I Feel Better (Live) – Frightened Rabbit (from the Liver! Lung! FR! album
I still think of Dan Savage as the guy who writes the sex advice column in the back of The Stranger, but in the 15 years since I first read him, he has somehow turned into one of the most important (and best) voices for queers, for sex and those who like it, and for a progressive sense of society (and politics) in general.
I can’t really say what the secret to his success is, apart from a strident honesty. My best guess is that he is a great example of how to escape the HHGTTG problem of leadership. To wit:
The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
The great thing about him, I think, is that he’s a standard-bearer for a movement that he himself feels conflicted about. He cares about the issues, certainly, but seems to remain in some serious doubt that he ‘deserves’ to be in that role. His primary gig, of course, is as an advice columnist. A job whose sole qualification—as he often states—is simply that people ask you for your advice.
That’s a lot of background, but I think it’s important for the point I want to make about his current effort: the “it gets better” project. After reading about a particularly troubling case of a young gay kid committing suicide, he wrote:
“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.
Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don’t have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.
So that’s what he did, making a short film with his boyfriend to make this point, and dropping it on youtube.
I started out skeptical. Not for any particular reason, but just out of a general sense of distrust for clever attempts to use new media, and for schlocky attempt to sugar-coat life.
But after watching the video–and watching some of the many, many videos made by people who aren’t famous or ‘important’–I think this is actually really important, and good.
They key reason is the way that the constant invocation of ‘it gets better’ does quite a bit more than it initially appears. I see three main objections that people might make: 1) this kind of thing is faux-activism that doesn’t make a real difference 2) that it would be better to actually focus on improving things where kids ARE, not just telling them to wait until things improve 3) it creates false expectations. Things might get better if you’re Dan Savage but most people won’t find perfect lives. There’s some truth to all of these, but I think they each suffer from the problem of myopia. By which I mean: they treat the literal message as if it’s the only message.
But that’s not at all the limit. When you say ‘it gets better’ you’re actually doing a lot of things. You’re expressing sympathy, by communicating to people in tough times that there are people out there who know what you’re going through. You’re judging their tormentors–making clear that what may seem natural and acceptable to the people in their immediate environment is being criticized and called out by people elsewhere. That can be a powerful thing. One of the toughest things about being a kid is that you don’t have a very good outrage-meter. And for people who suffer chronic bullying, it’s very easy to start doubting yourself. But perhaps most importantly, you’re not just telling people that things get better, you’re making an accusation that the conditions many young gay kids are forced to endure are unacceptable. To say ‘it gets better’ is to also state that the way things are right now is unacceptable.
And the message is not just for the victims. It’s for the culture as a whole. The fact that thousands of people are making their own videos takes this far beyond the vanity project of one guy. It makes it a collective work–a cathartic process for people to mark the pain of their own lives and express the joys they’ve been able to find. It doesn’t sugar coat. You see that there is endless variety in what it means to grow up. But that’s precisely the point. Life is not the simple set of circumstances in which you grow up. It can be almost anything.
And when we say ‘it gets better’ it’s also a call to action. The reason it gets better is because people MAKE it better. And the people who make it better are not just the individuals themselves. It’s society in general that has to change. This project is part of that process, to the extent that it draws a line in the sand. It exposes the parochialism of small minds as the toxic social function that it is. And, importantly, it does it in the form of making positive statements rather than simply listing out grievances.
It treats gay people as just…people. People who deserve the chance to live normal lives, to possibly do great things, and to possibly do small things. Not as victims who must endlessly suffer and identify themselves against that suffering–except to the extent that EVERYONE must do that.
And that’s not nothing. It matters. I don’t know if it matters a lot. Change is slow when it happens on a broad social level. But it does happen. And when you add up a lot of little things like this, it goes just a little bit faster.