This week, Slate highlighted several stunningly unhelpful videos made by out-of-touch grown-ups in an effort to discourage teens from homophobic bullying. They’re important object lessons in what not to do if your aim is to offer hope to teens lacking it. But today, I find myself tired of criticism and hungry for new alternatives. It’s easy to criticize, and much harder to provide new and better resources.
The public and largely digital response to Tyler Clementi’s suicide last fall has been extensive and at times inspiring. Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project (I’ll call it IGB) has, in particular, become a locus both of popular praise and of critical dissent. While IGB models bright futures for some queer youth, its critics rightly observe, it fails to address intersectional identities—queer people of color, primarily—and instead models a white, affluent, educated, and, one might even argue, heteronormative model of advancement.
Or, as Jasbir Puar interpreted in the Guardian: “Savage embodies the spirit of a coming-of-age success story. He is able-bodied, monied, confident, well-travelled, suitably partnered and betrays no trace of abjection or shame. His message translates to: Come out, move to the city, travel to Paris, adopt a kid, pay your taxes, demand representation.” Indeed, there are many, too many, whom Savage’s model of queer advancement excludes.
Tavia Nyong’o made a similarly compelling argument in “Bully Bloggers,” critiquing the role of the “salvific wish” that underlies Savage’s premise: “the fantasy that if we just regulate our own conduct and affairs properly, we can somehow save our people through the example of our moral fortitude.” Citing the literary theorist Candace Jenkins, Nyong’o translates the black salvific wish to Savage’s queer one, explicating “the burden to be a role model and savior for the race” as equally damaging to either demographic.
The radical-leaning critiques of Savage’s endeavor are relevant and well-founded. No, we do not do enough to value intersectional identities, and yes, it is doubly harder to be a gay black teen than a straight white one. The progress narrative, the bootstraps story, the “burden of being a role model and a savior”, as Nyong’o puts it, does not tell the whole truth of complex identities, and we should be doing much more to provide compassion and resources for those whom those narratives misrepresent.
These critiques get us halfway there, noting insightfully that the current resource models for GLBTQ teens in crisis are insufficient, but suggesting precious little by way of alternatives. Is a suicidal teen really going to turn to an obscure blog that cites Jenkins and Eve Sedgwick for solace, or, in the unlikely event that they do, find the solace they seek there? Is a depressed teen going to comprehend what “hegemony” or “heteropatriarchy” or “salvific wish” means, or how those terms affect them? Let me be absolutely clear: I am not discrediting the intelligence or curiosity of teenagers. Teenagers, poised on the precipice of becoming, hormonal, confused, hungry for the next thing and anguished in their liminality as they are, are not the problem.
We—and by “we”, I mean we intellectuals, all we with a microphone or a WordPress account, we of the advanced degrees and overdeveloped vocabularies—WE are the problem, or at least we are not the whole solution. It’s important to critique mainstream models of success; radicals push the center farther left, as I noted in my column on Tina Fey. It’s incredibly important to create more space within the academy for race and queer theory and for those who espouse them. But it’s also really fucking important—a matter of life or death about which we can no longer claim ignorance—that we do more than that.
Six months later, I want to write that Tyler Clementi did not die in vain—that with his death, America received the wake-up call it so badly needed to realize that GLBTQ youth is in a kind of psychological calamity, adrift without resources in a teenage holocaust of bullying in their schools and through their computers. Not to mention on the streets, where nearly half of all runaway youth are GLBTQ.
To write that Clementi’s death was not “in vain”, though, would be an unconscionable misstatement on my part. Every time a queer youth kills him or herself, in fact every time anyone takes their own life, regardless of age, race, or orientation, it is in vain. In vain because of the potential wasted, the pain unsalved, the hope destroyed. Suicide is, by definition, a life taken in vain. On our watch.
Which is why, fully cognizant of the fact that GLBTQ teens in crisis are even less likely to turn to my work than to Nyong’o’s or Puar’s or femmephane’s, I’m calling for new ideas. Over the next weeks I’ll be collecting interviews from some of the badass queers in my own life about how we can do more, and do better, and I’d also encourage all of you—whoever you are, reading this—to leave your ideas in that democratic and problematic idea-sharing space we call the comments box.
Be proactive: how do we create resources that validate the T along with the GLBQ, how do we role model for the child who finds herself marginalized by both race and gender, how do we provide a truthful optimism beyond growing up and getting out? How do we move beyond criticism into activism? I love this example, spotlighted by Racialicious, of how Tomee Sojourner and the Embracing Intersectional Diversity (EID) Project are refusing to shy away from complexity.
It doesn’t get better for all of us, and Tyler Clementi presented irrefutable evidence that identity-based bullying claims lives. How can we do better to make it better?
Laura Goode
Laura Goode’s first novel, Sister Mischief, an interracial gay hip-hop love story for teens, was released by Candlewick Press in July 2011. Her poems ...
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