Elsewhere Exists

A teenager in New Jersey jumped off the George Washington Bridge in September 2010 after his college roommate secretly streamed him having sex with another man. His name was Tyler Clementi. He was eighteen. The footage went up, the comments came in, and within days he was gone.

The It Gets Better Project appeared almost immediately—started by Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller as a direct response to a string of queer teen suicides that year. The concept was simple: adult gay and lesbian people recording themselves talking to the teenagers they used to be, telling them that the specific cruelty of high school and small towns does not define the whole of life. That elsewhere exists. That things open up.

Watching some of those early videos, I kept thinking about the distance between who you are at seventeen and who you get to become. The project’s reach spread fast, and eventually politicians and celebrities added their clips, which diluted something—once a sitting president is in your video series, it’s no longer just people in their living rooms telling hard truths. But the original impulse was real and the original videos were raw in a way that I don’t think was calculated.

What I keep returning to isn’t only the queer-specific message, though that’s what the project was built for. It’s the more general fact that the constraints of early life aren’t permanent—that the geography, the social structure, the family you’re born into are not the shape of your whole existence. Most people figure this out eventually. Some don’t get the chance.