Does It Get Better?

When I was at the education conference last week, I went to the Queer Studies SIG business meeting. It was more interesting than it sounds like it should be, because the leaders of the meeting opened it by showing some It Gets Better videos, holding a panel discussion on them, and taking questions and comments from the crowd.

The panelists pointed out many problems with these videos. For instance, a couple of people noted that the videos tend to have a white, middle-class perspective, and a higher representation of cis gay men. White middle-class cis gay men are great, of course, but they make a disproportionate number of the videos. I'm not sure why, exactly. Thoughts?

There are also some discursive contradictions in the videos. One, for instance, features two queer teachers who have their faces covered by bandannas and wrote their message on paper. They were afraid of losing their jobs. Is that a sign that it gets better?

I think we need to ask whether the bullying goes away once we leave high school. It's quite true that leaving the nightmare that is high school can make the bullies a less immediate presence in a person's life. But the video I link to above of the two teachers is a good example of how bullying can still work to keep people closeted or confined even after they become legal adults.

The anti-gay bullying is really easy to see. Check out Kobe Bryant, Exodus International, plenty of government officials and public figures, churches (and not just Westboro), the National Organization for Marriage, the Republican Party, fast food restaurants, big box retailers, and so on.

These people and institutions make it easier for kids to bully each other. Especially in the case of Kobe Bryant, whom many kids who like athletics and perhaps aspire to being professional athletes themselves have cause to admire. But they also are defending the rights of homophobes to beat up on queer people at the ballot box and in public, going to a lot of effort to make queer spaces harder to create.

So anyway, I'm not convinced that it gets better. I think people get stronger, and they, I hope, develop some ability to fight back. One of the criticisms leveled at the videos by the people on the panel was that it's much easier to feel that it gets better if you have some money and aren't facing the prospects of joblessness and an inability to have basic needs met. With such a high percentage of homeless youth identifying as LGBTQ, basic needs are an issue. Life and death, folks.

I don't want to imply that everything is all doom and gloom all the time forever. I think there are ways in which we can improve our lives as we gain autonomy. Having resources and access to education certainly helps with that. And seeing the ways in which the queer community can organize to support each other is powerful. I saw a lot of that at the education conference, and it was a fantastic experience. I think it's probably easier to find other people who accept you once you're out of the psychological experiment that is K-12 schooling.

So, what are we going to do about the problems of bullying from legislators, athletic superstars, and international religious organizations? A big question, I know, but when a person's identity is constantly under assault by legions of the world's jerks, it's clear that bullying hasn't quit. It's the same phenomenon, but as adults, we have more agency.