Message For LGBT Youth: It Gets Better

In response to a suicide by a gay teenager from Indiana who hung himself after relentless bullying at his high school, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage has started a YouTube page, the It Gets Better project. He explains the page in his column:

"My heart breaks for the pain and torment you went through, Billy Lucas," a reader wrote after I posted about Billy Lucas to my blog. "I wish I could have told you that things get better."

I had the same reaction: I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

His idea: having adults make a video in which they talk about how they survived growing up despite abuse and hate and bullying, and now are living wonderful lives, passing on the message that no matter how bad things are, they'll get better. Dan and his husband filmed the first one. Watch it after the jump...

I love this idea. Kids accessing the Internet can still get all kinds of information without it being filtered or censored by their parents or other authority figures, and hearing these stories can save lives. Still, there's a part of me that wishes a different tactic could be taken as well.

Because make no mistake about this: kids such as Billy Lucas who committed suicide under similar circumstances were murdered. They were murdered by the bullies, by lousy parents, by the employees of the schools that do nothing, by the religious hypocrites and right-wing politicians spewing their anti-gay filth and fostering the atmosphere of hate that has been allowed to flourish for far too long in so many places in this country. The blood of these kids is on the hands of the haters.

It disgusts me that the bastards of the Westboro Baptist "Church" are so willing to disrupt military funerals and other events, but sometimes I think that maybe if the haters got a taste of their own medicine maybe they'd finally get the point. Maybe protesting at churches during Sunday mass isn't such a bad idea when they're bombing abortion clinics and driving LGBT youths to their deaths. This goes against the spirit of the sign I held at the anti-WBC protest on Temple's campus in April (see picture) but I'm only human, and I'm angry and I'm sick and tired of this.