I have been waiting to get this video up until I had final approval from the people involved, but I am so excited to now share it that I’m up in bed with my computer aglow and Megan completely asleep next to me – that girl has serious Circadian rhythms.

Anyway, if you don’t know about the project…where have you been?!?!

Here’s the rundown. GLBT teens have always had a disproportionately high suicide rate; it’s been pretty consistent over time. The right wing (currently pretty silent on the topic) has loved to say that it’s another destructive part of the “gay lifestyle” – we all know that’s bullshit, of course, and that societal and systemic bullying makes the lives of GLBT or GLBT-perceived teens a special kind of hell.

I’m not sure what coalescing of events and connections spawned the uproar – maybe social media has us so connected that we started being able to see them as a whole, even though the kids were in different parts of the country. When you see it this way, the crisis is visible and you feel it.

Dan Savage started the project with this column and in his podcast. When he gets going, he is a powerful advocate for the causes he is passionate about and the GLBT community has responded in kind. Hundreds of videos of people telling kids what they don’t have access to – stories of how peoples’ lives got better when they got out of high school.

We feel their pain in a real way, and we are living proof that the particular sort of hell they’re experiencing often goes away with adulthood and removing yourself from that environment.

You’ve gotta give them hope, as Harvey Milk says. And hope serves to inspire. I hope more comes of this and that we can find ways to reach out better because we are not allowed to speak in their schools – policies on “neutrality” on the issue of whether or not gay people deserve rights or not have invaded school districts. Meaning: a kid can say gay people are going to hell, that’s just his religion. So if he gets in trouble for shoving a gay kid in a toilet and calling him a fag…well…how do you really address the problem of hatred there? You can’t. So we have to figure out how to do it from outside the system.

We made our little contribution. I hope we have more to give. Life got so much better for us – and we all measure what “better” is in different ways.

(By the way, my friend Kate is apparently our star because I don’t have time to select and upload a different picture.)

(Sidenote: this takedown of the “I’m a Christian and don’t agree with gay marriage, but don’t think gay kids should be bullied and so you can’t lump us together” response is just awesome to me.)