It Gets Better: Queer Futures, Critical Frustrations, and Radical Potentials

In 2010, responding to several widely reported Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and/or Queer (LGBTQ) youth suicides, the It Gets Better project was developed to offer hope and outreach to alienated queer youths in crisis through personalized YouTube messages. Queer critiques of the project and its founder, Dan Savage, were quick to challenge the privileged and homonormative investments from the outset of the campaign, rejecting the campaign as passive, impractical, homogenizing, and exclusionary. This paper argues that the queer critiques launched at It Gets Better work to both strengthen and obscure the radical queer potentials of the campaign. Read as a project of queering future, It Gets Better enacts a mediated form of generativity, while continually expanding the possible significations for the symbol of “better,” in order to queer sedimented logics that cast LGBTQ persons as without future. Rejecting critical tragedy in favor of a model of critical frustration, this paper works with and through queer criticisms of It Gets Better to embrace and extend the multivocal and contradictory potentials of the project.