We Can Do Better Than to Say It Gets Better

This is not a literary post but today is National Coming Out Day and on Friday we debut our Queer Issue and there’s a lot of buzz and chatter about the It Gets Better project so we thought we might say a little something that has been on our minds. The sentiment behind this project is admirable, telling gay teenagers to hold on because life gets better after high school. I appreciate how people from all walks of life are sharing stories of bullying, high school, coming out, and how life gets better so gay teenagers understand they are not alone, so they can have a little hope during one of the most hopeless times in anyone’s life. It’s all very laudable and it’s amazing (and a bit sad) that more than 1.4 million people have viewed the videos on the It Gets Better YouTube channel. Clearly, there’s a need for this nascent community. There is a need for these stories to be told. There is a need for the mere idea of hope.

At the same time, I cannot help but feel that it’s simply not enough to tell gay teenagers that it gets better. We’re telling these kids that there’s nothing we can to do. We’re telling them, “it gets better but for now, you will have to suffer.” We’re giving up. We are failing them. We’re also making false promises. It doesn’t get better for everyone, and in a society where gay marriage is inexplicably illegal in most states, where gay people are still in danger from hate crimes, bullying and harassment; where they don’t benefit from the protections heterosexual people take for granted; where serving in the military and putting your life on the line for your country means you have to hide who you are; in such a climate, it only gets somewhat better, doesn’t it?

I have to believe we can do better. I know we can do better. Instead of telling gay teens it gets better, we have to work to find a way to make life better for gay teens right now, not tomorrow, or next month or next year, but today. We cannot change, overnight, the attitudes of those homophobes and small-minded people (using that term loosely) who seek to torment gay teens but we should demand that our schools protect our children from bullying. We should demand zero tolerance for gay bashing in high schools with the same vigor that a zero tolerance policy is applied to a child who brings a pair of scissors to school. We should demand that our legislators enact the sorely needed civil rights legislation that should have been extended to the GLBT community a long damn time ago. Saying “it gets better” is well and good, but at the end of the day, it feels kind of hollow. It feels inadequate. We owe our children more. We owe ourselves more.  If saying “it gets better” is the best we can do, we’re way worse off than we realize.