The Moth Presents Dan Savage: Not That Kind of Gay (by mothstories)
Love the story.
The Moth Presents Dan Savage: Not That Kind of Gay (by mothstories)
Love the story.
The point of the “It Gets Better” project is to give kids like Jamey Rodemeyer hope for their futures. But sometimes hope isn’t enough. Sometimes the damage done by hate and by haters is simply too great. Sometimes the future seems too remote. And those are the times our hearts break.
– Dan Savage
- Mr. SAVAGE: I have an interesting story about a priest too, if you want to hear it.
- GROSS: Yeah.
- Mr. SAVAGE: You know, when I came out to my mom - and I had a similar experience with Terry, where I was ready to come out when I was 16 years old, and I really needed my family's support and needed to stop hiding. And I put it off for a couple of years because suddenly my dad left my mother, and I didn't want to pile on. I didn't want to walk into my mom's bedroom and say: Oh, hey, crying lady on the bed, this'll take your mind off the divorce.
- Mr. SAVAGE: So I waited until I was 18 to come out to her. And when I did, she - you know, my mom was terrific and a wonderful woman. And she - you know, she said, she told me a joke, which was, you know, very my family. She said: Oh, I kind of know. And did you hear the one about the two men who attacked a woman in Lincoln Park? Which was kind of the gay neighborhood at the time in Chicago. And I was like: No, Mom, I hadn't heard that one. She said: One held her down. The other did her hair.
- Mr. SAVAGE: And then she had her crisis in the following days, where she came back to me and said she was very upset about this and she didn't want any - didn't want to ever meet a boyfriend of mine. She didn't want me to bring any gay people to the house. She really wanted to have me but not have that. And she called a priest, a friend of the family. And my family was so Catholic and so involved in the Catholic Church that priests made house calls. So my mom called a priest, and he came running. And my mom sat with Father Tom, who I'm eternally indebted to, on the porch swing at our house, and said that I had come out and she was very upset and wanted to get me into therapy. And Father Tom put his hand on my mom's knee and said: Judy, I'm gay. And it's better this way. It's better for Danny to be out than to live like I've lived.
- GROSS: Yeah. Dan, what about your stories of being bullied?
- Mr. SAVAGE: I was, you know, my parents were very Catholic. My dad was a Catholic deacon. My mom was a Catholic lay minister. I went to the seminary for high school. And I was bullied mostly in middle school, in sixth, seventh, eighth grade. And it was bad, but it wasn't that bad. Ironically, when the project started, I called my older brother Billy, who's straight, to tell him that despite the fact that we were launching this campaign to address anti-gay bullying in schools, I remembered that he had it worse. He was bullied, viciously bullied, in the same school, same middle school that I attended at the same time. We were very close in age. And he had it much, much worse than I did. And he said something very smart. You know, I'd said, Billy - I remember how bad it was for you. Don't think I don't remember that straight kids get bullied too. And he said: Yeah, but at the end of the day, I had Mom and Dad, and you didn't. And that really captures the difference for the bullied straight kid versus the bullied gay kid, is that the bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience with bullying at school and why he's being bullied. And Billy was being bullied for being smart. And I couldn't go home and open up to my parents. I did think about suicide briefly, not because the bullying had gotten so bad but because I thought that that would be the good Catholic son thing to do for my parents.
- GROSS: Wow, that - to protect them?
- Mr. SAVAGE: Yeah, that it would be easier for them to bury a kid than have a kid come out.
“In response to the suicide of 15 year old Billy Lucas, a Greensburg, Indiana high school student who was the target of slurs and bullying, gay advice columnist Dan Savage has launched the It Gets Better Project.” (via Gaygamer.net)
She’s not interested in your fidelity, she’s interested in your misery
– Dan Savage on control-freak girlfriend
