It Gets Better

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

DUTTON

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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

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It Gets Better
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“You gotta give 'em hope.”

BROOKLYN, NY

 

 

O
kay. Listen up, people.

It gets better. You 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.

O
ne 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.