Even here, it gets better

Terry Miller paints a dark portrait of Spokane, in one of YouTube’s most popular videos this fall, as the city where high school bullies and indifferent administrators isolated him in a gay teenager’s hell.

Miller and his partner Dan Savage, editorial director and columnist for a Seattle alternative newspaper, The Stranger, made this video after the recent series of gay suicides in the United States. They wanted to reach out to other despairing gay teens to reassure them that as they move into adulthood, they’ll find joy and hope.

The video, which launched the “It Gets Better Project,” quickly went viral. Shared through Facebook links, it has now been viewed more than 1 million times.

In the video, Miller tells of the “merciless” abuse he endured in his Spokane high school.

“People were really cruel to me,” he says. “I was bullied a lot, beat up, thrown against walls and lockers and windows. Stuffed into bathroom stalls.”

When his parents spoke up, he says school administrators told them that given the way he talked, walked and acted, there was nothing they could do.

“Honestly, things got better the day I left high school,” Miller says in the video. “I didn’t see the bullies every day. … Life instantly got better.”

Now Savage and Miller enjoy each other, both of their families, and the family they’ve created with their adopted son.

Within six days after their video was posted, Savage told the Chronicle of Philanthropy recently, another 1,000 videos were posted.

Now celebrities such as television financial adviser Suze Orman, “Project Runway’s” Tim Gunn and “Glee’s” Chris Colfer have made videos. Political figures such as President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former first lady Laura Bush added their own “It Gets Better” messages. Even Oral Roberts’ gay grandson chimed in.

Gunn told the story of attempting suicide at age 17 and discovering that his life did indeed turn around dramatically. Obama equated the experience of gay teens to his own struggles growing up as a biracial American. Together, this collection of videos has been seen more than 10 million times.

What stands out most is the steady repetition from different childhoods, different regions and even different generations of the incessant bullying young gay Americans face.

Listening to them brought back memories of a college classmate I met more than 35 years ago in a ballroom dancing class. He was smart and funny and a great dancer, but when we attempted to date, there couldn’t have been any less chemistry. There was much we didn’t know how to talk about then. I was stunned a year or so later to learn he’d taken his own life.

It has always been enormously difficult to grow up feeling different, especially for your sexuality. Gay teens are three or four times more likely to commit suicide, according to the National Education Policy Center. More than 85 percent describe being harassed. That has to stop.

At www.itgetsbetter project.com, viewers can watch thousands of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered adults share their stories about overcoming the pain of high school and emerging far happier than they’d ever imagined. They can learn about The Trevor Project, a crisis-counseling program for gay teens, at (866) 488-7386 or thetrevorproject.org.

For my money, though, the most reassuring of the videos aren’t the spoken ones. Instead, they’re performances by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles and Broadway Sings for The Trevor Project. They defy viewers to remain dry-eyed. Even in conservative Spokane, young people especially are making change visible.

A significant number of my college students showed up in class on Oct. 20 wearing purple in honor of the gay teens who died recently.

Later that week thousands turned out at the region’s colleges, schools and universities to protest the Westboro Baptist Church, the hatemongers infamous for protesting at funerals for soldiers.

The young counterprotesters’ messages of love, hope and humor shone in sharp contrast to the Westboro members’ bigotry.

Let’s hope that the next time Terry Miller and Dan Savage return for a visit, they can conclude that even in Spokane, life does get better.