the power cosmic

From Savage Love:

“IT GETS BETTER: Last week, I wrote about Billy Lucas, a 15-year-old kid in Indiana who took his own life after enduring years of bullying for being gay. Billy didn’t identify as gay and may not have been gay. But the consequences of anti-gay bullying—whether the kid being harassed is gay or closeted or just different—are often the same: isolation, pain, despair, and suicide.

After last week’s column went to press, I learned about another teenager—this one openly gay—who recently took his own life. Cody J. Barker was a 17-year-old high-school student in Shiocton, Wisconsin. Cody was a cyclist and a gardener and a Lady Gaga fan who had planned to start a gay-straight student alliance at his high school this fall. “He really cared about making schools a safe place for students,” a friend of Cody’s told the Wisconsin Gazette. “That wasn’t always his own experience with school.”

Billy Lucas in Indiana, Cody Barker in Wisconsin, Justin Aaberg in Minnesota—these three boys and countless other LGBT kids have committed suicide because they couldn’t picture a future for themselves.

That’s why my boyfriend and I launched the It Gets Better Project, a slightly grand name for a YouTube channel. We made a short video about our lives—the harassment we endured in school, the full and rewarding lives we enjoy now—and invited other LGBT adults to make and upload videos about their lives. The response has been completely overwhelming: thousands of members, hundreds of thousands of views, and more than 100 videos from people all over the world sharing their stories, all in an effort to let bullied and isolated and unhappy LGBT kids know that it gets better.

There are a couple of similar and ongoing projects that deserve a shout-out: the amazing and deeply moving I’m from Driftwood (www.imfromdriftwood.com) documents “true stories by gay people all over.” Please check it out. And there’s a large archive of YouTube videos from LGBT teenagers talking about their own coming-out experiences at www.tinyurl .com/2fuwffh. And if any LGBT teenagers reading this are contemplating suicide, please visit the Trevor Project (www.thetrevorproject.org), a suicide-prevention project for gay teenagers, or call its 24-hour hotline at 866-488-7386.

And here’s a thought for people who are thinking about making videos for the It Gets Better Project: Many of the early submitted videos focused on something many gay adults have in common with gay kids—our experiences with being bullied. The pain we endured as kids should be touched on. But it would be great to see more videos that give gay young people a picture of the lives they could make for themselves if they just hang in there. LGBT kids who don’t know any LGBT adults need to see—with their own eyes—that gay adults lead happy and rewarding lives. So if you decide to make a video—and I hope that you do—don’t just share your pain. Share your joy. Give ‘em hope. Save a life. www.youtube.com/itgetsbetterproject

mail@savagelove.net”

Those are my tits, but I didn’t inhale.

Uh, ‘one day’ I’ll find someone that makes me wanna bury my face in their armpit and inhale? I’ve had that ‘one day’ about twenty times now, Dan. I hate deodorant.