It Gets Better (15 page)

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Authors: Dan Savage

BOOK: It Gets Better
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It got better when I came out, when I was able to tell my friends and family that I'm still me but I'm not quite who you thought. When I was able to say, “I'm transgender,” it got a lot better. My friends were there for me. My family was there for me. My colleagues were there for me.
When I came out to my mom, who is a retired bassoonist, I had been dreading that conversation for a long time, not knowing how she would react. Finally, I just said, “Mom, I'm transgender.” She replied, “That's all right, dear; we had a lot of that in the orchestra.”
Overall, my family and friends have been great: supportive, kind, and curious. Sometimes I think they treat my transsexuality as a sacred cow, though, and I find myself wishing they'd just lay in and razz me about it for once.
Right after I transitioned, I was really self-conscious. Any time I was in public and I made eye contact with someone, I got really nervous and thought, “Oh, this person is staring at me because I'm transsexual.” And then straight guys started asking me out, and I realized that there's more than one kind of staring.
It's always okay to ask questions, especially when it's questions about yourself. It's okay to ask, “Who am I?” It's okay to ask, “What gender am I?” You should never be afraid of those questions.
If I could tell my teenage self one thing, it would be: “Hurry up and get your wisdom teeth out, please. Do me a favor.” And if I could tell my teenage self two things, it would be: “Dude, you're a girl. It's okay. Get used to it and enjoy it. Be yourself and don't be afraid of anything.”
I love who I am. I'm very proud to be transsexual, and I wouldn't have had it any other way.
Tamsyn Waterhouse
grew up just outside Winnipeg, spent a decade in university studying mathematical physics, and dropped out when she finally achieved her life goal of owning her weight in LEGO. She now lives in San Francisco and works in renewable energy R&D. She loves film, food, games, airplanes, and communal living, but she does not love writing autobiographical paragraphs.
ART FROM RAGE
by Jake Shears
NEW YORK, NY
 
 
 
 
I
was fifteen years old when I came out. I went to a big high school, and since there were so many kids there, I thought it would be as good a time and place for me to come out as any. So I started telling other kids that I was gay, launching what was probably the worst year of my life. I was harassed; I was followed; I was threatened; kids wanted to kill me. I couldn't go from class to class without being accosted. Kids would throw desks and chairs at me in class and the teachers would just pretend that they didn't see what was going on.
I would get sent to the principal's office with these kids that were obviously
torturing
me, or I would go on my own accord, and be told that this was happening because I wasn't keeping my private life private. Any school administrators with that attitude today should be put in prison in my opinion.
I'm here to tell you that even though it's horrible and these terrible things happen, and you may have this idea to kill yourself, to hurt yourself, don't. I thought about it. I thought about killing myself quite a few times during this period of my life but I'm so glad I didn't, because I'm living the dreams now that I created when I was fifteen years old. I'm living out those fantasies that I had. It's such a rewarding, amazing life that I've gotten to lead.
I'm having so much more fun than I did when I was fifteen, that's for damn sure. The experiences that you have when you're a queer teenager—and I'm using the word
queer
in a very broad sense, covering everyone who feels different—are going to give you a whole new perspective on the rest of your life. And they can instill in you a sense of joy, a sense of inspiration, and an amazing sense of humor.
I get to run around onstage in front of a ton of people and rip at my clothes and shake my ass and act as gay as I want to be. I get paid to express myself however I want to in an explosive way. That's a direct response to the fact that I didn't feel like I could do any of that when I was fifteen. I've made a career out of my rage. I've turned it into a job. I still have a lot of rage in me and I still have a lot of anger about that time of my life, and I probably always will. But you can take that anger and use it for your own good. They say blondes have more fun. Well, I say queers have more fun, and blonde queers have the most fun.
However hard it may seem, however bad it gets, whether it's from your parents, or from fellow students, or your brothers and sisters, or your crazy religious next-door neighbors, or whomever, breathing down your neck, telling you that you are a bad person, or that you're full of sin, or that you don't deserve to have as good of a life as anybody else, just realize they're crazy. Those people are
crazy
. If you remember that, that they're just crazy people who have nothing better to do than insinuate themselves into to other people's lives and try to control them, if you just remember that, then you'll be okay. Then you can go on to make lots of friends and create a family full of people that don't behave that way.
You are a special person and you've got so much to offer the world, and even though you may feel sad right now, you can turn your sadness into joy and you can turn your rage into art.
Jake Shears
lives in New York City and is the lead singer of the band Scissor Sisters. He's also cowritten the musical version of
Tales of the City
, which will open at ACT in San Francisco in June 2011.
IT GETS BETTER /
(BTKOUN AHSAN)
by Bashar Makhay /
NEW YORK, NY
 
 
Original transcript:
Original translated transcript:
 
When I first came out to myself, I realized why I wasn't happy with my life; I was in the closet and I wasn't living my life truly. When I first came out, I was really scared of what my friends and family would think and do. I was scared they would hurt me, abandon me, or just maybe love me for who I am. In the end, after a lot of time and a lot of discussion, more people in my life came to love me for who I am, but there are still many people in my life that have a difficult time understanding why I love someone of the same gender.
I think the issue of our people is that we do not talk about sexuality. Before I came out of the closet, nobody I knew spoke about sexuality. I think that when our people think about sexuality, they don't want anyone to ask about sexuality or tell anyone their sexuality. This is an issue.
In the end, when I came out, I told the whole world, I told everyone I know, the news, Internet, newspapers. For the first time in my life I started to see people talking about sexuality, a lot of people. Today I am very happy with my life; I have a lot of friends and people in my family who are proud of me. All I can say is that it takes a lot of time and discussion but life gets better, life gets a lot better.
Bashar Makhay
proudly identifies himself as a Progressive Gay Chaldean Iraqi-American Christian man. He began his organizing work with ACCESS (Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services), providing HIV/STD counseling, testing, and referral services to Arab and Chaldean gay men. Working at ACCESS, after struggling with his own coming-out process, Bashar realized that the Middle Eastern gay community needed and wanted to be organized. Bashar left ACCESS and then cofounded Al-GAMEA (The LGBT Association of Middle Eastern Americans), a first-of-its-kind organization, created to provide a forum for support, socialization, education, and awareness inside and outside of the Middle Eastern community in metropolitan Detroit. Bashar currently works as a program associate for the Arcus Foundation, a private foundation that works to achieve social justice based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and race.
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
by Cameron Tuttle
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
 
 
 
 
N
o one bullied me in high school because absolutely no one knew I was gay. Definitely not me. It took me years to figure that out.
I was one of those squeaky clean, annoyingly mainstream, overachiever types. I got good grades, did student government, sang in musicals, played team sports, and joined lots of clubs to fatten up my college applications. But even though I was popular and friends with lots of different people, I felt alone, really alone, like no one knew the real me.
How could they? I was trying so hard to be perfect.
On the outside, I was a thriving, active, make-my-family-proud, successful teenager. But on the inside, I was emotionally numb, comatose, flat-lining. My mom had died of breast cancer two weeks before the beginning of ninth grade. She was an amazing mom, loving and supportive, and she gave me enough freedom to explore who I was so I could succeed or fail with my own personal style. After she died, I was devastated. But I was determined to prove to the world and to myself that I was okay.
I found myself working really, really hard to be the best because I was scared. Scared of being different. Scared of being defective. Scared of feeling my feelings. So for years, I didn't let myself feel.
I got a lot done in high school but I didn't have a lot of fun. And even though I wasn't ever bullied by other people, I was relentlessly bullied by my own thoughts and fears about who I was, how I was supposed to behave, and what would happen if I didn't.
I actually had this pathetic idea that I would somehow let down my community—people I barely knew in the conservative, snooty neighborhood where I grew up—if I ended up being a lesbian. How ridiculous is that?
Bullying isn't just what real people in real time say to you or try to do to you. Bullying is everywhere—it's in the words of fearful, judgmental parents who are trying to control you. (BTW: it's also in the words of well-meaning but misguided parents who are trying to “protect you from being hurt.”) Bullying is in the news and in government policy. It's in the imagery of pop culture. It's in religion. And as a result, it gets into your head.
How did it get better for me? Slowly. It helped that I went to college across the country, as far away as I possibly could go from my hometown without needing a passport.
I eventually found the guts to stand up to my inner bully, the judgmental, fearful, bossy voice in my head that kept telling me,
You can't . . . You shouldn't . . . Don't you dare!
And then I finally found the confidence to listen to my body and to my heart and to be honest with myself.
And then I moved to New York.
When I was living there, I met tons of people who were a lot like me—squeaky-clean, annoyingly mainstream overachievers who just happened to be gay: former high-school cheerleaders, homecoming kings, class officers, student leaders, star athletes. And I realized . . . yeah, I can do this. Yeah, I can be this. And now, I love being different—in my squeaky-clean, annoyingly mainstream way.

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