It Gets Better (20 page)

Fortunately, I didn't give up. Seeking help, I started seeing a “gay reform” counselor who was supposed to make me straight. He was the saddest person I had ever met. He was “gay reformed” himself, married with children. Seeing the sadness behind his eyes and in his life, I just realized that's not what I wanted and that there still was hope inside of me.

So I moved. I moved far away. I left it all. I said good-bye to my family and I said good-bye to my friends and I started over. This is the power behind being gay. At some point, you have to make a decision in your life about who you are and what you're gonna do. A lot of people don't have to do that. They just go through life one step at a time. But when you're gay, you have to make a big choice in your life to be who you were meant to be and to follow your heart. It makes you strong.

Make this decision. Be a part of a beautiful culture and a beautiful people—gay males and females who have all had to make difficult decisions and leave people behind in the wake who couldn't accept them for who they are. But you will be accepted and loved by many other people as long as you're true to yourself. So don't give up. Don't give up. It's gonna get better. It gets a hell of a lot better.

CHEVY CHASE, MD

 

 

 

 

I
met Aiden Rivera-Schaeff my first year of high school. He was soon my best friend. Aiden was transgender, female to male. He transitioned in his first year of high school, so, as you can imagine, the bullying was pretty intense. He was almost constantly harassed at school and online. About two months into his senior year, he dropped out. Some students in one of his classes started calling him his old name, Caitlin, and most of the class got into it. Some of them referred to him as “she” or “it.” He refused to come back after that. On April 22, 2010, he committed suicide. He was one month away from his eighteenth birthday.

The thing is, Aiden wasn't unpopular by any means. He was basically friends with everyone who accepted him as Aiden. The entire time I knew him, he'd always had a girlfriend or a girl chasing after him. He had a group of younger kids he was friends with that he looked out for and who treated him as a big brother. At his memorial service, they ran out of room on the benches and there were rows of people standing in the back of the room. Almost everyone who spoke at Aiden's memorial said that he was the one person that had always listened and never judged.

My favorite photo of him hangs on my wall, as well as a drawing he gave me a year ago. Our friend, Maddie Hook, took the picture of him a few days before his death. He looks so happy in it. He'd started to grow a little facial hair because of the testosterone treatment and I remember he was so proud of that. I wish Aiden was here to see all the videos and read all these stories so he might see it would get better. I know that there are a lot of people out there like Aiden who are amazing and beautiful and loved; and many like him, who can't see any of this about themselves because they have to deal with so much hate every day.

One of the most frustrating things for me after his death was that, outside of his friends and family, no one knew what had happened to Aiden. There was no media coverage; no one was outraged that this boy, who I had loved, had been harassed until he couldn't take it anymore. That was the worst part. It felt like no one really cared. And then I saw this project and the thousands of videos people were making. So I guess I just want to say thank you to everyone who made a video, shared one, watched one. Thank you for caring.

WASHINGTON, DC

 

 

 

 

H
ello. I am John Berry, director of the United States Office of Personnel Management. To all youth out there who are in a tough place right now—know this—it gets better.

I was lucky—I was never bullied. But I was afraid of who I was. I was afraid God wouldn't love me. I was afraid my parents wouldn't love me. I was afraid I couldn't be successful in politics. Now I know God does love me, more than I could ever have imagined. And God made me just the way I am—and God doesn't make junk.

My parents, whom I was walling out from my own fear, loved me all the more. But it wasn't easy. My dad, a Marine sergeant who went to Mass every day, asked me when I came out to him not to bring my partner over to the house. Ten years later, when my partner was dying from AIDS, my dad held him in his arms and told him, “I love you like my own son.”

Things do get better.

And as to my career fears? I am the highest-ranking openly gay man in United States history. I have stood on the North Pole and the South Pole. I have managed 40 percent of United States law enforcement, including the Secret Service, and the Park Service, and I've even been director of the National Zoo.

You can be whatever you want. You can
love
whomever you want. But only if you first love yourself. Trust me—it's worth it. It gets better.

Live. Love. Live.

NEW YORK, NY

 

 

 

I
grew up in Arkansas in the '80s and '90s and took dance lessons so, as you can imagine, I was endlessly made fun of. But I loved dancing. I loved it so much.

And I eventually quit.

By the time I was eleven or twelve, right around puberty, the teasing and bullying just got so bad that I actually gave up dancing. In retrospect I wish that I had had the courage to keep doing it. Don't ever let anybody talk you out of doing something that you love because it makes you feel different.

I didn't start dancing again until I was eighteen years old and on my way to college. It took time for me to realize that being “different” is actually a good thing.

There were no gay people in my town at all, at least none that I knew about. And I was led to believe that it was subversive or wrong or evil to be gay. There was no outlet. I was made to believe that I was odd and weird and different to the point where it was just debilitating. I was so consumed with being gay then. It was on my mind constantly. I was always thinking, “If I walk this way, or talk this way, or dress this way . . . will people think I'm gay?”

Today it's such a nonissue. I never think about it. It hardly ever crosses my mind. Except for when things come up in the news about a gay kid killing himself. And then I can't help but identify with those people and remember what it was like at that age and how I went through the same things.

By the time my senior year of high school started, I was
done
. I asked my parents if I could skip it and go to college instead. I was desperate to get out of there. People always say, “Your high school years are the best years of your life.”
Uh-uh. I mean, how depressing is that? Like, it's all downhill from eighteen?
I'm telling you: The best years are yet to come. And while all that bullying takes a toll, and it's so hard when it's happening, if you give it time, it will get better. It will. Everything you have endured makes you a much stronger person in the end. And although I ended up not skipping my last year of high school, once I got to college, things quickly changed for the better

I know there are a lot of people out there who are in their high school drama productions or take dance classes or do other things that boys aren't supposed to do. And I know there are girls out there who do things that girls aren't supposed to do. And, let me tell you, keep doing them. Because one day you could end up on Broadway like me; you could be dancing on Broadway.

DALLAS, TX

 

 

 

 

M
y uncle, Ronald David Roberts, was born in 1945, the oldest son of the late televangelist, Oral Roberts, my grandfather. My uncle Ronnie, like me, was gay. He wrote in letters, published after his death, that he came out in high school, but only to close friends and family, including his father. His father, Oral Roberts, was the first televangelist, and likely the most famous faith healer since Jesus Christ, with a worldwide audience in the hundreds of millions. He did not want a gay son. Oral's anti-homosexual rants were so vehement that they can still be found on YouTube, forty years later. In his thirties, six months after getting divorced and coming out, my uncle Ronnie died, on June 10, 1982, by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the heart.

I'm gay, too. And my mother, like her father, does not want a gay son. My mother made a point to tell me, only a year ago, at my grandfather's funeral, in front of four thousand people, that hell does exist and I'm going there. My uncle and I were raised in a world dominated by Evangelicals who taught, and still teach, that the fires of hell await all gay men and women. This is the Evangelical “Christian” legacy for gays like my uncle and me: Threats. Bullying. Damnation. Death.