A history of the “It Gets Better” campaign
In this excerpt from Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics, Brett Krutzsch explores the origins of the “It Gets Better” campaign and how the suicides of Tyler Clementi and other young gay people opened a new conversation about gay inclusivity in the wider culture. This excerpt has been adapted from the original.
In September of 2010, after a string of widely reported suicides by gay teenagers, sex advice columnist Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller inaugurated the It Gets Better video campaign. In their collaborative video posted to YouTube, the two men shared a similar story: as teenagers, their peers harassed them because they were gay. But after they graduated from high school, moved to cities, and matured into adulthood, they learned to embrace their sexuality, and, in turn, enjoyed a greatly improved life.
The clip went viral, and within one week, over one thousand people had uploaded similar testimonials that supported the direct message to LGBT adolescents: “It gets better.” Celebrities, sports teams, and President Obama soon released videos with the same declaration. Within the next eight weeks, more than ten thousand people had uploaded videos. In March of 2011, Savage and Miller released a book with excerpts from some of the videos entitled, It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living, which landed on the New York Times Best Sellers list. In February of 2012, MTV aired an It Gets Better special that featured Savage and several celebrities. By that time, more than fifty thousand people had created It Gets Better videos and millions more had watched the testimonials online.
It Gets Better had near immediate success, according to Savage, because of the country’s reaction to a gay teenager’s suicide the day after the first It Gets Better video premiered.
On September 22, 2010, Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate tweeted that he had spied on Clementi when he was engaged in a sexual act with another man. Clementi’s suicide quickly became a national news story. Three months later, Savage told Out magazine that Clementi’s death was like “steroids injected into [It Gets Better].” In turn, Clementi’s suicide became the first LGBT death after Matthew Shepard’s murder in 1998 that immediately ignited national outrage. And the It Gets Better Project became the most prominent response to the new countrywide focus on LGBT teen suicides.
As a reaction to Clementi’s suicide, and to the success of the It Gets Better Project, mainstream media outlets from the New York Times to the Christian Science Monitor reported on the unique vulnerabilities of LGBT teenagers and their higher-than-average suicide rates. In historically unprecedented ways, media commentators insisted that the country needed to address anti-gay bullying and the stigma many LGBT teenagers faced. Effectively, the national attention on Clementi’s suicide and the It Gets Better Project revealed that although some LGBT and, particularly, gay Americans had achieved greater visibility and legislative gains by 2010, many gay, queer, and transgender youth still felt an overwhelming sense of shame.
The response to It Gets Better from politicians, celebrities, and average citizens revealed that many heterosexuals viewed Clementi’s death as a tragedy the country needed to address. Whereas fifteen years earlier, many straight Americans associated gay men with death because of AIDS, by 2010, the connection between gays and death was not taken as a given. By 2010, white, gender-conforming gays like Clementi appeared to be on the precipice of full social inclusion in the United States. President Obama had vowed to repeal the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, same-sex marriage had become legal in some states, and several cities had enacted employment non-discrimination laws to protect LGBT citizens. These political advances prompted Savage and thousands of others to proclaim that life is, in spite of teen suicide rates, getting better for LGBT Americans.
In his writings and interviews, Savage was unwavering in his promise that life improved for all LGBT people. In an interview for National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air,” Savage was asked to read a portion of his favorite It Gets Better testimonial. Interestingly, he selected a video uploaded by a Latina lesbian who challenged the campaign’s central message. She warned, “As a gay woman of color, I just want to let the youth know that it kind of doesn’t get better. . .I’m not rich and I’m brown. . .It doesn’t get better, but what happens is this, you get stronger.”
Savage, though, did not let this woman have the last word or allow her proclamations to interrupt his progress narrative. He appropriated her “It doesn’t get better” warning and declared, “This is really the lesbian, Latina, Bronx way of saying that ‘it gets better.’” Savage ignored how this woman of color described societal discrepancies of power, and insisted that her message was the same as his. He suggested that her opportunity to upload such a video and broadcast a message to LGBT youth demonstrated that life was, in fact, improving for all LGBT people.
Savage’s ability to re-frame a direct confrontation to his message and transform it into one that aligned with his promise of betterment may help explain part of the campaign’s popularity. The It Gets Better Project’s focus on hope and on individuals overcoming exceptional odds exemplified what Barbara Ehrenreich describes as the American “desire to believe that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions.” For those who were white, middle-class, gender-conforming, and interested in getting married, the promise in 2010 that life “gets better” could have seemed accurate.
One explanation, then, for the attractiveness of It Gets Better was that it offered a glorious life to everyone who chose to receive it without accounting for differences in race, class, gender, or religion.
So even when the Latina lesbian from the Bronx refused to join the chorus to pronounce, “it gets better,” Savage enveloped her into his progress narrative of prosperity, endless possibilities, and a “better” LGBT life.
Brett Krutzsch is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Haverford College. His scholarship examines intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, race, and politics in the United States.
