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I do think it's a good motto for everyone. But I believe that LGBT teenagers—I know that LGBT teenagers—are particularly isolated and need to hear from LGBT adults.

Bullied straight teenagers go home, almost invariably, to a shoulder to cry one, and support from their families. Bullied LGBT teens all too often go home to more bullying from their parents, and then are dragged to churches on Sunday for still more bullying from the pulpit. And gay teenagers are routinely lied to about what it is to be a gay adult. Witness the GOP nominee for governor telling an audience—which may have contained closeted gay kids (G-d help them)—that gay people can't be successful. Someone needs to break that to Ellen, huh?

It can't hurt to remind all kids, though, gay or straight, that whatever they're facing now, however painful it might seem, however inescapable, it does end. And it does get better.

Oh, do a Google news search on It Gets Better Project. It hasn't been mentioned in every report, of course, but it's been getting tons and tons of coverage. Which is crucial—we need kids to hear about it, or overhear about it, and the media coverage is helping.

So are the Tweets and Facebook postings. This is a viral campaign, and it's been very, very successful, and we know from the response from teenagers, their parents, and many school teachers that it is reaching the kids it needs to reach.

Thank you, and thank your friends for contributing.

One thing that distinguishes this campaign from, say, red ribbons for AIDS awareness: where are those red ribbons now? Moldering away in landfills and dresser drawers. People have moved on to other causes, other issues that we need to raise awareness about. And that's inevitable and only right, I think.

But unlike the ribbons, the videos people are making and contributing right now will live on; they will be maintained on the website, and kids who are four now will be able to watch them when they're fourteen, and the messages of hope and strategies for coping with or confronting bullying will be just as useful and relevant then as they are today.

Sadly.

Conduct all business with school administrators in writing—that should be clear from all the cases where parents insist they talked to school administrators about bullying, and nothing was done, and then the school administrators claim, after someone has died, that they never knew, weren't told, the parents never came to them, etc.

If your kid is being bullied, put it in writing. Bring a lawyer. And if your kid has been assaulted, GO TO THE POLICE. When a 16-year-old kid beats up an old woman at a shopping mall, he gets arrested. When a 16-year-old kid beats up a 13-year-old kid at a high school, he doesn't even get suspended.

Assault is a assault, and it's a crime, and it doesn't matter if your victim is 13 or 63.

No one is saying that bullying straight kids is wrong. It is wrong. The It Gets Better Project is targeted at gay kids to address their unique isolation and combat the lies that LGBT kids are told *about being LGBT.*

But the message applies to all kids: It gets better, hang in there.

And on a personal note: I know that straight kids get bullied. My older brother, who is straight, had it worse in our grade school than I did, he was more brutally bullied than I was. But he understands that he wasn't also hearing from his church that he was sick and sinful and brought the bullying on himself, and he could go to our parents and tell them what was happening, and why, and get their support. I couldn't. If I went to our parents, I feared it would attract attention to what I was trying to desperately to hide from them.

I think things are getting worse in some places even as they get better in others. And I blame the religious right.

We've been subjected to a 15-year-long campaign of anti-gay dehumanization by self-described "Christians," people who define Christianity has 1. hating gay people and 2. wanting to see their capital gains taxes slashed. The kind of rhetoric injected into the culture about gay people—we're intrinsically evil, we're trying to destroy the institution of marriage, we're a threat to the family—has real-world consequences for gay kids.

Mom and dad in an area dominated by conservative politics and mega-churches—places with few openly gay adults—can only abuse gay people from a distance, at the ballot box. But their children, steeped in the same bigotry, exposed to the lies promulgated by religious "leaders," they go to school on Monday and there's a gay or perceived-to-be-gay 13-year-old kid. And they can abuse that kid in person,in real time, and with their fists.

And in many of the places where this is going on, the schools—even public schools—are run by homophobic adults who view gay kids as the problem, as having brought the bullying down on themselves.

So while it is getting better and has gotten better for gay people in many parts of the country, it has been getting worse in many places. Look at where the suicides have almost all taken place this fall: very small towns, rural areas, exurbs. In those places, it's getting worse.

We've been encouraging others to do the same. Adding captions is a labor-intesive process (it took my BF three hours to add captions to ours). We're really encouraged and thrilled to see the videos coming in now that are in ASL—of course, recognizing that not all deaf or hard-of-hearing folks know ASL. But they're great, and we want to see more of them. 

Sadly they're not captioned for the signing-impaired!

I would hope that people are supporting legit, qualified LGBT candidates. I certainly do.

Usually when a kid comes out, it's because he or she can't stand the pressure of being closeted anymore. The kid can't keep up the lies and deceit anymore. I do think kids should be encouraged to take a long, hard look at their particular circumstances before coming all the way out, and if it isn't safe, they should wait, or be strategic. (Usually it's the parents who present the greatest danger—large numbers of homeless teenagers are LGBT kids who were thrown out of their homes when their parents were told or discovered that their kids were gay.)

I would encourage everyone to read this story in the Minnesota Independent about the spate of suicides in the Anoka-Hennepin school district, the effort to institute anti-bullying programs, and the appalling efforts by "Christian" parents to block those programs:

http://tinyurl.com/27ugxtz

Yes, I do. And I think that's probably the only hope we have for making sure that bullying isn't tolerated: when it starts to cost them, when stopping bullying presents a smaller headache/walletache for school systems than turning a blind eye.

Well, I think the problem is that, for many young males, being a straight guy means two things: not being a girl, and not being a fag. So anything that's perceived as feminine or gay, on the part of males, is met with violent disapproval.

Most of the kids who are bullied, and most who've committed suicide, were boys who weren't masculine, or couldn't hide their sexualities. We need to address the homophobia at the root of this crisis but also the misogyny that undergirds and informs it.

So long as some children—out of ignorance, or trickle-down homophobia (as Kathy Griffin dubbed it)—react violently to difference, we will have this problem. And the problem is made worse when school administrators are themselves homophobic.

We're hearing from kids all over the country who are watching these videos and finding comfort—and helpful coping strategies, and good advice on how they can make it better. We're also hearing from the parents of bullied 13- and 14- and 15-year-old LGBT kids who are telling us that they're sitting their kids down in front of the computer to watch the videos, and that they're helping. We are also hearing from the parents of straight kids who say the same.

Ok, I'm out of time, and I have to run. Thank you so much for all of your questions, I wish I could've gotten to more. Thanks to the Washington Post for having me.

Please visit our new site: ItGetsBetterProject.com.

Thanks so much.