It gets better

This post was originally made in 2010 on a site where I annotated screenshots of crappy user experiences. That's been retired, but a few people found this useful/interesting and I kept it around.Good things don’t end up here; this is a place for crappy things. So what’s the beef with It Gets Better? It’s a good thing, right? Well, yes, but not unequivocally so – there are a couple of big things wrong with it. And since the bad things that end up here come with pissy little notes about why, I figure it’s fair game.This is a slightly sell-out, weasel-words moment for me. It’s where I “oppose the war but support our troops”. Well, actually, it’s more like the other way round, but that hasn’t descended into cliché yet, and in any case makes you sound like a sociopath. So yeah, I support the idea behind It Gets Better, but some of the execution is broken.Every single It Gets Better video I’ve seen, be it the original (which is still fantastically touching and useful), the Google one, the Facebook one, the even more cynical self-promoting celebrity ones, or my personal favourite, parses down to a simple three-point message:

1. Don’t kill yourself, please.
2. Your life will suck for the foreseeable future and you can’t change that.
3. It gets better if you move out of that one-horse shithole and join the urban middle class.

These things might be true, but I’m furious about being asked to accept them.Apart from the first one. I think there are too many humans, but even I can’t fault the first one. Kids - don't kill yourselves. The other two are broken.While the majority of institutions, and schools in particular, continue to treat victims of homophobic bullying as themselves culpable, point 2 there is going to stick around.  But for fuck’s sake let’s not accept that.And take point 3: is “Sod the proles, move to the big city and be fabulous, darling” really the best we can do?I’m not saying it doesn’t work.  Being bourgeois in the affluent South-East of England is working out just dandy for me, thank you very much; and I wouldn’t go back to Darlington if you doubled my salary. Ok, that’s not just a gay thing. But it’s hardly a progressive message, and it’s certainly not easy, extensible, or sustainable.What if you don’t want to leave Middlesbrough? What if you’ve looked at both Richmonds and like the one with fields? Even if we accept the idea that leaving is an inherent good, how about folks with no realistic prospect of getting out of Sunderland?This is a broken idea as grimy and insidious as any social mobility fantasy belched out by the “progressive” right. Baked into it is the notion – linked to the problem with point 2 – that you can’t improve your world, nor would it be desirable; no, improvement comes from joining ours.Now, I’m not attributing a belief that snide and unpleasant to everyone (or really anyone) who’s made an It Gets Better video. But I do worry that in rushing to celebrate the fact that our lives have got better, we risk glossing over the fact that lots of us had to make some fairly substantial changes to make them better. It’s hard to imagine I’d be anywhere near as happy if I were still living on a run-down North-Eastern council estate. And I definitely can’t imagine I’d ever have had the will to tough it out and try and make things better there. I’m not that strong. But should the message be that I’d have to be?So yes, leaving is an option. It’s a realistic and valid one for some people. But it’s not a solution to the problem, and it’s not an aspiration we should find palatable.I worry that the message people will take away from this tremendously hopeful, and more-or-less universally well-intentioned project is one that they must accept the realities of homophobic abuse as unchangeable, that the only solution is to run away. Again, it does work. It is an option. But it isn’t an option for everyone, and it doesn’t help anyone you leave behind.There is a caveat. Stonewall have tweaked the message and brought it into their wider campaign against homophobic bullying. There’s a lot less wrong with the idea that It Gets Better Today, and they are campaigning to change things in context rather than encouraging people to change their contexts. That’s great – give them some moneyI'm also ignoring the fact that it does get better. Many people do tend to be a bit nicer to each-other as they get older. Yep, the humans don't entirely suck, and life isn't unremittingly horrible; not even in Darlington. But we clearly can't rely on that.So, yeah, here’s me loitering by the sacred cow enclosure, sheepishly trying to conceal a bolt-gun, I guess. I don’t think It Gets Better is a bad thing, but I’m really, really, concerned that its hope may conceal a profound ideological failure.