Dan Savage overwhelmed by gay outreach's response

[n2doc]

Peter Hartlaub, Chronicle Pop Culture Critic

Friday, October 8, 2010


Dan Savage and his partner shot the first It Gets Better Project video in their Seattle home. It turned out poorly - too much about their bad experiences as teens, not enough about their good times as adults - so they brought the camera and sound gear to a local bar and tried again, focusing on their joys as a couple raising a preteen son.

Then they uploaded the message on YouTube and waited.

"Honest to God, we put up our video and thought 'Are we going to be the only ones?' " Savage, 46, said by phone.

Two and a half weeks later, the author and sex advice columnist's online experiment is a phenomenon, thanks in part to a bit of tragic timing: The high-profile suicides of several gay teens, particularly 18-year-old Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi, who killed himself after a voyeuristic video of an intimate encounter in his dorm room was allegedly made by his roommate and broadcast online. Clementi, a promising young violinist, apparently sought advice from a gay-themed online chat site after his date was cybercast and reportedly told his dorm's resident adviser about the incident. But none of that was enough to keep him from jumping to his death from the George Washington Bridge.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/08/MNVJ1FP6E1.DTL

[saracat]

1. Wonderful idea. Congrats to them.