresser drawers and landfills, no longer doing the job they were designed to do. But these videos will continue to exist online. Fifteen-year-old kids who need to see them now can watch them now, and five-year-old kids who will need to see them in ten years will be able to watch them then.
Which is why we’ve created—with the help of the folks at Blue State Digital—a stand-alone website. These videos will always be archived at itgetsbetter.org. So the same videos that are today giving hope to LGBT adolescents will be giving hope to LGBT adolescents for years to come.
I want to say a few words to LGBT kids who’ve just finished reading this book.
Middle school and high school can be hard. Believe me, I know. When I was in school I was pushed into lockers, shoved to the floor, punched, slapped—and that was just the physical abuse. I probably don’t need to tell you about all the times I was called names. When my parents went to the school to complain, the principal told them that I was bringing the harassment on myself by “acting that way.”
There’s so much coming at you right now: new feelings, new people, new experiences. Not all of those feelings are positive, not all of those people are kind, and not all of those experiences are pleasant. Sometimes you can feel lost and alone. I did. Kids can be cruel, parents can be hurtful, and preachers can be particularly hateful, quoting certain verses from the Bible while ignoring others. And there are still teachers and school administrators out there who ignore or excuse bullying.
But, after reading this book, you know that there are people out there who went through what you’re going through. You’ve heard from parents who love their gay kids and religious leaders who want you to know that not all faiths reject you. You’ve heard from teachers and educators who are working to make schools safer and more welcoming for you and other kids who are different. And you’ve heard from politicians who are committed to standing up for you and your rights.
And there are thousands of more messages like these online—go to itgetsbetter.org to watch them—and there are more coming in every day. You don’t have to sift through the clues like I did when my dad tried to reassure me, as best he could. The message you’re receiving today is much simpler, much louder, and much clearer.
It gets better.
TERRY MILLER
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We’d like to thank all the contributors to this book first and foremost, who gave so generously of their time and talent, as well as their representatives, working long into the night; Ingrid Emerick at Girl Friday Productions for collecting these essays, hunting down releases, and gently bossing us around; Elizabeth Wales for her support, advice, and nudging; Kristen Legg for transcribing the videos; and—as ever—Brian Tart, Jessica Horvath, Susan Schwartz, Julia Gilroy, Daniel Lagin and everyone at Dutton for their patience. Christine Ball, Amanda Walker, and Carrie Swetonic in publicity for their assistane and understanding. A huge thank you to Blue State Digital for creating the It Gets Better Project’s amazing website, itgetsbetter.org. Thanks to Brian Pines and Seth Levy for their organizational and legal support; Randy Phillips for his personal assistance; Joe Jervis, Andy Towle, Andrew Sullivan, and John Aravosis for their advice and moral support; Charles Robbins, Eliza Byard, and Chris Hampton and the staffs of the Trevor Project, GLSEN, and the ACLU for all they do every day; Jonathan Finney at Stonewall UK and Shin Inouye at the White House for going above and beyond the call of duty; to all the volunteers in Washington, DC, who have spent countless hours viewing and uploading videos: Scott Zumwalt, Colin Bishop, JP Brandt, Alex Levy, Christopher Nulty, Jason Rahlan, and Trevor Thomas. Thank you to the incredible Carol Chen at Google/YouTube who made it possible to post the thousands of videos that have come in. And a very special thanks to our good friend Kelly O and our son, D.J, who is himself living proof that it gets better.
Thanks also to Tim Keck, Laurie Saito, Anthony Hecht, and everyone at The Stranger who pitched in during the hectic first month of the It Gets Better Project’s life.
Most importantly, we want to thank everyone who has made an It Gets Better video. We wish would could thank you all by name.
Thousands of amazing and touching and heartbreaking and uplifting videos have been submitted since we started to work on this collection. We’re sorry that we couldn’t include more of them in this book. Please go to itgetsbetter.org to watch all the videos.
To the LGBT youth reading this: Thank you for being you, thank you for sticking around, thank you for inspiring us. We can’t wait to meet you.
RESOURCES
Some Curriculum Guidelines for Schools and Teachers
Schools are a primary social structure for children, and social relationships with peers are a central part of students’ lives. Research shows that school, and the social interactions that take place there, can play a stabilizing or destructive role for young people, particularly if they are experiencing emotional stress. Professor Robert Blum, MD, MPH, PhD, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, noted in his monograph “Best Practices for Enhancing School Environment” that “school environment and school connectedness can be determining factors in a young person’s educational experience. When students believe that adults in the school care about them, have high expectations for their education, and will provide the support essential to their success, they thrive. When teachers and staff are deeply engaged in creating a safe, nurturing, challenging school environment their job satisfaction increases. A positive school environment is a product of a collective effort.”
We also know that, according to the Harris Interactive Study conducted in 2005 titled, “From Teasing to Torment: School Climate in America, A Survey of Students and Teachers,” 65 percent of teens report that they have been verbally or physically harassed or assaulted during the past year because of their perceived or actual appearance, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression, race/ethnicity, disability, or religion. The most common reasons cited for being harassed frequently is a student’s appearance. The next most common reason is sexual orientation. In this survey, a stunning 90 percent of LGBT students reported having been bullied in the past year, and almost a quarter of these students do not report the incident because they do not believe the school staff will do anything or be able to stop it.
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br /> The survey shows how schools need to “bridge the gap between the support that teachers say they provide to students and students’ perceptions of teachers’ willingness to take action.” Cited are measures such as strong anti-bullying policies that prohibit harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity; student and staff education on bullying prevention and intervention; and a deliberate effort by school administration to create a safe, nonbiased, and supportive environment for all students to reduce the risks and stresses for LGBT youth.
There are several things that teachers and administrators can do in the classroom and school to promote understanding and tolerance and to create a safe and supportive environment for LGBT students:• Show your support of LGBT youth through modeling inclusive language and behavior. Use gender- and orientation-neutral language and examples in your lessons.
• Create a safe space for students by working with them to set norms and expectations to ensure respect. Lead a discussion where students create ground rules for themselves that are fair, inclusive, and involve respect for all.