Billy Lucas, Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown; the list continues to grow even into 2015. The name Leelah Alcorn may help piece things together.
\nEveryone listed has successfully committed suicide after dealing with harassment, homophobia, assault and more. These are all common experiences held by queer youth.
\n
\nDan Savage, author of the relationship and sex advice column Savage Love, made an effort in 2010 to respond to the tragedies befalling many families and communities across the world. His idea, with the help of his husband, became the \u201cIt Gets Better Project.\u201d
\nThe project has had tremendous success in terms of its mission to spread its message. The site hosts more than 50,000 videos sent in with their own message to youth, centering around a show of support and the moral that life gets better if you endure. Our President himself weighed in and created a video.
\nThe heart is in the right place in both the founders and the participants of the project. However, like all movements, this LGBT+ movement has created unintended consequences by promoting its message.
\nWe cannot be sedated with just the message \u201cIt Gets Better.\u201d I, myself, am amazed how many people know this as a truth, well enough to spread it around.
\nTo begin my suspicions of the matter, I\u2019ll examine the title. It seems to me that there is a lot absent from the phrase \u201cIt Gets Better.\u201d What exactly gets better? The trauma experienced in youth is not easily resolved and can have real consequences on youth \u2013 gay or otherwise.
\nWhen we suggest that life gets better for individuals without acknowledging the long-term consequences gay youth can be subjected to, it devalues those life experiences, and we become capable of ignoring both the perpetrators of injustices and the victims. Most importantly, we end up forgetting our survivors.
\nThis leads me to my second point. We\u2019ve covered what, but how about, well\u2013how does it actually get better?
\nTime seems to be the largest factor mentioned in the video. Again, surely time does change your experience in life, but it does not change the experiences you have already had.
\nCiting a passage of time is horribly inactive, and not exactly the best message to spread to those in mental duress and positions where they may not have agency or safety. Life is time sensitive. Time shifts the responsibility away from society and suggests that youth should be complacent with the status quo in society.
\nWhen we focus on time, we delay action and neglect any personal participation. A movement needs movement. It needs action.
\nNow I take a look at \u201cbetter.\u201d Better is, well, better than before. Improvement. However, is better the real goal?
\nIf you endure, things will improve. That doesn\u2019t say by how much. We all know there are no guarantees in life, but this does not seem to even have a ballpark to go by.
\nYou will get older; unless the IRS disappears, you will pay your taxes; and unless we do more than just say \u201cIt Gets Better,\u201d if you\u2019re queer and trying to grow up, you will likely experience mostly preventable trauma.
\nThis isn\u2019t to say that Savage\u2019s campaign hasn\u2019t made strides.
\nIt Gets Better has created larger visibility of the very real struggles faced by the LGBT+ community. They have taken initiative, and as of March 19, had over 596,940 people take their pledge.
\nIt reads:
\n\u201cTHE PLEDGE: Everyone deserves to be respected for who they are. I pledge to spread this message to my friends, family and neighbors. I’ll speak up against hate and intolerance whenever I see it, at school and at work. I’ll provide hope for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other bullied teens by letting them know that it gets better.\u201d Similar initiatives have even sprouted up locally.
\nIn Dayton, the Love Wins Project is an initiative that aims to foster an inclusive environment for students, regardless of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation. Love Wins hosts several events a year, including an event in which students, faculty and the Dayton community are encouraged to come share their stories and record their own \u201cIt Gets Better\u201d video.
\nBut this isn\u2019t just about gay youth to me. We all share similar experiences as humans. We will all face our own struggles. Falling is hard; getting up is hard.
\nYet, lending a hand to someone who\u2019s fallen down can be a lot simpler than we tend to think. Our everyday interactions give us chance after chance to actively improve the lives of not only ourselves, but also others.
\nThe Advocate, a popular LGBT+ magazine, recently named Dayton as the \u201cqueerest city\u201d in the country. As a resident and as someone who has grown up mostly in Dayton, I was shocked at my town taking the title.
\nI\u2019m thankful for the opportunities Dayton offers for the LGBT community, but if Dayton is the most friendly of all cities in the States, we need to do better.<\/p>\n
Barton Kleen Billy Lucas, Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown; the list continues to grow even into 2015. The name Leelah Alcorn may help piece things together. Everyone listed has successfully committed suicide after dealing with harassment, homophobia, assault and more. These are all common experiences held by queer youth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5723,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[1999],"class_list":["post-11380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tartan-news","tag-barton-kleen"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-2Xy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5723"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11381,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11380\/revisions\/11381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSocial Media Editor<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"