On Children’s Literature and the (Im)Possibility of It Gets Better

Abstract

It Gets Better and Children's Literature: An Overview In response to a devastating rash of reported queer youth suicides in fall of 2010, American writer Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller founded It Gets Better project, a website inviting adults to submit videos that offer messages of hope and encouragement to youth who may be struggling with their sexualities in difficult environments. (1) Fueled by contributions from public figures like Barack Obama and a host of celebrities including Ellen DeGeneres, It Gets Better has garnered widespread attention and received over fifty thousand user-created video submissions that have been viewed more than fifty million times (What is). The It Gets Better book, co-edited by Savage and Miller, was released in March 2011 and appeared on New York Times bestseller list within weeks, and an It Gets Better documentary special profiling several queer teens was broadcast on MTV and Logo in February 2012. As It Get Betters popularity surged, however, critiques of project quickly surfaced. (2) Tavia Nyong'o notes that It Gets Better primarily hails an upwardly mobile class of white gay youth while excluding those for whom adulthood does not necessarily bring a reprieve from forms of anti-queer violence--particularly, Nyong'o writes, gender nonconforming and/or trans people. Sponsored by Gay-Straight Alliance of San Francisco, Make It Better project takes aim at passivity implicit n It Gets Better--the idea that simply enduring adolescence will result in improved social conditions--by offering practical tools for taking action against homophobia in schools and communities and on a national level. (3) In a Guardian article, Jasbir Puar expresses concern with narrowing of queerness' significance for both adults and youth: she argues that It Gets Better showcases a narrow class of successful adults and reinforces idea that queer youth are inevitably prone to suicide and bullying. For Puar, many adult It Gets Better contributors are invested in versions of family that stray little--if at all--from heteronormative and from narratives of upward mobility that [echo] now discredited 'pull yourself up from bootstraps' immigrant motto (In Wake). She concludes, thus ['it gets better'] might turn out to mean, you get more normal (In Wake). And in a frank Facebook post, queer activist Charlotte Cooper challenges idea that queer youth require adult stories to survive, writing, I wish there was some kind of an It Gets Better campaign in which fucked up queer teenagers give reassurance and advice to windy and pompous bourgie grown-up homos. There is a provocative tension between It Gets Betters stated purpose and way seems to circulate. On one hand, It Gets Better claims to be about queer youth: project directly addresses itself to this audience and ostensible crisis in which finds itself. (4) As Savage notes in his introduction to It Gets Better book, the point of project is to give despairing ]kids hope. The point is to let them know that things do get better, using examples of our own lives (6). On other hand, taking into account ever-growing array of responses to and critiques of It Gets Better, project appears to be more about adult hopes and anxieties surrounding how queer youth should be addressed than about queer youth themselves. As circulates through a variety of media, It Gets Better accumulates (mostly adult-authored) personal stories that echo project's primary, teleological narrative of development and resilience and an expansive body of (mostly adult-authored) critical interventions that interrogate pedagogical value and appropriateness of message that it gets better while gesturing, more broadly, to project's political failings. In other words, It Gets Better does not circulate according to ways that imagines its audience. …