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Canadian Celebrities Tell Gay Youth That “It Gets Better”
A group of prominent Canadian media personalities, artists, businesspeople, and politicians―including Rick Mercer, George Smitherman, Mark Tewksbury, and the cast of MTV’s 1 Girl, 5 Gays―have lent their voices to a Canada-specific “It Gets Better” video. It debuted on Tuesday night at an LGBT Youthline fundraiser and online.
Ever since Dan Savage, reacting to a recent series of widely reported instances of gay youth killing themselves after mistreatment by peers, put out the call, gay adults have posted thousands of YouTube videos in which they describe their improving circumstances during post–high school life. The “It Gets Better” project, as it’s known, has evolved relatively quickly in the month or so since its inception: it now has its own website, and even Barack Obama has contributed to the project, though he isn’t gay. (We have to specify, just so nobody thinks we have inside information.)
The new “It Gets Better” video, embedded above, is a nicely shot, professionally edited, celebrity-endorsed contribution to the project, made specifically for the alienated youth of this country. Organized by reporter and stylist Arren Williams and HGTV personality Tommy Smythe, it’s a heartfelt and very Canadian tribute to the healing power of time.
Rick Mercer, speaking over the phone to Torontoist yesterday afternoon, explained that he’d agreed to be interviewed for the video out of a sense of personal obligation.
“I’ve always been a private person,” he said. “I don’t necessarily like talking about my personal life that much, but I think if you’re in the public eye and you’re gay, you kind of have an obligation to at least be out, to a certain extent, for no other reason than gay kids kill themselves. And that’s why you do it.”
Playwright and director Brad Fraser, who was also interviewed for the video, offered a refinement to the “It Gets Better” message.
“I think we have to let them know that no matter how hard it is right now for them, it’s not going to get easier,” he told Torontoist. “But if they want it to, it can get better, and that requires a lot of work on everybody’s part.”
At the moment, it appears that some of that work is being done on YouTube.
We have to specify, just so nobody thinks we have inside information
Actually no you don’t. You can keep the “scandalized” idiots guessing.
I guess I was living under a rock, because I had no idea that Mercer or Smitherman were gay.
When I stopped to think about that fact, it made me happy. It means that a gay man can become famous today without the main descriptor about him being ‘he is gay’.
I think this is a good reminder why we need to keep certain issues at the forefront. I think we’ve maybe started becoming complacent a little in this messaging. It shouldn’t take an incident for us to remember and encourage each other, but glad that it’s being said and backed by such celebrity now.
I’d be so much happier if this otherwise awesome video didn’t have the vapid losers from 1 Girl, 5 Gays in it.
What we have here, then, is a high-production-values Canadian recapitulation of a grassroots American phenomenon. Here, elite artists and designers, with a few ringrs (business executive, athletes, now-defeated politician) pose carefully to tell kids how much better it gets.
I suppose taking a raw, unvarnished idea and “improving” it is just the sort of thing the Gays like to do, but this thing is overproduced and derivative. Is one twelve-minute video shot by professionals really better than a dozen 90-second videos captured by Webcams?
While the description as “a nicely shot, professionally edited, celebrity-endorsed contribution to the project” is accurate, isn’t it also an indictment?
I think this “contribution” is counterproductive, not least because I am almost finished my half-year-long research project on gay and lesbian economics. The video perpetuates a myth of gay affluence. Isn’t this the wrong kind of carrot to dangle before rural or isolated Canadian gay kids? We’re trying to tell you “It gets better,” not “You get richer.”
On another day, we can discuss the lengths to which Rick Mercer and his producer husband have historically gone to keep a secret. Perhaps someone should knock on their door in Playter Estates and shoot an interview.
Bonus fact: They can’t even write out their titles correctly.
Fucking hell, Joe.
Would this get any attention if unsuccessful nobodies said the same lines into grainy webcams? No, it wouldn’t. The fact that these celebrities and other people of influence and creativity and achievement went through the same things Jimmy 14-Year-Old is experiencing today, and didn’t let it hold them back, says volumes about the importance of not killing yourself just because you’ve had a tough few years in high school.
If you want to watch unheardofs talking into their web cams go to the Youtube channel, there are plenty. Among them, you’ll notice a bunch of affluent queers have uploaded videos with much higher production values, but try not to fly into a rage.
Why am I not surprised you’d shit on an anti-suicide outreach video so you can plug an unrelated project of your own (and gloat about a typo)? What kind of smug human garbage does that?
I think it’s very admirable that this diverse group of LGBT “celebrities” have created this video to add to the extensive collection of “It Gets Better” videos that have been produced. Everybody has their story, everybody has their way of telling it.
In response to joeclark, I do not see this video as counterproductive at all. Nor do I think it’s any better or worse than many of the other “low production value” videos out there. Who cares if the video was shot on a web cam in some kids’ bedroom, or whether professional media personalities were filmed professionally in a well-edited video with good lighting and sound?
I think it’s telling that in this video the people are not named until late in the video. They are just individuals telling their story. It’s only later in the video that we learn their names, learn that they are successful people in different occupations. Why should they be ashamed to be successful and happy?
Good work, Canada!
Not that it’s not great that “gay” doesn’t have to be a master status, but…you didn’t know George Smitherman was gay?
That sounded mean. I just am surprised, because Smitherman being gay came up several times over the course of the election—early on, when he adopted his new son with his partner; at the end, when there was a homophobic ad on Tamil radio; in the middle, when he’d bring it up himself and was talked about as Toronto’s first gay mayor (both glowingly and, in dark corners, negatively and derisively).
Wow, what a mean-spirited twat you are joe. You sniping from the sidelines at people lending a heartfelt hand to others. Your “contribution” is – oh #@! it. I dont want to waste another second on the likes of you black-hearted bastards.
Wonderful video.
I wish there were a video for straight kids in school. Not to diminish the experiences of LGBT kids growing up, but high school is pretty horrible for the straight (in my case nerdy) kids too.
No one tells you when you’re growing up that the way things are isn’t the way things stay. No one told me anyway.
High school is terrible for most people.
The original grassroots video project secured more than enough attention. It didn’t need professionals waltzing in well after the fact to do it up proper. The actual format of It Gets Better – individuals shooting their own videos on whatever equipment they have – did not need to be “improved.” This overproduced starfucking exercise is not actually better than the real thing.
As for your other allegations, you obviously don’t know me, or much in general. And “playwritght” is wrong no matter how virtuous the cause. If you’re defending high production values, defend that.
#1: I’m going à la carte with this.
#2: joeclark, I’m on side with your remark about the pull/sway/impact a self-made, home video can exact on a queer kid, and I would concur that I’d rather be hearing “it gets better” from someone who is as ordinary as I am and not extraordinary the way a privileged public figure (privileged by virtue of publicity and a budget to look sharp on screen) is. Beyond that point, the self-plug was slightly out of context here and falls short of contributing to the premise of why there is this “It gets better” campaign. Mentioning the problematic myths on income disparities between heteronormative and homonormative populations/peer groups is not germane in this particular discussion.
#3: I tend not to think too highly of Dan Savage/Savage Love, but as with my remark about income myths, that’s not really important to this discussion. I am not saying, but I am just saying.
#4: For some flavours of queer, it doesn’t always get better. It actually does get worse, but it’s not as if this is going to be lauded (much less admitted) by people in video clips. Head down to Homewood Avenue sometime after dusk and then come back with “it gets better” as one gets older. That’s why this campaign, as well-intentioned as it might present itself, is limited at best and, at worst, a catalyst for twisting the already-inserted blade shoved inside one’s proverbial chest for the most vulnerable, most neglected queer populations.
#5: Where it got better for me was when someone with whom I could relate as an equal peer lived by example and did so with strength, dignity, and humility. Over time, it adds up. That’s what resonated most when I stepped out of the closet in high school and kept giving me strength at each big step (such as telling your parents). The alternative was television — usually highly public figures who were too abstract and removed from what was familiar to my experiences. And often too exuberant in a way afforded only by a scant few people who are disposed to be so.
It’s a grassroots project created by an affluent gay celebrity who wished he could have told a 15 year old “it gets better” before said kid hung himself. His is the first video in the channel!
The video linked above doesn’t prevent anyone else from uploading their own; it doesn’t in any way diminish the intent, message, or value of other contributions or participants; and it isn’t, by a long shot, the first “celebrity” endorsement of the project (many of which are shot on consumer-grade cameras, with the background noise and household lighting that is so vital to the message). So what is it exactly that makes you the arbiter of who gets to contribute to telling kids not to kill themselves? Other than your twisted notion that this video (with its 98.9% “Like” rating) somehow infringes on your (unpublished) research project, why do you care?
(Worth noting: This “It Gets Better Canada” isn’t even listed in Dan Savage’s channel.)
Oh, and “bonus”: Rick Mercer (you know, the closet case, because that’s your business) shot this “it gets better” video back in 2007.
“I am almost finished my half-year-long research project on gay and lesbian economics”
Stop spamming Torontoist. This is not the venue to showcase your completely unrelated personal projects.
#2: Why do we have to choose? The vast majority of videos aren’t from celebrities or other people of note, they’re from regular average people. You have to go out of your way to find them in the channel.
But go to the channel and take note of which videos have the most views. Anything in the high 5 digits, or 6 digits or more: they’re all from celebrities or other public figures, or the staff/members of a high profile organization. So either these people/groups have much more reach than Jenny Regular or Tony Average, which benefits the project as a whole, or people want to hear what they have to say more than Jenny or Tony – all variations on the same message – which proves their value as contributors.
#4: It sounds like you’re criticizing the project for not applying to absolutely everyone who is gay, or not being specific enough. It Gets Better For Some But Not All isn’t an inspiring message, and might even increase the suicide count. Which would you prefer?
#5: “…usually highly public figures who were too abstract and removed from what was familiar to my experiences.” If only some highly public gay figures, who had those same experiences, would step forward and speak to the kids…
We’re supposed to be telling despairing kids their entire lives get better, not that their houses and interior-design sense and bank accounts do. This video’s high production values and settings made money an issue. “Normativity” ain’t got nothing to do with it; if you won’t talk like an academic, I won’t curse like a sailor.
accozzaglia, let’s take a walk through Seaton Village sometime so I can show you Ann-Marie MacDonald’s corner lot.
#2: Only in that I concurred with part of joeclark’s argument — not all of it. As to the meat of your point, clusters of videos due to viewership, tags, and the like tend to make it so that ordinary people find one another on places like YT. There might be exceptions, but more often than not, there seems to be more than just “it gets better” coming from similar peers elsewhere: there is a running dialogue with video blog postings responding to video blog postings. There is a kind of public dialogue between the out and not-so-out in that space which sort of underscores that aside from being out, there’s nothing terribly unusual about the people able to do so safely.
I say it’s not so much a choice than it is a reasonable case that one feels more like a platitude than the other might in the eyes of someone enduring a crisis of coming out or being out in hostile environs. Sure, for the famous, it gets better, if . . . [any number of limiters can be appended here, starting with appearances, etc.] As to the 5- and 6-figure viewings, part of this is also a function of non-queer audiences watching viral videos. If anything, those videos are geared more for non-vulnerable parties and are prepared as approachable — approachable enough that such a clip could easily end up on Oprah or similar.
#4: I am selectively criticizing, yes. Pre-Web 2.0, I wouldn’t be able to make the same argument. The improved accessibility of self-publishing tools like YT have sort of upended that old model that one gets seen if one is already known to popular culture. But because there is that option to self-publish — and for that to be spread easily from viewer recommendation to viewer — it becomes even more the case that the high-profile videos suggest an inclusive pragmatism, not something which for (enough) queer youth ends up being an unhelpful platitude that ends up being impossible untrue to their own life path as a queer person.
#5: Sadly, don’t count on it.
I would step up to a more general, overarching case and note that the high production values and settings made it more about class and access to power, not just money. This is what resonates more closely to home when someone looks to a video and wonders if there’s really anyone whose experiences really are like their own — not something verging on a grand narrative of sorts.
As to my academic wonk: but I enjoy it when you swear like a sailor! :)
As to a jaunt through Seaton Village — a thruway between two areas I visit a lot of friends (usually cutting across on Barton or Olive) — sure. I’m not sure why or what she has to do with this, but you’re on.
Let me set aside for the moment the bullshit claim that I am “promoting” my “own project,” as though I had a rival It Gets Better I was trying to shill.
Nonetheless: The gay insistence on making everything as beautiful as possible, on maxing everything out, that much too much is never too much, vitiates the actual legitimate format of It Gets Better, which, I repeat, is people speaking truth to Webcam. That’s a feature, not a bug, but try telling that to the raft of interior decorators involved in this project. Couldn’t they just have accepted the project as shabby-chic?
Blog posts aren’t newspaper articles, Twitter updates aren’t blog posts, and 12-minute professional videos aren’t It Gets Better posts.
Again: Wouldn’t a dozen 90-second videos from individuals have worked better?
“Wouldn’t a dozen 90-second videos from individuals have worked better?”
Piece of advice:
– It’s better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness
That being said, I can’t wait to see what you’ll organize in your own campaign Joe Clark! Then I will say: “Good on you for doing something and not just sitting idle on the internet”. The reality is your armchair will just get ruined from all your fingernail scratching.
So, so little you know . . .
Response: Yes.
I think it was more rek making that cranky assertion about your income disparity research. I did find its mention completely out of context for It Gets Better, but beyond that, I didn’t really have much of an opinion. Your final findings will be useful — in proper context.
“Truth to Webcam” is what I was iterating as well. What these professionalized clips are is a sanitization of variety and practical realities. It is partly why the campaign, in a top-down context as A-list queers put themselves in front of dedicated video cameras and good lighting, is one I can’t get behind unless the testimonies are coming from ordinary people — which for most people means “accessible, shared experiences.”
Otherwise, I concur with you on the rest of that, up and to the nitpick that “12-minute professional videos aren’t It Gets Better posts,” which must be new or something. I never knew there was such a broad web dialogue on that point to conclude that the former isn’t the latter. ;)
Enlighten me than. Otherwise I have no choice but to dismiss your comment as trolling.
I’m fully aware of Joe Clark, so I’d be very open to you telling me something new.
For the record, I don’t agree with either one of you (not surprising I know, but let’s be transparent about our posts, at the very least).
You’re adept at branding others “troll” the moment you are challenged. Just a point of observation, really.
In short, there are other approaches to improving the path for successive dykes, gays, and queers after our time — some approaches more visible and some more distinguished than others. Like joeclark, one great approach is peer-reviewed research and publishing those findings. Another approach is front-line activism, such as marching. Another still is behind-the-scenes activism, such as facilitating others in their efforts. Another yet still is nudging change through jurisprudence, such as changing law in court to, for instance, bring the marriage question to the table. That’s how Canada got its start to legalizing marriage for everyone.
If you want to know one of several approaches that I have personally taken, then I can do that. It will require your buying dinner and first round and an interest to hear some really interesting stuff. This here is neither the place nor setting for it. You’re welcome to decline that, too, but please do so without flinging the word “troll” around. Thanks.
The troll comment was specific to your drive by answer. I do overuse the word, I agree, but in this instance I had to call you out on it ;)
Another approach is to have visible celebrity endorsement (jus saying). A proven methodology at that.
This campaign isn’t about legalizing marriage, or changing laws. It’s a response campaign. There are countless volunteers and people already involved in ALL of the alternatives you both present. I just don’t see how that equates to: This was stupid because it should be been done like a, b or c.
All I get from both of your comments is this:
I (personally) don’t respond to celebrities telling me anything.
I (personally) don’t even listen to anything that doesn’t include my EXACT experiences in life.
I (personally) think everyone in the world is like me (personally).
I (personally) think you should read my thesis.
To which, I’d respond: I (personally) don’t think either one of you know the first thing about Public Awareness Campaigns and I (personally) don’t think neither one of you are the litmus test for (the rest of) us.
Well then. Would anyone else like to step in and verify torontothegreat’s assessment?
I genuinely don’t think this was what I was saying — that is, everything he expressed underneath the “All I get from both of your comments is this” line. This being a conversation about the It Gets Better campaign using high production values (a cornerstone of centralized media) in a decentralized media world, I stand next to joeclark on this point: people willingly (and these days, easily) find people like themselves a lot more easily and under their own initiative than when I was coming out of the closet — way back when something like an It Gets Better campaign could only have succeeded with high production values and regular airings on television, back when media was still the near-solitary domain of central dissemination.
Decentralized, DIY media is what up and coming generations are relating to most. Call it the rise of the YouTube Generations. This does matter when getting out an important message in the most effective manner: make it participatory for those most intimately invested in it.
Having so many gay kids kill themselves in such a short period of time is nothing new. The difference is the Internet and its ability to reach out to people. The purpose of the entire campaign, be it from individuals on YouTube or celebrities, is to bring awareness to two parties: gay youth contemplating suicide and the general public to rally against bullying.
Discounting the video by Canadian celebrities is foolish and immature. Having this video go out there and having this video being reported in the news raises awareness of the campaign and will, in crappy marketer terms, drive traffic to the YouTube channel. That only has a positive effect to raise awareness of the campaign, one which may give hope to these kids.
It’s completely confounding to me that anyone would suggest that telling gay youth that it will get better is a bad thing. Suggesting that the possibility that these kids will end up in the sex industry is a reason not to tell them it will get better is absolutely ridiculous. You don’t see parents telling their teenage daughters “well, you may end up a whore, so you may as well have no hope that you’ll survive high school,” do you?
The difference for us who are not heterosexual is that we don’t have those role models to tell us it can. This video provides that.
I wish that someone had told me in the late 80s/early 90s that things would get better.
So you’re discounting the hundreds (thousands?) of videos that have already been posted on YouTube then?
No. I’m only discounting the celebrity budget productions as efficacious. On the flip-side, I’m all for seeing a twenty- or fifty-something person using their webcam to get the message out and across.
Except when that ends up being quite the case for some queer adults who aren’t permitted a place to improve or function within existing, sanctioned queer-friendly or gay spaces. With all due respect, it isn’t absolutely ridiculous — not when you have the absence of a support network, are new to a geography of escape (from abuse and harassment), are cornered by years of the previous two, are under-literate, are applying for refugee status, are outright illegal status, are now hooked on self-medication to ease the emotional pain, are not the token physical appearance for that locality (i.e., visible minority), and so on. Once the statistical numbers are broken down, some queer sub-groups are burdened with higher rates of suicide attempts and completions than others.
To say, writ large, that “it all gets better,” is (like I said yesterday) twisting the knife further for the most vulnerable groups — groups who will seldom, if ever, see someone famous whose own life experiences come anywhere close to their own.
Full-circle, letting ordinary people make their own videos and posting them to YT lets the message be taken with greater credence: “It gets better, but you should also know this, too, owing how I’ve already been there and want to make sure you avoid it if you can.”
Me as well. That which I did see back on TV in the late 80s and early 90s did more to make me want to cut myself and envision a certain end to the pain than it did to inspire a sense of confidence in the future — or myself. To have people who were totally unlike what I was experiencing or who I was as a person telling me on afternoon TV how they were just like me — when it was clear they were something else entirely — hardly helped matters. So I went it (mostly) alone until I made my way to better geographies. Even then, there were barriers, but suddenly they were at least partly surmountable obstacles rather than utterly insurmountable.
So I hear you, canuck1975.
Modern media includes YouTube. YouTube is hardly a replacement for other outlets. Celebrity is still a strong endorsement, this is why people like “The Situation” can be paid thousands of dollars to show up at clubs (I can give you hundreds of examples of how celebrity endorsement WORKS). Your comments about both subjects are warped and extremely insular.
It’s great that Joe Clark and yourself are talking about community and exclusion. Especially considering you’re agreeing with the poster boy of community exclusion. If such comments were true, (which they aren’t), how do exclusionary (for the sake of insult) comments like this “help” your community and “support network”?
At the end of the day, have the debate, it’s yours! Live with the fact that while you may not respond to this high production value and celebrity endorsement a certain percentage will. Not everyone is you or fits your situation. So yea, take the sacrifice in the name of the cause! If 1 kid (see I’m even being hyperbolic for the sake of agreement!) relates to this video and you feel that this particular video out of thousands is useless, I guess you can live with that 1 kid not getting the message that they so crave to hear.
Sacrifice in the name of is just a wonderful way to think! Very military of you! Perhaps the rest of us are too bleeding heart and require leaders like you to lead us to the promised land.
So, so little you know… I know Canuck1975, and this comment is actually funny to me. Unlike you however, I won’t speak for him. Just realize there is a massive amount of irony and ignorance in your reply to him.
:O
OK. So what about you, High and Mighty? Since whatever I advance here appears to be farcical to you, and joeclark, who expressed another world view separate from my own, is apparently a kind of nemesis of yours reaching back to — re-checking that link you dropped — almost three years ago (thanks, I guess, for the back story?), should we just go ahead and defer to your wisdom and hear out your experiences which have endowed you with what is evidently the last word of authority?
On second thought, you need not feel compelled to answer for that. I don’t really wish to know any longer. This stopped being a general discussion the moment you took (seemingly personal) umbrage with what either of us challenged in your argument. We may agree to disagree, and that’s fine with me — even if it’s not fine with you. I conclude that because it’s evident I cannot have a dispassionate, even intellectual discussion with you or hear any thought-provoking thoughts in your remarks — which has no bearing on your giftedness or otherwise. I’m just wasting my time with you when you lash out like that.
Have a good weekend, torontothegreat. Sorry I’m shutting this down between us.
If your colleague torontothegreat was correct in that there was irony and ignorance in my reply to you yesterday — offensive or otherwise — I apologize to you forthwith. All the best.
My coverage of the election has pretty much consisted of this website… Never even knew he had a son (the adoption story), or heard about the homophobic ads… mind you I was also not in Canada for the 2 weeks prior to the election.
After re-reading this thread, I think this discussion ended at yourself and rek.
Don’t mistake a good memory as a grudge. A bullying comment about sexual orientation is completely relavent to this discussion. For myself, it would be the deal-breaker to take anyone seriously who has openly participated in this type of behaviour. Especially, in a comment thread attached to the story above. I guess we agree to disagree here too.
I’m not even sure what would offend you so much about my reply, that you’d feel the need to get all Freudian on me for 2 paragraphs. Anyways, enjoy your weekend too.
Why not take it from the horse’s mouth?
It Gets Better organizer/interior designer Tommy Smythe, whom you may know as Sarah Richardson’s sassy gay assistant (“design sidekick”) on various TV shows, said this on The Agenda, 2010.11.04 (≈13:56, emphasis added): “We had an agenda to deliver the message from LGBT people – people who had a profile, who are able to be out gay and lesbian and transgender people in the world. For some of us in many countries around the world in terms of our jobs, and nobody can hurt us. And in many cases we’re actually celebrated personalities and beloved because of who we are. And we present and LGBT life that is livable and happy and beyond better than it was in high school.” (For the actors in the video at least, Smythe here is talking about the the pampered elite Private Eye calls “luvvies.”)
Smythe again, ≈29:39, emphasis again added: Less than a month after talking about it on Facebook, “we had a polished finished film. And our long-reach agenda has always been to re-edit the film – we have ten hours of footage that’s all incredible, stories from the LGBT community. What we want to do is re-edit it into a half-hour format to be taken by the people who participated in the video into the schools to start conversations” – surely “polish their brand image” – “and be used as a teaching tool. That’s why it’s so produced, and that’s why we targeted people who had a profile and had a message to say.”
And as Antonia Zerbisias pointed out, the project was launched not online but at a gala at the Carlu. Not only are the creators approaching this as a lump of coal to be turned into a diamond, they seem to view it through the prisms of “fundraiser” and “celebrity telethon.”
Again: Where’s the grassroots in all this? Effaced by a gay mafia that sees YouTube videos by average people as a problem to be solved rather than a medium to be used?
I take it this means you’re also discounting the potential impact of high profile politicians, like the President, since he’s not “grass roots,” eh? Is Obama one of those cultural elites in the gay mafia too, or does he get a pass since he used YouTube as his medium (which, you know, these people did too)?
You believe that hoary old platitude? What is this, Christopher Closeup? That platitude may be true, but I’ll say this: It is also better to truly empathize with others than to just put your experience above them. And that’s what Dan Savage has done.
He’s discounting it because the whole project’s completely bogus, and everybody knows it-eveybody with a lick of sense more than the celebrities and Dan Savage himself. Here’s a set of good reasons why the whole project’s bogus:
Why I don’t like Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project as a response to bullying
* Same sentance
* Stops listening
And then in each one of your numbered replies (+3) you lump everyone together. Genius!
Not mine-the original blogger’s, whose name is Femmephane (who I forgot to mention in the original post, sorry.)
My “cranky assertion about [his] income disparity research”? What assertion? It was a comment on the mental gymnastics Joe was doing to change the topic (a video about teen suicide) to be about him and his project. I said nothing about the linked-to (“plug”) research itself.
“The gay insistence…”
Wow.
Still waiting for your It Gets Better Project Curator credentials, Joe…
“The gay insistence…”
Wow.
Still waiting for your It Gets Better Project Curator credentials, Joe…
Fair enough. “Asserting a comment” was the long-form of what I probably should have written, but point taken. I think we both concur that joeclark’s reference to his own research was not germane to this discussion.
While flawed in some minor respects, that was refreshing to read.
You are once again criticizing the campaign for not being inclusive of absolutely every queer person on the planet. It wasn’t meant to be, and it doesn’t have to be. It was never intended to reach these drug-addicted queer immigrant prostitutes you seem to think spend their days surfing YouTube for teen outreach videos. (You are free to start your own project.)
And I agree, to an extent, with torontothegreat’s reading of your posts. You may not identify with any celebrity of any stripe, but the vast majority of people this project is designed to reach are celebrity-aware. And I dare say, hungry for out gay celebrity rolemodels. Not everyone between the ages of 12 and 18 – regardless of sexual orientation – is a hyper-aware counter-culture independent, immune to the pull of celebrity status, no matter how much you wish to project yourself onto this age group.
You’re right. I am. If I don’t feel included as a queer person by this campaign, then I’m positive there are quite a many others who do not, either. I don’t see why it’s not problematic that some queers are excluded by this navel-gazey campaign. I’m calling a spade a spade here. It’s fine if there’s a spade in the mix, but at least acknowledge it rather than bury it.
This campaign buries it. We could argue until the CN Tower crumbles into dust, but these are how the optics come across to my me and my own life experiences. This take may not be congruent with yours, but they are just as valid.
I’m not saying there aren’t inherent flaws in the idea, trust me, I’m not a fan of Dan Savage anymore, but it’s doing a lot more positive work than negative, and for that, I’m grateful.
Anyone who isn’t needs to examine their priorities and decide if reaching out to people, regardless of the means, is going to have a positive impact on lives. Period.
I’d say the same about the It Gets Better program… and celebrities participating in it. ;)
Fair enough. We’re just not going to be on side together with this campaign.
I suspect “it gets better” will become “it got forgotten” in ways that other public-service campaigns tend to stick. It is an online meme of later 2010. I question its presence or positive effect by 2011. :P
“To have people who were totally unlike what I was experiencing or who I was as a person telling me on afternoon TV how they were just like me — when it was clear they were something else entirely — hardly helped matters.”
This is the part of your reaction to the video, iterated at least 3 times now, I just do not understand. Here we have successful gay men and women of varying celebrity status, relating to teenagers the difficulties they encountered when they too were teenagers; the abusive parents, the school bullying, the self-doubt, depression, etc., they had in common with their target audience. No, Sally Teenager isn’t a television personality or Olympian or whatever, but someday she could be. If, if, she doesn’t let her smack-happy mom, or the Anti-Dyke Cheer Squad, or her own dark thoughts, drive her to suicide first.
So why do you utterly dismiss the value of this sort of testimony?
Because, rex, if I was fifteen right now — given the experiences I had amassed by the time I had actually reached fifteen — and I saw this campaign on TV trying to tell me “it gets better,” then I know it would have been of limited utility for what I was dealing with (omnipresent abuse at home and school as a function of being visibly queer and unable to “fake straight”) where I was dealing with it (i.e., a very conservative place far removed from acceptance, much less tolerance). Even at age eighteen when I finally came out, I’d have felt much the same way. As to when I was twelve or thirteen, I didn’t have any way to frame my experiences into words. “It gets better” would equally have meant little to me at that point.
As a rider: I did find examples of it getting better. It took until my early twenties, though. The internet probably helped on some level to facilitate this — something I didn’t have when in my teens. But these were people I came to know on a point-to-point, individual basis — not through a mouthpiece facilitated by mass media. I hope I’ve cleared that up for you.
I asked specifically about your dismissal of celebrity testimony. If you-at-age-15 can’t relate to the message at all, what does it matter who delivers it? You seem to be blurring your problems with this project in general and the individual video now.
Ahhhhhh… Noted. Thanks for clarifying that :)
That’s correct. Celebrity tends to appear when there is a mass media outlet, or absent that, a medium by which their message is heard on a potentially substantial scale. Further, there was no celebrity, then or now, from whom I could relate with my queer life experiences. If, however, I found somebody at age 15 whose experiences growing up queer resonated with me, then I would have taken notice — individual person or celebrity.
But seeing above as there was no celebrity, either then or now, the question of celebrity efficacy would be moot here just as it is moot for people for whom the present meme completely misses.
I can’t believe you fucks, nor can I believe Dave Topping allows this business to go on.
You understand this thread is itself cyberbullying?
Annnd this got rather nasty for all involved, didn’t it? Comparatively for Torontoist, I mean. Comments are now closed.