PREDICTABLE: Navel-Gazing Over-Intellectualizing Queer Theorists Attack Dan Savage's "It Gets Better"

At almost the moment that Dan Savage shared his idea for helping LGBT youth, I began pondering the inevitable backlash from the queer theorists who relish attacking any project (no matter how innovative, effective, or sincere) merely because it came from a member of the "patriarchal ageist classist gay white cis-male privileged ruling class." I've read a few such predictable rants since the moment the It Gets Better Project launched, but this one takes the cake.

I'll just excerpt one bit of this drivel, where the author attacks Savage's own initial video.

Promoting the illusion that things just “get better,” enables privileged folks to do nothing and just rely on the imaginary mechanics of the American Dream to fix the world. Fuck that. How can you tell kids it gets better without having the guts to say how. This is a video for rich kids for whom the only violent part of their life is high school. It’s a video for classist, privileged gay folks who think that telling their stories is the best way to help others. Telling folks that their suffering is normal doesn’t reassure them– it homogenizes their experience. It doesn’t make them feel like part of a bigger community, it makes them feel irrelevant.

From my privileged classist gay white cis-male walk-up studio apartment, let me just say, FUCK YOU, LADY.

For a more nuanced reaction, let's go to Matthew Rettenmund.

"Telling people that they have to wait for their life to get amazing—to tough it out so that they can be around when life gets amazing—is a violent reassignment of guilt." This is laughable. Violently laughable. We're talking about kids considering suicide, and the writer thinks that the "reassignment of guilt"—if that's even what this is about—is "violent"? No, violent is hanging yourself. This is the kind of writer who probably refers to unpleasant words as "rape," too. The writer thinks it's "ageist garbage" to tell kids they're depriving themselves if they don't survive their teen years. Is it really ageist to say life improves as you age? It also argues that kids are being pre-blamed for not having the guts to make it to the promised land, but isn't it really just an extension of hope, an encouragement to continue living? Note to essayist: Stay away from romcoms.

And the far left continues to eat its progressive own in the cause of some mythical gaytopia.