Trans/plant/portation

I was reminded yesterday that we’ve just passed the one-year anniversary of the It Gets Better project, that anti-bullying campaign from Dan Savage and his partner, Terry Miller. On September 21, 2010, they made their now-iconic YouTube video telling queer youth that they should hang in there, because someday things will be better than they seem right now. Dan and Terry had been catapulted into action, they said, because of the recent media attention on a number of gay suicides, all of which, the narrative went, came in context of those kids being bullied and harassed by their peers. That Dan and Terry were really only speaking about young gay men and not the gamut of youth on the LGBT spectrum, and that the media lavished its attention only on recent white gay men’s deaths was not a topic Dan wished to discuss, though I and many others attempted to do so. Read More…

I was once a Savage Love reader, sure. I’ve known the definition of GGG pretty much since Dan Savage invented it, although I never realized until tonight that he came up with it and all of his acronyms just to save type space. Which makes sense, and is something that may fade away as newspapers trudge toward extinction. Almost a decade ago I read Skipping Towards Gommorah, and if there were big problems on the bigotry front, I missed them. And I laughed when Savage invented a new definition for “santorum” so much, I worked it into one of my novels-in-progress.

However, there came a day—I have no idea when—that I read his column and flinched. In giving some answer to a reader’s question he was too harsh, used a dose too strong of mockery, enacted an assumption that led inextricably to a position that I couldn’t abide. Like snowflakes at the leading edge of a cloud these added up over time, and eventually I stopped reading his column, and didn’t bother to spend time reading whatever was his next book. Read More…

Photo courtesy of See-ming Lee

I wrote last week about the sudden newsworthiness of LGBT youth suicide. Certainly it’s been around for decades, and there have been and are people who study these people and these moments, but collectively, their work, analysis, and recommendations haven’t made it to center stage. So it frustrates me to see personalities emerge from the woodwork to tout their initiatives, as if we’re seeing a meteoric rise in suicide, or as if the world merely needed their guidance to avert the tide of anguish. Read More…