[LINK] "Campaign Offers Help to Gay Youths"

[rfmcdonald]

This New York Times article on the "It Gets Better" movement serves as a nice introduction to the ways in which modern social networking technologies really can catalyze pretty notable social movements. (I like the 21st century, did I mention?)

The videos are “a new way of using the technology at hand to save lives,” said Stephen Sprinkle, a professor at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, who posted a video to YouTube about the loneliness he felt before identifying as gay.

Some say the videos also represent an important moment for the gay rights movement. The sharing of coming-out stories has long been a tool of solidarity among gays as “a way to say that we understand each other because we had to come out under fire or because we struggled with it,” Mr. Sprinkle said.

The “It Gets Better” videos are different, he said, because they are both more public and more positive. “We’re able to look back on our stories and say, it really has gotten better,” he said.

Dan Savage, the sex columnist who started the project, concurred, saying in an interview that the videos were “helping gay adults realize that it’s gotten better for us,” but that “for teens, it’s been getting worse out in the boonies, in the exurbs.”

The “It Gets Better” idea came to Mr. Savage, 46, while he was riding the AirTrain shuttle to Kennedy International Airport last month and thinking about Billy Lucas, a 15-year-old from Indiana who committed suicide Sept. 9. The local news media reported that Mr. Lucas was bullied regularly.

Days earlier, Mr. Savage had blogged about the suicide, and a reader had written: “My heart breaks for the pain and torment you went through, Billy Lucas. I wish I could have told you that things get better.”

Mr. Savage said he felt the same way. But how to tell them? He gives talks at colleges regularly, but not at middle schools or high schools. “I would never get permission,” he said, blaming a system of “parents, preachers and teachers” who “believe they can terrorize gay children out of being gay as they grow up.”

His realization was this: “I was waiting for permission that — in the era of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook — I didn’t need anymore.”

Mr. Savage and his husband put the YouTube page online on Sept. 21, and he promoted it in his syndicated column. The column quoted the politician Harvey Milk: “You gotta give ’em hope.”

For Mr. Savage, the responses have been “really overwhelming” — far too many for one person to watch. He is now preparing a permanent home for the videos.