It Gets Better

by Dan Savage

  CLOSETS ON FIRE

  by Anthony Antoine

  ATLANTA, GA

  My everyday prayer when I was six years old—because I had already been taught the power of God, and taught the power of church, and taught the power of prayer—was “God, take this away from me or take me away.” I didn’t know then to call it “homosexual” or “gay.” I didn’t have those words at six years old. I just knew that I was different, and that I wasn’t like other boys. I had all of these feelings and I had already learned that it was not going to be an easy road ahead for me. So I got down on my knees and I prayed, “God, take this away or take me away.”

  I didn’t know then that it was going to get better.

  But today, when I think about the best evidence in my life of it getting better, I think about recording my first full-length CD five years ago. I’m a musician. I love music. Music is my passion and I wanted the freedom to be able to record the truth about what I was living.

  Now, my first few CDs were about the girls this and hip-hop that, I was putting on a front. But I was in love with Chanté Moore’s song, “Chanté’s Got a Man,” and I thought, okay, well what if I had the freedom to sing about having a man, too? So I recorded “Dante’s Got a Man Too,” and soon after that, in 2005, I recorded my first full-length CD, Closets on Fire. I wanted to depict my real life, to tell the truth about who I am, what I have learned, and who I have grown into. I wanted to record the truth about it getting better, all up in song that you could hear over and over and dance to and sing to and fall in love to. That’s the best evidence I can offer from my life that it gets better.

  In my dedication for Closets on Fire, there’s a picture of my four-year-old brother, Eric, and my five-year-old self, standing in the fiercest, queerest, gayest pose. And next to that photo, I wrote:“To my brother and me at age four and five, if I could go back and visit these boys in ghetto Newark, I would tell them both to always embrace your specialness and that you’re both beautiful little black boys worthy of unconditional love.”

  ’Cause at age four and five I didn’t know that, I didn’t know that I was even worthy of that. And I didn’t know that there was a pathway to understanding that even in your specialness you are still worthy of unconditional love. The dedication continues:“I would whisper in my ear, ‘there will be brighter days after your struggle with your sexuality and as fierce as your pose is right now, so you will be.’ For us at four and five, and for other kids needing examples of gay and okay, I offer you Closets on Fire.”

  Today, when people ask me if I’m gay, often times I’ll tell them no. “No. I’m gay gay. I’m double gay. I’m gay to the tenth power. I’m all of that and gay.” I’ll walk in it. I’ll walk in the truth and that’s okay. I’ve learned to live a life of freedom and I’ve found happiness. I’m no longer that six-year-old boy praying to be different, praying to die. It gets better, baby. It gets better.

  Independent recording artist and activist Anthony Antoine is originally from Newark, New Jersey, and has been in the Atlanta area since 1998. Currently he is prevention and testing program director for ARCA (AIDS Research Consortium of Atlanta) and has been coordinating HIV/STI prevention efforts for the Atlanta area for eleven years. You can visit Anthony Antoine online at www.anthonyantoine.com.

  THE KING BROTHERS

  by Dick and Mark S. King

  SHREVEPORT, LA, AND FORT LAUDERDALE, FL

  Mark: Hi. I’m Mark King and I am a gay man. My brother’s name is Dick. And he’s gay, too. Yes, I have a gay brother and his name is Dick King.

  Dick: Trust me, I’ve heard them all.

  Mark: What do you like to say in bars?

  Dick: “Oh, you like my first name? Wait until you hear my last name.”

  Mark: But this is a family show, so we’re going to move on. This is for young gay guys out there who are wondering if life gets better.

  Dick: It does. It gets better.

  Mark: It gets a lot better. And it gets better for a long time; my brother can tell you that. Dick’s been gay for a really long time. There’s a big age difference between us, almost twenty years, and he grew up in a different time than I did.

  Dick: Almost a different generation.

  Mark: I came out in high school and everybody knew in my high school—in Shreveport, Louisiana. Not a big town—and everybody knew. It was hard. When I was in sixth grade, before I even came out, I was called a “sissy” and I was bullied a lot. I remember getting kicked on the playground by this one guy, who shall remain nameless. He wore cowboy boots and he would kick me in the shins so hard that blood would run down my leg. I would have blood in my socks. I remember coming home after school and taking my socks off and throwing them away because I didn’t want my mother to see the blood. I didn’t want her to know.

  Dick: Because then you’d have to explain.

  Mark: I would have to explain that I was getting kicked on the playground for being a big sissy. And I was ashamed. I was ashamed of myself then.

  Dick: Not to mention the fact that your older brother was a star football player.

  Mark: We have another brother who is a year older than me and he was the big jock on campus. I was drum major of the band.

  Dick: And in the drama club.

  Mark: Yes, I was in the drama club.

  Dick: So there you go.

  Mark: So there you go. Now, Dick, on the other hand, did not come out when he was a kid.

  Dick: No, but like Mark, I always knew that I was gay. Growing up I always knew that I was who I was. It wasn’t like it changed at some point when I became pubescent. I just always knew. And I grew up in a different place than Mark. I grew up on an air force base.

  Mark: Actually, Dick grew up in fantasyland. By age ten, he wanted to be Liberace. Now, for you youngsters reading this, Liberace was a big, big queen. And basically my brother was Liberace by the age of ten.

  Dick: I pantomimed Liberace all the time.

  Mark: As you can see, there are various levels of talent in our family. And that’s okay. And it’s also okay that he didn’t come out until he was in his mid-twenties. It doesn’t matter when you come out or how you do it. Sometimes you don’t feel safe coming out until you’re a little older. Sometimes it just happens and you can’t help it.

  Dick: Sometimes it depends on where you are. When I came out I was in New York, so I was in a place where I felt a lot safer.

  Mark: And I was in Shreveport, Louisiana. I felt like the town needed a little gaying up. So that’s what I did. But it doesn’t matter when you do it or how you do it, but when you finally do, it gets better.

  Dick: It gets better.

  Mark: It gets a lot better.

  Dick and Mark S. King were raised in a family of six children (two boys, two girls, two gays). Dick, the elder, is haunted by memories of babysitting and diaper duty for Mark. Today Dick is a custom picture-framer and performs in community theater. Mark is a longtime HIV/AIDS activist and writer, best known for his popular blog, myfabulousdisease.com.

  COMMUNITY FOUND

  by Taylor Bailey

  DALLAS, TX

  I had a pretty terrible time in middle school. A lot of bad things happened. I was one of only nine boys in my class. I went to an incredibly small school, in an incredibly small town in Texas, so you can only imagine how accepting these people were. Even though I didn’t play football, I was lumped into athletics class with all the jocks. A lot of really terrible things happened in that locker room.

  The other boys were ruthless in their torments. At first, it was simply name calling and group mockery. This evolved into physical bullying and harassment. They would touch me and press their bodies up against me while we were changing, and then run around claiming that I had been aroused by their actions. At one point, I attempted to hide in a separate bathroom to change before athletics and they actually hunted me down, barged in, and harassed me there. One Monday, when I was changing for athletics, I put on my gym clothes and was suddenly in an
incredible amount of pain. Apparently, a lot of sweet food had been thrown into the bottom of my locker in a locker room with a terrible ant problem. Before I knew it, I was covered in ants. They were on my chest, my arms, my hair, my face. I was standing in the middle of the room screaming, being bitten all over, and everyone was just laughing. Nobody would help me. I kept turning around begging for help and nobody would help me. Even the guys who weren’t usually mean were too afraid of the bullies to do anything. I was told later that the food was stashed there with the hopes of this exact thing occurring. The worst part? Nothing was done about it. The coaches turned a blind eye toward it, and I was too afraid to tell anyone it had been intentional.

  I hit my lowest point in seventh grade. I was lying a lot to my family then. I would make up stories about interactions I had so they thought I had friends and I was happy, when really I was spending a lot of time alone. Or if I wanted them to think I was spending time with friends, I would hide somewhere and then come home and say, “Oh, I was just with friends.” I very strongly considered taking my own life during that time. I was only in the seventh grade! It amazes me to even think about that now. I write these words and I think, “No. Surely not.” But it’s true. I was so miserable.

  The thing that really saved me was my sister—my little sister. She was only about two or three at the time and I loved her so much. She was my biggest fan. And she’s who I would think about when I thought about killing myself. I realized I couldn’t do that to her. Thank God, because I couldn’t have seen then where I would end up now. If I could have, I would have understood that I just needed to get through these few years because much better things were waiting for me. I would have realized that I was going to do much better things than these assholes who are making my life so miserable.

  I think that’s the key. You have to start thinking, “These guys, they’re just miserable people. They’re making my life miserable but they’re not going to amount to anything. Whereas I can. And I will.”

  And I did.

  It was a rough path. But I am happy to say that I am twenty-three years old and I am a very happy gay man. I’ve had several really loving relationships with other men, and my family’s very accepting of me. At first they were a little uncomfortable with it but now my mom and I actually joke around about it. She’ll make gay jokes, and my nanny’s the same way. She actually watched the YouTube videos and told me how amazing she thought it was. My mother now always says, “When I hear people talking about their views on homosexuality, I just want to say ‘Well you have clearly never loved anyone who was gay.’ ” My sister, Jordan, is a teacher who advocates strongly against bullying in schools, especially where it pertains to LGBT youth. My father, who died in 2005 at his own hand, was also a gay man who had struggled his entire life with his sexuality. Though he never fully recovered from the traumas of his life, he gave me the strength and courage he didn’t always have to make it through mine. Strength and courage I needed to survive losing him to the battle against the horrific tenets of the ignorant. I wouldn’t be here without him.

  If I could make any suggestion, it would be to involve yourself in something like theater or art or music, or one of these areas where people are more accepting and open-minded. I mean, you don’t really find a lot of bigots doing theater. That’s what ended up saving me. I transferred to a large high school where my being gay wasn’t a big deal. I’d say, “Well, uh, I’m gay.” And my classmates’ response would generally be, “Oh, yeah . . . we know, dude.”

  I thrived doing theater. I was able to take the terrible experiences I had in my youth and turn them into an explosive fuel behind my work as a performer. I was surrounded by passionate, artistic, and intelligent friends who would have torn apart anyone who dared hurt me. This community of love thrust me forward into studying performance at a top-ranked school for theater where I earned my degree alongside some of the most talented people in the country.

  So find something. Find a group, an organization, or just friends who are like you. Whether it’s your family or your day-to-day life, just know that it gets so much better. You will be happy and you will be well-adjusted and you will have the life that you want.

  Taylor Bailey holds a bachelor of fine arts in theater performance from the University of Evansville in Indiana and is now a professional director and actor working in Dallas. In addition to his career in the theater, and inspired by the events of his childhood, the life of his father and the It Gets Better Project, he plans to attend graduate school in the fall to obtain his master’s degree in social work so he can become a licensed clinical therapist, working with LGBT youth and their families.

  FROM SCARED TO PROUD: THE JOURNEY OF A GAY MEDICAL STUDENT

  by Jake Kleinman

  NEW ORLEANS, LA

  I’m proud to say that I’m about to graduate from medical school and enter my residency as a physician, but just a few years ago I was in a much darker place.

  I’d been a jock growing up and had few interactions with gay people, but during college I began experimenting with my sexual orientation. I didn’t know if friends and family would support me. I envisioned losing all of my friends and missing out on opportunities that I deserved because of my sexual orientation. I was worried about hanging out and meeting girls, fearing they’d read my interest in them as romantic. And I was scared to tell my guy friends. The last thing I wanted them to think then was that I was gay.

  I also knew I wanted to be a doctor and worried that being gay would make it hard for me to be accepted at the southern medical school I had chosen. I was also concerned it might be a problem in the medical profession I later hoped to enter. I wanted to live my life as an open gay man but was afraid it would end my medical career before it even started.

  When I finally did come out to my closest friends, near the end of my senior year of college, my heart dropped when they laughed in my face. I demanded they tell me why they were laughing at such a “serious” issue. They responded, “Jake, we’re laughing because the way you told us, we thought you had terminal cancer. Your being gay is just funny compared to that.”

  Shortly after starting med school, I realized that I was just as guilty of being ignorant about the south as I assumed people were about me being gay. Not only was I accepted at my new school for being gay, I was asked by the dean’s office to help welcome the new students each year. They wanted someone who could explain that being gay or being different was actually applauded here and, importantly, that we can use our experiences as gay people to educate and relate to our patients in the future. Standing up in front of a roomful of new medical students was daunting but I have rarely received so much positive feedback in my life.

  In my four years here, I’ve developed a great network of friends, and a number of the best people I’ve met have been gay. They are some of the most talented, successful, and supportive people I know. We’ve all had to find ourselves in the realest sense of the word, and that experience has created a solid community here. This hit home to me about two years ago when I was eating dinner with my boyfriend at one of our favorite restaurants. This guy, Mark, came over to our table from the group of about twenty guys he was sitting with. He introduced himself and told us that every Wednesday is Friends and Family night at the restaurant. He invited us to join his “family” next week. We’ve been going almost every week since then and Mark remains one of our closest friends. Far from my fears in high school, being openly gay has only added to my life thus far.

  If you are feeling in a dark place right now, I want you to know I understand. You have to believe in yourself—believe in your potential—and realize it will get better and there are people out there who care about you. Look to friends and family who are supportive, or to organizations like the Trevor Project, working to make this place better for you and me.

  Jake Kleinman was born in Westchester, New York, and went to college at Colgate University, where he majored in Spanish literature and pre-medical studies. He is
currently finishing up medical school at Tulane University in New Orleans and will be starting a residency in pediatrics in the summer. He lives with his partner of two years, who is also a physician, and the two of them hope to start a family.

  AUTHENTIC SELF

  by Sara Sperling

  SAN JOSE, CA

  I was the typical straight girl. I had the boyfriend. I was president of my high school. I played sports. I was in a sorority in college. But I knew I was different. There was something huge missing from my world. I wanted that “butterfly-in-my-stomach” feeling when you like someone and they like you back.

  Even though I had friends who were gay, and people who were open around me, I still thought I was the only one going through exactly what I was going through. I thought I was going to lose my friends and my family. I thought nobody from high school would like me again, and later I worried that I’d get kicked out of my sorority.

  I decided that I couldn’t keep the secret any longer. I told my parents. My closest friends and I even stood in front of my sorority (140 members strong) and told them I was gay. At this point I wasn’t concerned anymore if I was going to lose anyone’s friendship, I just didn’t want to lose me. To my utter surprise those closest to me already knew and didn’t show any disappointment when I finally told them. Maybe it was because I wore 501 jeans and listened to the Indigo Girls. My friendships were different going forward. I was able to show my true self to others. There were a handful of my sorority sisters that I didn’t hear from after that but I was totally okay with it. I can only hope that their reaction will be different today, especially if their own child comes out to them.