It Gets Better
In 2011, in response to the suicides of gay teens, a video campaign was launched in the United States by author and journalist Dan Savage and his husband, Terry Miller. Known as It Gets Better, the campaign was created to support lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth in the United States. It quickly became international, with supporters flooding in from around world. The campaign has been supported by celebrities – including Ellen DeGeneres, Neil Patrick Harris, and English rugby star Ben Cohen – and by international leaders – such as Desmond Tutu in South Africa and British Prime Minister David Cameron – all of whom have recorded videos and messages of support. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police released a video with their staff sharing experiences of being gay men and women in the force and ensuring viewers that it gets better.
Each of us is encouraged to pledge the following:
Everyone deserves to be respected for who they are. I pledge to spread this message to my friends, family, and neighbors. I’ll speak up against hate and intolerance whenever I see it, at school and at work. I’ll provide hope for lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and other bullied teens by letting them know that “It Gets Better.”
Fifty years ago, let alone one hundred years ago, this pledge couldn’t have been imagined. Immense changes have occurred in the attitudes toward gays. It has gotten better – not just for gay youth facing the challenges of adolescence, but also for the LGBT community at large. Never before has there been the same degree of acceptance, tolerance, and respect for the LGBT community.
That is not to say that there isn’t still bullying and hatred toward the LGBT community by individuals and some groups, but there is more support for LGBT youth than there has ever been in the past. There is a fight to stop bullying against members of the LGBT community in person and in cyberspace.
On December 15, 2011, the United Nations released the first-ever report on the human rights of LGBT people. The chilling report details how around the world people are killed or endure hate-motivated violence, torture, detention, criminalization, and discrimination in jobs, health care, and education because of their real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. In the report, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights calls on countries to repeal laws that criminalize homosexuality, abolish the death penalty for offenses involving consensual sexual relations, harmonize the age of consent for heterosexual and homosexual conduct, and enact comprehensive anti-discrimination laws. The report stresses the need to champion the LGBT community and highlights the great strides that have been made in the last two decades with thirty countries decriminalizing homosexuality.
The report identifies the seventy-six countries in the world where it remains illegal to engage in same-sex conduct. In at least five countries – Iran, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Yemen – a conviction can result in the death penalty.
While homosexuality is still outlawed and punishable by law in some places, there are a growing number of other places where same-sex marriages are legal. Gay pride is honored in cities such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, London, Mexico City, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Shanghai, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Toronto. These cities embrace gay culture and have large, vibrant gay communities. The colorful rainbow flag is used to identify the LGBT communities, and the color pink is used to celebrate gay culture. In Toronto the directory of gay businesses is called The Pink Pages; in France the LGBT television station is called Pink TV; and in Britain gay news is delivered through the Pink News. Businesses actively seek out “pink” dollars – the money spent within the LGBT community, also known as the Pink Economy.
Why pink?
Because pink was the color of persecution for gay men in Nazi Germany. It is forever linked to the pink triangle they were forced to wear in concentration camps to identify themselves as homosexuals. The color pink comes from a bleak and terrifying period of gay history, but today it is a color of remembrance and celebration.
True to her word, Kitty Fischer never did forget the man who had pulled her out of the latrine at Auschwitz. And she never forgot the story he told her. He was forced to wear the pink triangle because he was a homosexual – he lived with another man. When he had arrived at Auschwitz, the Nazis asked him how he made his living. They laughed when he told them he was a portrait painter and said they had the perfect job for him. They gave him a brush and a bucket of whitewash, and for seven days a week, ten hours a day, he used his skill to brush the filth off the latrines. That’s how he came to witness Kitty’s humiliation.
By the time Kitty and her sister had arrived at the camp, the war was not going well for the Germans. Camps were being closed, and evidence of the atrocities that had taken place in them was being destroyed. When the man with the pink triangle learned he was being sent to dismantle another camp, he feared the girls would be killed if they stayed in Auschwitz. He told Kitty that some women were to be sent out of the camp to work in a weaving factory and that they must find a way to be part of the group.
Only fifty women were chosen, but Kitty and her sister were among them, after Kitty made up a story that her family had owned a weaving factory in Czechoslovakia. She never saw the man with the pink triangle again. She never even knew his name. She only knew that he had saved their lives and that she would never forget him.
Many years later, in 2001, when the Gay and Lesbian Holocaust Memorial Park was dedicated in Sydney, Australia, where Kitty then lived, she said, “I don’t know what happened to him, but I made a promise that if I ever got out of Auschwitz alive, I would tell the story of the pink triangle man who brought me two jacket potatoes every day and saved my and my sister’s lives.” (48)
The memorial was Kitty’s brainchild, and she played a major role in its fundraising. Those who visit the Gay and Lesbian Memorial Park opposite Sydney’s Jewish Museum can read the inscription:
