Since the release of the video of President Obama contribution to Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project, there has been a bit of a brouhaha in the comments of a few of the diaries discussing the video and I think there is a bit of misunderstanding about the reservations some in the LGBT community and some allies have about the President's message. I use the word "reservations" as opposed to "problems" because I don't think anyone really has a problem with the video, except maybe right wingers who are perfectly happy with LGBT's killing themselves.
On the content and sentiment of the video, even very harsh critics of the administration and the President have expressed gratitude for him speaking out on the issue of the suicide problem among LGBT youth. The negative sentiments being expressed in the comments of the aforementioned diaries are not taking issue with the video's content and sentiment per se! Let us be absolutely crystal clear on that. To understand why negative sentiments are being expressed at all, we have to look deeper at the context of the video's release and how some people are abusing its existence for political reasons.
But first, I think it is necessary to provide some background into the line of thinking of some of the LGBT on this. I'm qualifying that with some because I'm not going to presume to speak for most and certainly not all of the LGBT community, but I do hope to hit on the themes of the comments that are mistakingly being construed as attacks on the video or attacks on the President for the video. I've spent a couple of days trying to marshal my thought and organize them as best I can. In the intervening time, a couple more diaries on the subject appeared requiring even further refinement. I realize this may be long for a lot of people and that will discourage many from reading the whole thing, but it is important to understand the root of divergence of reactions over the video. Again I apologize for the length.
Recognition of one's sexuality and differentness and the affect on institutional memory
All of this of course starts here, at the point in our development of a human being where the qualities associated with our sexuality are manifested and become visible to others. I use "qualities associated with our sexuality" in place of sexuality itself because I don't think one has to reach the point of sexual awareness for the expression of one's self to give rise to the self awareness that one is profoundly different in ways ultimately manifest in one's sexual orientation.
I speak of this from my own experiences of knowing I was very different from other boys from the age of about 4 or 5. I didn't know what sex was or what being gay was, but I had a self-awareness that I was different. I do think the age this realization occurs can vary profoundly. I've known a couple of gay people who claim to have not come to this realization until they were teens. The point is, LGBT's reach a point where we know we are somehow different from most other people. It is something we discover in ourselves. And for many, the chilling part of this is the understanding that being that "somehow different" openly is dangerous, that is that differentness is acknowledged openly, we risk losing everything.
Because sexual orientation is something we discover in ourselves at some point, usually before adulthood, it should be apparent that the LGBT community is profoundly different than other minority communities, lacking a sort of multigenerational institutional memory passed down by being part of that community from birth. The impact of this cannot be understated. While less true today than probably 20 years ago, most African-Americans growing-up know and are taught about the struggle of their forebears for Civil Rights. Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Thurgood Marshall, Dr. King. Knowledge of people such as these by African Americans became more spiritual and cultural than merely academic. Being a part of the community wasn't taught, it was experienced. Each generation was able to build on the previous, to serve, directly, as the heirs of the legacy of the prior. The same can be said of the Hispanic community and even to a certain extent of the women's rights movement, passed from mother to daughter.
The LGBT community lacks this continuity that serves as a means of aggregating influence and clout. Each generation of the LGBT community must be taught in a much more academic sense, the history of gay rights because growing up, LGBT history was something to shield children from, not openly embrace. It takes LGBT people going out and finding other LGBT people of prior generations for this transmission of institutional memory to occur.
LGBT acceptance by family...or lack thereof
The other side of this coin, that we don't grow up in an LGBT community, is the potentiality of rejection by the most basic unit of the community into which we are born, our family. Whereas an African American child within a family has family members with similar or even shared experiences, this is not necessarily true of the LGBT child.
Growing up, when a black child is confronted with racial bigotry and discrimination and needs a sympathetic shoulder to cry on or sympathetic voice to give them support and comfort, the child generally has a parent they can turn to. Most black children have at least one black parent, a parent that likely suffered from the same bigotry and discrimination, if not worse. Likewise, a Jewish child confronted with religious bigotry and discrimination generally has a Jewish parent to whom they can turn to. For the gay child however, this generally is not the case. A gay child generally does not have a gay parent that has had similar experiences facing the same type of bigotry and discrimination. Indeed, the gay child may well face bigotry and discrimination from their own parents if their sexuality is revealed.
I've posted that paraphrase of something said I think by either Ellen Degeneres or her mother Betty a few times here, even using it as a prologue to a diary now nearly three years old that is unfortunately still relevant to the discussion of the problem of suicide among LGBTQ youth.
The only minor issue I had with President Obama's video was his statement that
Whether it’s your parents, teachers, folks that you know care about you just the way you are. You’ve got to reach out to them, don’t feel like you’re in this by yourself.
This is not always true and does a disservice to the suicide issue at hand. Indeed it lies at the heart of the problem. We'd all like to think that parents do and always will love their children just as they are, but painful reality teaches us that is not always true. Based on surveys of LGBT youth compiled several years ago, we know that half of all LGBT youth that come out to their parents experience a negative reaction. A quarter are kicked out of their home at least temporarily. A third of LGBT youth that are homeless or in the care of social services were subjected to an act of violence when they came out. A staggering 20-40% of the homeless and runaway youth in this country identified as LGBTQ. Studies show LGBTQ youth are up to 14 times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight cohorts and account for up to 30% of all suicides by 15-to-24 year-olds.
Worse yet, many parents when confronted with having a gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or questioning child turn to their church and "reparative therapy" in hopes of "fixing" their child as though the self discovery by the child that they are gay, that they are different, is a choice that can be trained or prayed away.
We have come across this despicable movement before in relation to Obama with the concert then Senator Obama held to attract black evangelicals to his campaign, a concert headlines and emceed by Donnie McClurkin, an "ex-gay" himself that holds himself out as a success story of the "ex-gay" movement. While Obama tried to distance himself from McClurkin's beliefs, it moved forward with him leading the concert. On the stage, McClurkin declared to the crowd "God delivered me from homosexuality." That alone was bad enough, but the Obama campaign showed its cruel tone deafness after the concert when it distributed a press statement declaring in all caps:
MCCLURKIN DOES NOT WANT TO CHANGE GAYS AND LESBIANS WHO ARE HAPPY WITH THEIR LIVES.
As though it were somehow alright for McClurkin to target unhappy gays and lesbians for reparative therapy universally condemned by the medical community (American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Psychological Association, American Medical Association, National Association of School Psychologists, National Association of Social Workers, etc).
It is rejection and attempts to "repair" GLBT youth that drive many to runaway or to become homeless through being kicked out. As I emphasize above, 20-40% of youth living out on the streets are LGBTQ. As I wrote in my diary three years ago:
Life on the street for these children is understandably difficult.
According to the NGLTF Report, homeless LGBT youth are three times more likely to participate in survival sex than their heterosexual peers. Survival sex is defined as "exchanging sex for anything needed, including money, food, clothes, a place to stay or drugs."
Others in the field echo this concern. "Our gay homeless youth tend to engage in drug use and prostitution more, they tend to experience rape and sexual violence more. They’re just the invisible kids. They contract AIDS more than the heterosexual homeless population. They’re at a higher risk of suicide," says Melissa Larsen, Homeless Youth Policy Coordinator at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center of Utah.
And many shelters do not offer gay children the support or protection they need. The NGLTF cited the story of Dilo Cintron who recounted how the "staff at one [New York City] shelter he used were so unsympathetic that they once walked by without intervening while he was being assaulted in a laundry room." The report also cite other egregious treatment of gay youth by the staff of other shelters:
At one residential placement facility in Michigan, LGBT teens, or those suspected of being LGBT, were forced to wear orange jumpsuits to alert staff and other residents. At another transitional housing placement, staff removed the bedroom door of an out gay youth, supposedly to ward off any homosexual behavior. The second bed in the room was left empty and other residents were warned that if they misbehaved they would have to share the room with the “gay kid.”
Clearly not all LGBTQ youth are or should feel safe "reach[ing] out to" their parents. If you are still skeptical or think that this is being overblown, please consult the institutional memory of this very blog, and examine the story of The Nephew, his outing and rejection by his parents. While experiences like this are not frequent among gays, they are most assuredly not rare.
Life at school and in the community as "the gay kid"
Of course not all parents reject their gay child. Thankfully, awareness and acceptance are growing and hopefully fewer parents are taking such an appalling view of their own child. Is that enough? Is that reason enough for a LGBTQ child to not feel intensely lonely, isolated and unloved?
Sadly, as we have seen from several of the suicides publicized over the last few weeks, the answer is no. The need for acceptance among one's peers often eludes LGBT children. One survey of such children by GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) found 90% has been bullied in the last year. NINETY PERCENT. Two-thirds reported verbal harassment, a sixth had suffered physical harassment and 8 percent had been assaulted.
Justin Aaberg was an out gay teen, accepted and loved by his family and unbeknownst to them, despite having a wide circle of friends, suffered from bullying because he was gay. This past summer, Justin, just 15 years old, took his own life.
More recently, a similar case played out in California
People were not always nice to 13-year-old Seth Walsh. Neither his valiant younger brother Shawn nor the rest of his family could protect him from what they insist was chronic teasing. Even before Seth came out as gay, family and friends say, he was perpetually picked on for his mannerisms and his style of dressing. The bullying turned Seth Walsh to suicide, one of a spate of such deaths across the U.S. in the past two weeks.
Justin Aaberg, Seth Walsh, Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown, Raymond Chase, Cody Barker, Billy Lucas, Zach Harrington, Chloe Lacey, Corey Jackson, Harrison Chase Brown, Felix Sacco, Caleb Nolt. All since July. All gone. All victims of bullying.
But this is not new. Last year, the two victims that epitomized the vulnerability of children to bullying were Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera. Both were just 11 years old when they ended their life. Back even further, in 1997, 15-year-old Robbie Kirkland, despite his family fully embracing and loving him, was driven to suicide by persistent bullying from being gay. Over Christmas break, unwilling to return to the pain he was suffering at school, Robbie ended his life. In hopes of helping others, Robbie's mother and sister have gone on to tell his story to fulfill Robbie's last wish, a piece of a poem Robbie had written first in 1994 and included in his suicide note:
I may be gone, but I hope I am not forgotten.
Remember me.
What is new is the willingness of parents who have suffered these tragedies to be open about them in hopes of preventing them in the future.
But what is lacking in the schools are the resources to deal with these issues. The bullying needs to end, but we all know that won't happen overnight. That is a problem that will take years to address and may never really be fixed. As it is addressed though, we need to develop better resources for schools and to change the attitude of administrators towards bullying in schools. Schools staff need training in how to identify bullying and catch the warning signs. Discipline procedures need to place a greater emphasis on protecting the victim and addressing any lingering psychological effects of bullying.
One step in doing this means banning discrimination by the school itself on the basis of sexual orientation. We already have laws in place protecting students from discrimination based on their race, ethnicity, religion, sex, national origin, etc. That does not however extend to their sexual orientation or their gender identity or expression. Children who are being bullied for being gay need a tool to exact compliance from their schools. Schools and school officials face little to no chance of liability for permitting bullying that would be address if it were based on any other basis. Some lawsuits have managed to shoehorn their way into court using Title IX by showing the school's reaction to the bullying would have been different if the victim has been of the opposite sex (e.g. in one case a boy was mock raped in the school gym, an incident school officials acknowledged they would have addressed if the victim had been female, but their reaction for the male victim was "boys will be boys"), but this is a poor proxy in many cases of LGBT bullying.
What many schools fear is that if they speak out against bullying based on sexual orientation and gender identity, they will face a community backlash. In a diary regarding the dismissal and rehiring of a gay student teacher in Oregon's Beaverton school district, one commenter noted that schools tend to be the most socially conservative (with a little "c") public institutions in a community because the most socially conservative community members are the ones that tend to yell the loudest when schools try to do anything progressive. As the child of a retired school principal and a retired school teacher, I must concur. Schools will take the path least likely to lead to a lawsuit. Discipline or kick a student out for bullying is more likely to lead to one as victims of bullying rarely sue. When they do, it is often because they get help from outside the local community from organizations like the ACLU, Lambda Legal or the National Center for Lesbian Rights because local counsel is either 1) ill educated or emerging law in the field or 2) reluctant to sue their local district further dividing the community.
The community backlash can also include public displays of anti-gay hate at the school board meeting or city council meeting. One of the recent suicides, that of Zach Harrington in Norman, OK, occurred after just such a meeting. The level of vitriol spewed by fervent anti-gay protesters can profoundly affect a LGBT person's perception of the community.
In smaller communities, this often leads to gay flight to larger, urban areas because gay people often do not feel safe after such displays. In many places, this has lead to a sort of gay ghettoization, the formation of pockets where LGBT's make up a significant portion of the population in the area. This is not necessarily any safer or even preferable in my opinion. A "gayborhood" provides one-stop shopping for gay bashers. I can't tell you how many news stories I've read of gay bashers pouncing on some unsuspecting person coming out of a gay bar in the Castro, West Hollywood, South Beach, Greenwich Village or Chelsea. Think back to the movie Milk where gays in the Castro took to carrying whistles as a means of alerting other gays of an attack.
While having a place where gays have their own community, a place where there can be a generational transfer of institutional memory, it has the additional side effect for perpetuating a lack of social progress in the areas where gay flight occur, often more rural areas. These areas will of course never be devoid of LGBT's in the same way areas became devoid of racial, ethnic and religious minorities because of the nature of sexual orientation and gender identity. But with a dearth of such individuals, who often hide their orientation in fear, it enforces an "otherness" about it, validating the more conservative view. Having out gays living in such communities is seen as a threat by more conservative forces. For a nice documentary on this, watch Out in the Silence about Oil City, PA. It tells the story of an out gay teen who faced bullying in school and an out lesbian couple that decided to do something for their community by restoring a historic theater and opening it as a community center. Along the way, they face a socially conservative backlash from some in the community, often lead by the head of the local chapter of the American Family Obsessed with Homosexuality Association.
The larger community: our states and our nation
While we tend to be more disconnected or distant to our states and our nation as a community, the affect of discrimination and hate against LGBT's at this level cannot be underscored. It is a terrible thing to live in a place where the government officially hates you even if you personally may not become the target of that government's discrimination.
Not every gay wants to serve in the military, not every lesbian will ever want to marry and utilize government benefits denied same sex couples, not every transgender person will work in a job where they may be subjected to discrimination in the workplace, not every bisexual will seek to buy a home and potentially face credit discrimination, etc. But we all feel the specter of such discrimination. To many of do have to worry, "is this the day my boss finds out I'm gay and I get fired?" There is a mental anguish that probably every LGBT lives with everyday over this. It may be quite mild for some, and harsh for others, but it is there. And it wears at you day by day.
It is this sort of mental anguish from institutionalized discrimination that was the subject of study by Kenneth and Mamie Clark studying the attitudes and perceptions about race by children. In one experiment in their research, children were given dolls to choose and play with. The dolls were identical to each other in every respect except the doll's race. They found children, including black children, preferred playing with the white dolls. In another experiment, children were asked to color a drawing of a person with the child's own skin color. The children more frequently chose a color lighter than their own skin. Interviews with the children found they associated being black with bad and white with good. The research they conducted later played an important role in American history. Both testified about their research in the school segregation case Briggs v. Elliott in the late 1940's. The Briggs case was heard by the Supreme Court in 1952, who returned it to the District Court for further proceedings. When it returned to the high court later, it was combined with four other cases from other states. You might have heard of the ruling resulting from that...Brown v Board of Education. In his opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren relied heavily on the Clark's studies and the findings of the Kansas court in the Brown trial case. The unanimous Supreme Court found the psychological affect of the discrimination a compelling argument against segregation:
To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. The effect of this separation on their educational opportunities was well stated by a finding in the Kansas case by a court which nevertheless felt compelled to rule against the Negro plaintiffs:
"Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law; for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system."10
Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. 11
Footnote 11 cites first, the Clark's study.
This affect is no less true of LGBT children today. Our society and our laws enforce a finding of heterosexist supremacy, teaching LGBT that we, as human beings, are worth less, that we are not entitled to equality and often not entitled to mere dignity. That is the world in which these suicide victims lived...and died. This affect is as much a part of the problem as bullying. It is one reason why LGBT activists want concrete, highly visible progress on our issues, not the largely insignificant, token bits that have been offered.
The order of progress and strategy of attack on discrimination
One thing that has not been discussed here much in recent months, at least not that I have seen, is a discussion of why LGBT activists are pursuing certain issues more forcefully than others. I can't definitively say why. I think we all have different perceptions and reasons for why we are attaching importance to one issue before another, but I'd like to offer my view of the landscape.
The reason why, in my opinion, getting rid of Don't Ask, Don't Tell has and should take minor precedence over say the Employment Non-Discrimination Act is the fact in DADT it is the government doing the discriminating. As I wrote above, it is a terrible thing to have one's own government hate you. Dealing with private individuals and corporations discriminating is one thing, but the government doing it is very different. It is more symbolic. Overturning it is more symbolic. It is also a gatekeeper issue. Open that gate and it makes wins on other issues much easier. It is kind of hard for government to claim the moral authority to stamp out job discrimination against LGBT's with a law like ENDA if government itself is practicing sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination.
DADT also opens a line of attack to other issues. As Lt Dan Choi has mentioned in several speeches, there are many services available to the spouses of soldiers. When a soldier dies, his or her spouse receives the flag that was draped over their spouse's coffin, presented by an officer on bended knee with the words "On behalf of a grateful nation." It is unconscionable that such an absolution would be denied the loved one of a gay or lesbian soldier. The mere fact that that soldier, in most states, could not marry that partner is symbolism enough to attack marriage laws, but the denial of federal benefits as well would put the government in an untenable position. Ending DADT and allowing open service doesn't just get us ENDA and make ENDA easier, it gets us things like the Domestic Partners Benefits and Obligations Act and strengthens the case against DOMA. With DADT and ENDA out of the way, other issues important to the LGBT community can come forward. People only have so much RAM with which to process and keep track of the major issues of a movement. With the LGBT civil rights movement, we have had so little progress for so long in terms of legislation, by necessity, we've pushed the limits of what people can handle and understand at once having AIDS, Hate Crimes, DADT, ENDA and DOMA all at the forefront. But waiting in the wings are other issues like safe schools, student non-discrimination, youth homelessness and runaway issues, immigration equality for bi-national LGBT couples, housing non-discrimination, etc.
While social progress has been made over the same time frame, the law has not kept pace and has given rise to a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness within the LGBT community. Children pick up on that. They understand and see far more than we give them credit for, which is why the It Gets Better project has been important, to let them know there are small things that are not as easily perceived that are improving. But that doesn't absolve politicians from their duty to address the larger issues.
Lines of communication and a path forward
For years we have seen Congress punt on LGBT legislation. In 1996, as part of a deal to secure a vote on passing DOMA, it was agreed in the Senate to permit a vote on ENDA. While DOMA passed overwhelming with just 14 nays, ENDA failed on a 49-50 vote, the decisive missing vote being that of Arkansas Senator David Pryor who had left Washington to be with son, current Arkansas Senate Mark Pryor, for an emergency surgery. In case you have forgotten, in 1996, the Senate was in Republicans hands by a 53-47 margin. Fourteen years later, with a swing of +12 votes in the Democratic caucus (at one point at +13), we can't even get a vote on the measure. That is just one example of legislation an overwhelming majority of Americans now support that is D.O.A. because of a lack of leadership in Washington and an unwillingness to do anything that is even marginally pro-LGBT.
In this struggle, especially over the last two years, there has been a profound lack of communication between Democratic leaders and the LGBT community. While some of that blame can be laid at the feet of the LGBT community, the lion's share lay with the party and administration. They won't talk to us. They anointed the Human Rights Campaign as the sole representatives to speak for us and for them to speak to despite HRC having an increasing image problem in the LGBT community. They are seen as being more interested in access than action, more favorable towards glitzy galas than grassroots action, more interested in their own sustenance than real progress. Too often HRC has been nothing more than a LGBT front group for the DNC having their orders dictated to them, rather than HRC dictating to the DNC as to what the LGBT community wants and expects.
Just to give two examples, in 2009 Jarrod Chlapowski worked on a project for HRC to highlight LGBT veterans. The project was given a $20,000 budget to create a five city tour. Chlapowski was so effective and frugal with the funds, he stretched it to cover 20 cities. And the campaign was starting to be effective...perhaps too effective for HRC's liking. In an article in Congress.org about the rift between organizations in the LGBT community, Chlapowski spoke about his impressions of HRC:
"HRC was very reticent about adding extra tour stops even though I stayed close to budget," Chlapowski said.
He and Servicemembers United's founder, Alex Nicholson, said they continued to pressure the Human Rights Campaign to expand the grassroots efforts that fall without success.
They say that the Human Rights Campaign, which was also working to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, appeared to be waiting for a signal from the president before devoting more money to the issue.
Nicholson, who worked with Chlapowski on the Voices of Honor tour, was also at the now infamous February 1 White House meeting after the SOTU where Obama promised to work with Congress to repeal DADT. Excluded from the meeting was Aubrey Sarvis, one of the leading experts on DADT and one of the most important activists and leaders on its repeal. While controversy abounds over whether or not the White House definitively said repeal would not happen in 2010, it is clear from the meeting the White House had no intention of pushing for the repeal with any force and HRC followed the White House's lead. Nicholson, in an interview with Sirius OutQ's Michelangelo Signorile said:
I'll say, honestly, first of all, that I don't think HRC has done everything they could have to put pressure the WH. I believe there are some there who believe they have done everything they can...I think there are others who may have other agendas and professional careers and things like that to worry about. I have been begging HRC to scale up their operations on don't ask, don't tell since early last summer...Realistically, I do think there was more they could do earlier this year, and I think there was more they could do last year...I would have loved to have seen the ramping up going on a year ago. You can't build the infrastructure...in a matter of two months...That needed to happen last summer.
The White House has been unwilling to talk to other organizations or to even talk with the LGBT press. Obama has been in office for 644 days and granted 0 interviews to the LGBT press. The last interview I could find with a member of the LGBT press was an interview in April 2008 (during the primaries) with the Advocate's Kerry Eleveld. The only LGBT event the President has spoken at...HRC's annual galas dinner last year. And when the White House has hosted LGBT events, HRC officials are always high on the guest list while the non-A-list orgs are not. The only LGBT event where that was not the case was one designed specifically for state level organizations. I wrote more extensively on the messaging issue a few months back, but in an attempt at brevity I'll move on here.
This brings us to the context in which the Obama "It Gets Better" message was released. This is the first time Obama has made this sort of direct level of communication at this magnitude to the LGBT community. That is highly welcome and a much better approach to "It Gets Better" than their first attempt.
Obama did not attend this year's HRC gala, sending instead Valerie Jarrett, whose speech before the group tried to co-opt the it gets better message away from the focus on suicide prevention and apply it to the LGBT political scene.
Dan Savage created the "It Gets Better" project, but last year in a Q&A at a speech talked about the ability of the administration to effectuate progress on LGBT issues. He pointed out Obama gave Harvey Milk the Medal of Freedom posthumously and that Obama cited Milk's signature "You gotta give 'em hope" phrase in his speech at the ceremony. Of it, Savage remarked "Yeah, if you're Harvey Milk, pretty much all you can give 'em is hope. If you're President of the f***ing United States you can give something more than hope. You can give actions. You can give results." After Jarrett and the White House used the "it gets better" line in her speech to HRC to defend their poor record on LGBT issues so far, Savage was livid:
Fuck you, you pack of co-opting cowards.
Seriously. You can do a lot more than offer hope. You have the power to make it better. Right now. Suspend enforcement of DADT. Don't appeal the decision by a federal judge that declared DADT unconstitutional. Stop defending DOMA in court. Keep your promises. Make it better. And if you're not going to keep your promises or do what you can to make it better, White House, then you could at least have the simple human decency to shut the fuck up.
State-sanctioned discrimination against LGBT people legitimizes the kind of anti-gay attitudes and beliefs that lead directly to anti-gay bullying at the ballot box and anti-gay bullying in schools. You can do more. Enough with the speeches. Enough with the pretty words—particularly the lifted ones.
Fuck you.
After the President's video was released, Dan Savage was interviewed. His response to the video:
It was rightfully seen as posturing not to make things better, but to work the votes for the midterms. In a time when the LGBT community is under a sort of pall of mourning for these young lives lost and trying to get a positive message out to other young people to prevent future suicides, the maneuvering to use the phrase politically and the suggestion in at least one of the diaries that it was cause to vote for Democrats in the mid-term elections was stomach turning. It would be the LGBT equivalent of George W. Bush standing on the wreckage of the two towers, arm around the emergency worker holding the bullhorn and asking everyone for their vote in the election. The fact that the White House realized its error in this regard is to their credit. The recorded the message with Obama speaking out on the issue is welcome. We need all the help we can get on the youth suicide issue, but what we don't need is the issue being manipulated for political gain. This issue is deeply personal for many in the LGBT community because many of us know and understand exactly the feelings of hopelessness and despair these teens no doubt felt. We were in their shoes at one point and we survived and want to make sure than not just more such teens survive but that all of them do.
If you've made it all the way through this incredibly long diary, I thank you for reading. It was a lot to get off my chest and believe me I did try to pare it down, but there was just too much to say and I felt strongly the deeper context was necessary.