It Gets Better
 

Two guys made a video about being happy gay adults in response to the suicide of a gay teenager in Texas. They called it "It Gets Better", and set up a youtube channel, encouraging others to make videos. This morning -when my attention was drawn to it, it was just their video. Now there are half a dozen or so.

I think this is such a great project. It may not be a solution to the problem, but at least it's something. It's sort of like what happened for nerds when Bill Gates became a household name. Only better. Just a glimpse of light at the end of the tunel, of something better out there when it feels that maybe it isn't really worth carrying on.



http://www.youtube.com/user/itgetsbetterproject

Hey, that's awesome.

But what if children see it, and catch the gay? :haha:

It's ok, they most likely have Norton or McAfee to deal with that

Like!

It gets better, and is getting better with the hard work of all the LGBT activists and regular gay people, and any other person who will not accept bigotry and tolerance.

Of course, high school is frequently hell for many of us, regardless of sexual orientation.

Seriously, though, that middle school/high school age is so fucking awful if you aren't "popular" maybe it's fucking awful for everyone, who knows? I don't -I was on the podgy/swot/nerd/parent-are-divorced-oh-the-shame list. I suspect many of us hardcore dwellars were not on everyone's party list. It would've been nice to know that people like me stood a chance in adulthood.

I always figured I'd be a loser adult too, but it never occurred to me to do anything about it -positive or negative. It just sort of happened as I went to uni I got a fresh start and it became clearer that maybe i wasn't actually a loser (jmho ;) ). And life has just got better from that point.

I guess that's why this struck a chord. And..... I'm not gay and yet it was pretty horrible for me. I now live in a very gay-friendly city. My kids go to the school where all the gay parents sent their kids if they can get in. And yet I still see the kids who "have gay tendancies" being rejected by the other kids. Not the teachers and parents, thankfully, and it's not outright bullying, but they still hover on the outside of the cliques and find it hard to fit in.

I agree! it struck a chord for dealing with depression, too. That awful pit of black despair, when you think nothing can possibly be okay ever again. It DOES get better!

It doesn't get any better, you just reach 21, and can be drunk all the time.

Thanks, xoB. :rolleyes: Someone let me know when he's becomig intolerably irritating? Why are you so bitter? You're pretty popular here. I sorta assumed you weren't gay from your posts, but are you? Whatever your bitch is, you clearly made it too. Why would you not support those who remember how shitty it was offering a lifeline to those currently there?

??? Who ???

The guy on the right is Dan Savage, who writes a sex advice column called Savage Love. I hope he's able to garner publicity for this.

It was a joke, which doesn't affect this project or it's intended goals. Those queer kids aren't coming to the Cellar for affirmation. I might add it has nothing to do with nerds or geeks, it's about queers, you're twisting it for your own fit.
Anyway, telling kids that after high school everything gets better is missleading. If they don't work, and damn hard, at making it better, it won't. Life sucks and then you die, unless you make it otherwise.

I saw the column while I was checking out the video. is it good? it seemed ok

life doesn't always get better, no. but nothing ever gets better if you off yourself for lack of hope. OR try to drown your sorrows with alcohol.

fair points, sorry I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to find it funny, so I thought you were just being unpleasant.

But i don't believe you have to work hard to make it better. I think it gets better anyway -you do have to work hard to make the most of that and turn it around. But it seems reasonable to me that it gets better (maybe not perfect) the minute you are not forced to be confined in a room with people who hate you on principle? Certainly worked for me.

True, that's why it was a joke.

This is pretty awesome. My heart sinks whenever I think of the bullying gay kids have to go through. I hope this reaches all of them.

even one would be a good thing? Even not a gay kid but any kid?

Totally not the point Bruce. It gets better because when they leave high school, they escape the debilitating bullying from mean-spirited asshole kids.

You think leaving the shelter and three squares of home makes it easier? OK, now you aren't confined to the classroom, you're confined to a job with even more rules, and have to deal with the same assortment of assholes as High School, just to survive. True you can change jobs, as long as you can find one, and aren't so deep in debt you can be choosy.
Higher education is a way to escape, but that's not always an option, takes a lot of work to do well, and is very expensive. You have greater control over your social life but that can be tricky without the parent filter, and everybody makes a few mistakes there. Of course everybody knows that college girls do the pseudo-lesbian thing, so that's a fun plus.
Better is very subjective.

but bitter is easy to discern.

Oh you damn hippies think everything is lovely. :lol:

You're right. A "Working Class/Non College" gay probably has less light at the end of the tunnel/is looking down a longer tunnel, and probably has less access to this resource. But that still doesn't make it a bad thing?

rose colored granny glasses

Certainly it's not a bad thing, it's a great thing for the queer kids in High School, and maybe even college, to see that the future is not all doom and gloom just because of their sexual orientation.
I'm just cautioning against telling every kid that feels like an outsider in High School, that graduation day automatically leads to sunshine and roses. Not that I think this project does that for the queer kids either.

I laugh when people tell me to go on facebook so I can connect with High School classmates. :rolleyes:

I resisted FB forever, but finally succumbed and used it to find an old, old friend who disappeared off the face of the planet after high school (STALKER ALERT!) -I'd failed to find him any other way. He's not out, but I think he's gay, as does my best female friend from high school (we were a trio). She visited me a few years back and were were concerned that he might have commited suicide. I was so happy to find him alive and well and it seems to me that the old high school release worked for him regarding happiness, if not entirelt freedom to be who he is. And i could be wrong about that.

I used to enjoy it back when I consistently read the Onion online (they syndicated it as part of their "A/V Club" section.) Haven't kept up with either in several years, though.

It's ahh... 12:43 am 9-23-10, and they are up to 19 videos. Fortunately some are addressing other queers, besides gays.

I still think it rocks. It's better than nothing. Way better than nothing.

Whom are you trying to convince? :haha:

you? (who, not whom)

Not me, I think it's a great idea, and I'm glad you brought it here. My caution is expanding it too generally, beyond the target and subject it was created for.

Maybe someone should take on a similar project, for the other High School misfits/outsiders, telling them it will get better after High School, if they do x, y, and/or z.

If I was ever a misfit as a kid I didn't know it. I had a great childhood with my set of friends and so many experiences I treasure. As a young adult I went into human services, spend my career helping the disabled,helped my son fight through his autism like sensory issues, and not very well because he had to deal with his mom's handicaps. Now that he has pretty much a handle on things my mom get's Alzheimer's. I am tired,burn't out, kaput. I keep reminiscing about my childhood which scares me. I want to be reminiscing now about good things that happen now. In my bad moments I tell myself ,it will get better sometime before I die, or not. During my good moments I tell myself it's just life life balancing out. If that is the case then my son is going to have one hell of a good next 40 years.

That's kind of the point, though--you don't have to do x, y and/or z. It gets better instantly, the day you graduate, simply by virtue of not being trapped in a high school building with sadists anymore. Sure, you still have to get a job and live your life, and in a small-town blue-collar scenario you are likely to encounter a lot of the same types of people you saw in high school. But the difference is, most behavior perpetrated by high school bullies--vandalism, harassment, threats, assault--is at best a firing offense and at worst a prosecutable crime, when it's done out in the real world. Not to mention, you now have the freedom to move to a larger city if your small town is an exact replica of the high school environment. You can hitchhike if you have to, and your parents can't say anything about it, whereas before they could have had cops haul you back as a runaway.

The campaign isn't that life gets easy. It's that life gets better.

Firing offense? Prosecutable crime? Not when you're the odd man out in the group, and maybe in the community. The boss and cow orkers are lodge brothers with, in the softball league with, go to the same church as, the cops.
No, graduating (or dropping out) of High School doesn't change anything. That requires work and determination on your part. You have to make it happen and it ain't easy.

Is it good? It's fucking hilarious. I thought everyone read that.

There is one column form years ago that we had taped to the wall in the shop in college where Dan is going off on some guy for asking about what he can eat to make his "cum" taste better.

After letting the guy know that grown ups spell it c-o-m-e, he goes on to say that and as far as he (Dan) is concerned they guy can eat firecrackers to make his come taste like the 4th of July, but in case the guy didn't know, their is an AIDS epidemic going on and coming in someone's mouth isn't safe, among other withering comments.

He is one funny fucker.

I disagree that it automatically gets better. My freshman year I had a roommate who had a lot of troubles in high school. I don't know the full story but he switched schools between his sophomore and junior years of high school because of bullying, isolation, etc, and supposedly the school he went to junior and senior year wasn't much better. He said he was suicidal for a while as well (honestly I thought he was looking for attention at the time but whatever).

Anyways, so we met the summer before freshman year of college through some roommate search and he was extremely excited for a new start and to be in a much more "mature" environment. He had plans of meeting a bunch of people who weren't judging and all of that stuff.

But one thing we both didn't realize at the time was that people are going to judge you on how you act no matter what. There isn't some instant rush of maturity that occurs when someone leaves high school. The same people we were hanging out with freshman year all graduated high school the year before. If you were bullied in high school there was usually a reason for it, some more legitimate than others, and acting the same way when you graduate will most likely result in people treating you the same (being gay can be somewhat exempted from that but I'll get back to it).

So I quickly found out that this guy was creepy and weird as hell and tried way too hard to impress people. This naturally turned all of our hallway against him and he went back to the same old trends as he did in high school. I haven't talked to him since the end of freshman year but unless he changed how he acted, I bet he still gets treated the same way. It may not be as direct as in high school or the dorms, but it will still happen.


I had another old roommate, junior year, who had an opposite situation. He was king back in high school. Star football player, second best wrestler in the state for his weight class, valedictorian, popular as hell, etc. He lived in a small town and when he moved to the University of Minnesota he eventually found out he was only average compared to everyone else. There were other issues too but I could easily tell that this bothered him because he would get very insecure and call himself a "genius" and talk about how great he was back in high school. He became an alcoholic and has nothing to show for himself right now. I know a few other people that have the same basic story but just not to that extreme. All of them live in the past.


While I do agree that graduating high school for the most part gives everyone an opportunity to live a better life, I would never say that it automatically gets better. People are going to be judging and be assholes wherever you go. A lot of people are miserable and that is apparent of how they treat other people. Almost all my gay friends are much happier now than in high school because they stopped giving a shit what other people think about them. Getting out of their high school helped A LOT, but it still came down to getting rid of the insecurities instilled on them for the past 12 years.

Graduating from high school gives you an opportunity to change but you still have to do it if you want to be happier.