Bad Timing: “It Gets Better” and the Problem of Pedagogy

• In Event: The Affective Turn, Sexuality, and Curriculum Studies

Abstract

The last decade has seen an explosion of scholarship in queer theory that addresses both the lure of a better future and the nostalgic pull of a lost past. Bound up with conversations about affect and queer feelings, this attention to temporalities registers the ways queerness disrupts the inevitability of what Edelman (2004) calls, “reproductive futurism”—the fantasy that children inherit the future. Queerness, this literature hopes, pulls the promise of generational continuity apart at its seams. As Bruhm and Hurley (2004) argue, the “queer child” is the child who has given up or been stripped of her right to childhood. And yet, in the midst of these conflicts over the role of the family and children in the making of a queer future, LGBT adults and youth struggle to find spaces to talk with each other even as those conversations hinge on, even as they muddy, tropes of generation and development.
In this paper, I turn to the video project, “It Gets Better,” to consider the nature of conversations between adults and youth in the LGBT community. “It Gets Better” is a project started by sex columnist Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller. In response to the media coverage of a rash of suicides by LGBT youth in the fall of 2010, Savage and Miller created a short video that directly addressed LGBT youth and asked them to remember that even if their high schools, homes or towns are inhospitable environments, they should know that life gets better when: you move out of your parents’ house, you go to college, you leave high school, you make gay friends, you travel the world, you learn that you can have a family of your own, you fall in love. Their list, culled from their own autobiographies, is not meant to be exhaustive. It chronicles less the futures of LGBT youth than the pasts of Savage and Miller. They tell youth that they too felt suicidal, survived bullying, had fights with their families and that they lived to tell the tale.
Rather than understand “It Gets Better” through the important and widespread critiques of its “homo-normativity,” I consider the multiple temporalities at stake in these essentially pedagogical conversations. In the inaugural video, sex columnist Dan Savage and his partner Terry Miller speak as parents and as adults to LGBT youth. However, the chronology of this message is haunted by afterwardness of learning. What is at stake in these videos is both contemporary youth’s sense of themselves as queer and who they can imagine themselves to be as adults, but equally, how adults come to narrate their queer selves into existence and how, in that effort, they make use of their own adolescences. And then, from there, how that effort and that narrative come to shape the ways adults engage with contemporary youth.

Author

• Jen Gilbert, York University