The It Gets Better Project: A Study in (and of) Whiteness — in LGBT Youth and Media Cultures

Abstract

The It Gets Better Project (IGBP) became a worldwide phenomenon, offering support for socially marginalized and oppressed queer youth who were perceived to be vulnerable to suicide. The project originally was comprised of a collection of first-person video weblogs created in response to gay male suicides, and this collection ultimately formed a type of social archive. Central to these video weblogs were messages of hope and that the viewer’s lives would ‘get better’, though exactly whose lives were supposed to get better and what ‘better’ was supposed to mean was left to the imagination. The IGBP initially began as a single video weblog on YouTube in September 2010. It was later published as a book of the same title (Savage and Miller 2011). In the video the creators of the project, Savage and Miller, discuss their own experiences of teenage bullying, survival and escape. They ‘created [it] to show young LGBT people the levels of happiness, potential and positivity their lives will reach — if they can just get through their teen years’ (Savage and Miller 2011). The evolution of the IGBP has since translated into a registered 501(c)3 organization doing business in the United States as the ‘IOLA Foundation’ located at 8,315 Beverly Boulevard, Suite 101 in Los Angeles, CA 90048 (see IGBP 2014a).¹ Interestingly, since 2009 this nonprofit organization has had a total of $1,069,890 contributions, almost all of which have been expenditures on its web presence.²