Hope Against Hope

15 years on, did it get better?

This essay discusses suicide

“Hello. My name’s Oscar. I’m an accountant in Scranton, Pennsylvania and I’m gay. And I’m here to tell you that yes - it does get better.” What a rush of memories and feelings. It’s 2010 and social media is an exciting possibility, a new force for good. Its opportunities seem endless as we connect to lost friends and new friends across the world. New social networks are emerging, offering novel pathways for self-expression and connection. Obama is president. Aaron Sorkin is writing a film about Facebook. You might be forgiven for asking “how could it possibly get better than this?”

Oscar wasn’t a real person. He was a character in the NBC sitcom The Office, a mockumentary that traced the work lives of an ordinary bunch of middle and working class Americans employed at a paper supply company in Scranton. The show ran from 2005-2013, yet remains popular over a decade later thanks both to its solid performances, its cosy warmth and now, presumably, due to nostalgia, including a nostalgia for a different age of social media. It’s a curious time capsule from an era of online fads, of participation, of instant microcelebrity: planking, group lip dubs, “balloon boy” and baby otter videos all make an appearance, alongside Oscar’s It Gets Better video.

It Gets Better was a viral video campaign that began in 2010 following on the death by suicide of a number of young people who were either LGBTQ, or assumed to be, and were bullied on that basis. Its instigator was the US journalist and pundit Dan Savage, and in his long-running syndicated column Savage Love he encouraged his readers to submit their own videos to YouTube where they offer hope to queer teens by letting them know that while their life in the suburbs, or in homophobic families, or in rural schools full of bullies, might suck right now, hang on in there buddy, because it gets better. Rewatching The Office recently, I recalled how prominent the campaign was, and my own mixed feelings about it at the time. It also occurred to me how much has changed since then: the idea of a popular social media campaign of queer adult strangers reaching out directly to queer youth seems like a paranoid right-wing fever dream today. Fifteen years after the original campaign, we might well ask ourselves: did it even get better?

I mentioned my own mixed feelings to the original campaign. I was in my mid-20s at the time, and so angry, in that confused way where unpicking the personal and political was impossible, and probably unnecessary. It didn’t seem to me like it got better at all; homophobia was deep-baked into society, and, despite having been out for the best part of a decade, I still found my own sexual desires confusing, frustrating, hard to manifest in a way that seemed right or even enjoyable. Add to this coming of age in the midst of a global financial crisis, encumbered by debt and precarious employment, and being on the feeling of smug lectures from well-off liberals seemed like a particularly complacent poke in the eye. What were they trying to say?

The videos produced by supporters of the campaign were designed to offer hope. People appeared on screen to tell their own stories of teenage bullying, isolation and even suicidal ideation, and how much their lives had changed since. I escaped, they said, I moved to a city, I have a gorgeous apartment, a gorgeous boyfriend, gorgeous friends, a gorgeous life, and you will too, if only you can learn to suffer, to endure.

I felt strongly that they had it all mixed up. Surely young LGBTQ people suffering from abuse, homophobia and ostracisation needed to be told something more than hang on in there, as though it was a tough week at work and still only Wednesday. Homophobia and transphobia was not merely a rite of passage of teen bullying, but a social crisis, a political crisis, and one that we ourselves had lived through. Couldn’t we remember how it felt to be a gay teen? If anything, there was a sense that perhaps, with social media, it was getting worse, with increased visibility for queer people in the media counterintuitively also providing increased exposure for teens. Sometimes, when you’re a queer teen, the last thing you want is to be seen, for who you are to be the subject of attention. Was this all we had to offer our young counterparts -- the deferral of freedom, of self-expression?

What’s more, its focus on teen bullying as a phase to be endured seemed to limit homophobia to other teens. True, you will eventually leave school, but absent some tough and enduring schism, families are often for life, while, as The Office frequently joked, anti-gay bullying and the eternal closet continue to plague us throughout our life. The character of Oscar is closeted for a number of seasons before being outed against his will by Michael, forcibly kissed without his consent, and then the frequent subject of homophobic jokes or remarks from other characters, even if not the butt of the joke for the show’s writers. It Gets Better seemed to me, at the time, the worst of liberal complacency, and one that further alienated queer youth from support. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” it seemed to say, “you’ll grow out of it.”

Anyway, who’s to say it would get better? One of the hallmarks of teen bullying is its persistent legacy throughout life. Its effects can endure long into adulthood. Future low self-esteem, depression and other mental health issues, compulsive and harmful drug use, and poor educational and health outcomes can all result from teenage homophobic bullying. When I think back to my own teenage years, in which homophobic bullying and violence were not just frequent, but my abiding experience of school in general, is that, while it was miserable, I was driven by some sort of internal will to survive it. I laughed off bullies, I punched back occasionally, and I nursed a sense that there was something more for me, even if I had no idea what it was. Just…others. Others like me. It was only when I did escape that the survival mechanisms of that moment started to pile up on me; depression, self-hatred and suicidal ideation were the 20s dividends of my teenage strategies. Of course, these manifestations were multi-causal, but homophobia was high up there in the maladjustment sweepstakes, and I didn’t want to adjust, or expect gay teens to adjust, to their causes.

Everything in It Gets Better seemed ill-aligned. Not only was there an expectation that the youth simply need to endure their own persecution, but also that queerness possessed some sort of internal logic of exile, of escape. It simply wasn’t possible to imagine that one could flourish where you were, or to imagine that you could make where you were tolerable, welcoming, loving. The hostility of your environment wouldn’t change, but in time you could move to another environment. I’ve long been fascinated by this story, and the more I’ve thought about it, the more it appears as a driving motor of queer culture, almost the original gay fairytale, complete with handsome prince. To discover your true self, good or bad, you must leave the place that made you. It’s there in David, the American protagonist in Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room whose sexuality in New York manifests as a bully, but in Paris as passion. It’s there in Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, where Therese and Carol can only realise their desire on the road (and it’s there in the Ripliad too, in its way). It’s there in City of Night, it’s there in The Beautiful Room is Empty, it’s there in Brokeback Mountain, it’s there in Rubyfruit Jungle. It’s there in the Bronski Beat song Smalltown Boy: “You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case / Alone on a platform, the wind and the rain on a sad and lonely face / Mother will never understand why you had to leave / But the answers you seek will never be found at home / The love that you need will never be found at home.” Hope and home are incompatible.

This is where we get to the hard nub of the problem, the sort of conversation I wasn’t willing to have with myself in 2010. Exile and escape is a queer trope that never goes out of fashion not just because it makes for a compelling narrative, but also because it is true, and it manifests as a shared cultural, communal experience. We can set as our aim the erasure of bigotry from society, but you might as well be offering the moon on a stick when what people need in the moment is hope. A personal hope, too, the hope of escape. God knows, I should have known that, because the hope of escape was what got me through my teens, even if I wished that the people around me might change.

In reality, the history of homosexuality and queerness and its relationship with a wider society is not the steady accretion of rights and tolerations in which LGBTQ people have asserted their rights and received their rewards, but rather a series of moral panics from within the heart of the sex-gender system. It’s within these moral panics that we’ve come to understand who we might be, and who else might be with us, and in pushing to escape them those ideas have spread across society. By their nature, cycles of moral panics means things might get better, only to get worse again. We can see that in the current moment, as LGBTQ people, and especially trans people, are high-stakes chips in the culture war. Politically speaking, 2010 may well have attained the sheen of the good old days. While Oscar is victim of homophobia, it’s mostly ignorance rather than malice, while it would be impossible to imagine a credible version of The Office made today where Dwight wasn’t, in some shape or form, an explicit alt-right fascist. On a macro scale, It Gets Better simply isn’t true, and anyone who has seen anything must be tired of such a trite, whiggish interpretation of the world.

But perhaps that’s exactly why the promise of hope is so important. When you’re in a moment of crisis, you can’t rely upon changing everything in order to change something, and happiness is still attainable in a cruel world. And when we need hope, we actively think about the kind of environment we do want to live in. Who will we share our lives with? How will we conduct our friendships? Where will we party? Who will we fuck? What will our home look like, and who will it welcome? Personal hope is a world-building exercise, a stimulation not just of the imagination, but of our ethics and values, our political worldview, and our aesthetic sensibilities. As adults we have a responsibility to safeguard and educate the young, whether we are related to them or, perhaps especially, if we are not. But where that is not possible, we can do a lot worse than encouraging them to hope, to build in their mind an idea of who they do want to be.

In my focus on systemic political change, I think I underestimated something very important: that endurance and resilience might be human, queer characteristics worth cultivating, for they bear unexpected fruits even when things get worse. Even when you escape, your problems hound you. You make loving relationships, only to see them breakdown irreparably, in confusion, in pain. You make close friends, eat dinner with them, laugh with them, get drunk with them, and then they die, and you’re without them. You find a beautiful apartment, and you paint the walls and move the furniture, and then you’re evicted. You sober up, then fall off the wagon. You get a new job, and have to come out again, and discover your boss is an arsehole. You write a book, and nobody reads it, play a gig, and nobody comes. But you learned resilience early, and you get back on the horse, and you love again, different this time. So does it get better? Well, it gets different. And sometimes, that’s enough.

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