Born This Way & That

On the MTV Movie Awards this year, after the best kiss award was announced (one of the “Twilight” couples), the male of the couple ran from the podium, into the crowd of celebrities in the first few rows, and planted a long, lingering lip kiss on his male co-star. And you know what the audience of trendy teenagers did? It hooted and applauded. I didn’t hear one catcall or epithet.

The kids—the cool ones, the ones who go to MTV tapings, who will be the future tastemakers—do not consider male gay PDAs to be the agreed-upon anathema that my generation of teenagers did.

The Boy, almost six now, is a big fan of Lady Gaga and “Glee,” and we encourage that kind of behavior. He watched “Glee” for several months (with The Missus—it has too much singing and dancing by half for me), before we discovered he thought the character of Kurt was a girl.

But where I can take or leave “Glee,” I am surprised to find myself firmly in the Lady Gaga camp. God, it’s still embarrassing to even type her name. But that’s all right. Nobody who knows me reads blogs anyhow...

So let me tell you my Lady Gaga story. I’d heard about her. I’d seen pictures of her dressed in meat. She was supposed to be the latest big pop creation.

Naturally, I dismissed her out of hand. Assumed she was a Madonna-wannabe, but didn’t have even Madge’s squeaky chops, so she had to do crazy shit like dress in meat to get attention.

And in my defense, I can still see how she has set herself up to be perceived that way.

Anyhow, just to punish myself, I decided to watch the Grammys this year, too. I saw Ms Gaga arrive in an egg; I figured hers would definitely be a performance I would fast-forward through. Then she opened her mouth to sing, and this roaring arena-rock voice came pouring out. Sure, she had choreography and the usual excessive trappings of the successful best-selling pop tour, but this weird little chick could sing!

She proved it a couple days later when she released the studio version of the song, and her live vocal had been stronger than the studio one. That never happens, certainly not among pop phenoms. Suddenly I had visions of her going out, fronting a Queen tour with the surviving band members—it would be amazing.

Freddie Mercury definitely would have approved.

Anyhow, I also loved the content of the single she sang at the Grammys, “Born This Way.” My mother, for instance, just can’t get head her around the idea that people are born gay—not broken down then converted, or courted by the devil—and that it’s like being left-handed or blue-eyed: It’s okay, in spite of what her Good Book tells her.

It’s so cool to have that message boiled down to three simple words, set to a crazy danceable beat, and sold to millions of eager young listeners around the world. Bruce Springsteen said something a long time ago that Lady Gaga is now embracing: You may not be able to save the world, but you can change it.

The time is definitely ripe for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign.

You have to have heard about it. A web site where LGBT kids and adults can leave video messages advising the latest generation of LGBT young ’uns to hang on, stick it out; it gets better. It’s brilliant and wonderful.

I’ll bet it’s saved a lot of lives, and improved many that didn’t need saving.

As much as I admire and am grateful for the “It Gets Better” campaign, though, I can’t help but regret the fact that had it been around in my youth, it wouldn’t have been a place I would have gone to because of its emphasis on gender-identity issues.

As it’s being marketed now, they’re leaving too many kids behind, and we can’t afford to spare any.

There is a whole underclass of schoolkids who are bully-bait every day who are barely mentioned in the It Gets Better pledge, which reads as follows: Everyone deserves to be respected for who they are. I pledge to spread this message to my friends, family and neighbors. I’ll speak up against hate and intolerance whenever I see it [I love that bit!], at school or at work. I’ll provide hope for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and other bullied teens by letting them know “It Gets Better.”

Four words: and other bullied teens. Giving that many kids so few words in your mission statement seems to me more like an afterthought, or political cover, so “It Gets Better” doesn’t get spun by the Bad Guys as another Gay Campaign To Indecentify Our Children. Those four words may help protect it from partisan smear campaigns, but the site doesn’t seem to have much content for the kids they refer to.

I watched a lot of the videos on the site, and they are heart-breaking as well as hopeful. But almost every one of them deals with someone’s testimony concerning surmounting issues created by their gender identity. And there are at least as many kids bullied in school for any number of other specious reasons, and I was one of them.

Nobody at school targeted me because they thought I was gay, I was just different. Didn’t fit in. Socially inept. I was easy prey there for a while, and there were a lot of other victim-written-all-over-them kids getting their asses handed to them on the playground every day, too. It eventually got so bad for me, one year the biology teacher took me in and had me work on assignment posters in his classroom at lunch.

He made it better, but lunch only lasted an hour out of every day…

For most of those of us unaffiliated with a larger group of like-minded outcasts, it never got much better for us as we grew older. I eventually joined the stoners because their entrance requirements were pretty easy to meet, and because nobody but nobody wants to go through high school alone.

Because if you’re in school and you just don’t fit in—and aren’t lesbian, gay, bi or trans—you don’t even have the promise of a strong community which has endured similar prejudices to take you in and embrace you to look forward to. What you’ve got is bupkis; more grade-pressure, a stress-packed home life, peer-indifference and/or abuse and pretty likely a damned lonely life to look forward to.

Who speaks for those kids? All too often it is the suicidal assholes who come to school one day with trench coats, shotguns and a to-do list of high-profile classmates and teachers.

Because baby, they were born that way, too.