A frustrating performance by Dan Savage
Below is a guest post by Ben Dueholm, who wrote the Century's 2011 cover story on Dan Savage. A version of this post appeared on Dueholm's blog, The Private Intellectual. --Ed.
On Sunday night I went to hear Dan Savage speak about the It Gets Better Project. The last time I saw him was 2003, if memory serves, in front of a crowd of perhaps a hundred. At one point Savage took a break from promoting his new book Skipping Toward Gomorrah to refer his audience to the now-famous New Republic cover story "The Liberal Case for War" (against Iraq).
It was a good talk, funny and engaging, and it made a striking contrast with his Sunday appearance. This time, the room was packed with well over a thousand people from all over the region. The heart of his talk was something much graver than his old book's subtitle ("The seven deadly sins and the pursuit of happiness in America"), though not graver than the matter of invading Iraq. It was about how he came to start, with his husband Terry, the viral-video campaign to reach out to hurting, bullied and suicidal LGBT kids with the message that their adult lives will be worth living. The column in which he publicly launched the project, in response to the suicide and subsequent post-mortem cyberbullying of a child in Indiana, still makes for very moving reading.
By his own account, Savage expected maybe 100 videos to be added to the one he made with Terry. In fact, the YouTube channel currently hosts more than 50,000 videos from all around the world.
Savage speaks beautifully on bullying, despair and hope. His rage at the bullies and the cultures that enable them is obviously genuine, and even when he slips into demagoguery--as he does often and seemingly without thought--he does so with something that seems very much like innocence. He reports that the It Gets Better Project has touched and even saved many lives, and who would doubt it? Adolescence is hard enough without the stigma of sexual or gender nonconformity.
