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. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England 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. It Gets Better® , It Gets Better Project®, and the It Gets Better Project logo are trademarks of Savage Love, LLC. REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR. eISBN : 978-1-101-51340-8 Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. http://us.penguingroup.com 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. 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. 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.