It Gets Better: Why One Accepting Adult Changes the Odds

The argument, Harry Hayman says, has never been complicated. You do not have to understand somebody else’s life to respect their right to live it. You do not have to share their choices or their experiences to leave them alone while they make them. And your personal discomfort, however genuine, does not give you authority over what another person does with their own existence. He made another of his periodic donations to It Gets Better and wrote about this publicly in August 2026, not because the idea had changed but because, as far as he is concerned, the work that makes the idea real still matters and the people doing that work still deserve support.

What It Gets Better Does

It Gets Better was founded on September 21, 2010, by writer and activist Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller. It began as a direct response to the deaths of several LGBTQ+ teenagers who had been bullied. The idea behind the first video was spare enough to state in one sentence: gay and queer adults would record messages telling young people that life after high school was not going to feel the way high school felt, and that it was worth holding on to find out.

The campaign grew quickly. The Wikipedia article on the campaign notes that by October 2010, less than a month after the original video, President Barack Obama had contributed a message of his own. The project was formally incorporated as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, and the archive eventually grew to include more than 50,000 video entries from contributors of all sexual orientations, with more than 50 million total views. The organization now operates affiliate groups in 19 countries, including Chile, Mexico, Canada, and India. In Peru, Chile, and Mexico, it runs an initiative called Hora Segura that provides free psychological support. In 2012, the project received the Primetime Emmy Governors Award. A printed essay collection published in 2011 became a New York Times bestseller.

The scale matters. But so does what the organization decided to do with that reach. Since 2022, It Gets Better has distributed approximately 1.5 million dollars to schools across the United States and Canada to fund LGBTQ+ student support projects. That is a different kind of work than producing videos, and it reflects an organization that has moved beyond its founding medium while keeping its founding purpose: making sure young people hear, in some form, that they have a future.

Harry Hayman calls It Gets Better an organization he has been proud to support for years. The phrase he used was that it works through storytelling, education, and community. That description tracks. It is also, for anyone who has watched what Harry does across the rest of his public life, a description of the kind of work he tends to put his backing behind.

The Research Behind the Ask

The reason organizations like It Gets Better exist is not only emotional. There is a documented relationship between whether a young LGBTQ+ person has at least one supportive adult in their life and whether they are more likely to survive adolescence, and the relationship is substantial enough that researchers consider it one of the more reliable findings in this area.

The Trevor Project, which focuses on crisis intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ young people, has conducted a national survey on LGBTQ+ youth mental health annually for several years. Its 2024 national survey drew responses from more than 18,000 young people ages 13 to 24. It found that 39 percent of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered suicide in the past year. Among transgender and nonbinary youth, that figure rose to roughly 46 percent. The 2024 survey also found that LGBTQ+ young people living in very accepting communities attempted suicide at about 8 percent, while those in unaccepting communities reported a rate of about 20 percent. The community a young person lives in, in other words, shows up in the data.

In a research brief on accepting adults and LGBTQ+ youth, the Trevor Project found that LGBTQ+ young people who reported having at least one accepting adult were 40 percent less likely to have attempted suicide in the past year. The brief analyzed data from more than 20,000 respondents ages 13 to 24. The brief found that over one-quarter of those without an accepting adult reported attempting suicide in the past year, compared to 17 percent of those with at least one. The Trevor Project’s overview of facts about LGBTQ+ youth suicide puts the broader comparison plainly: LGBTQ+ young people are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide as their non-LGBTQ+ peers.

The research does not suggest that acceptance solves everything. What it suggests is that the absence of acceptance makes measurable things measurably worse, and that its presence makes them measurably better.

A Philosophy That Does Not Require Agreement

Harry Hayman did not frame his donation as a political statement. He framed it as the product of something he has never found difficult to reason through.

”I’ve just never understood the obsession with somebody else’s sexuality,” he wrote. His way of accounting for his own position was deliberately plain. Gay, straight, bisexual, still figuring it out: none of those categories told him anything he needed to know about a person. What he was interested in was whether they were decent. Whether they treated people with respect. Whether they tried to leave things a little better. “That’s the shit I care about” was the phrase he used.

The line he returned to was this one: “Your discomfort doesn’t give you jurisdiction over somebody else’s existence.” It is a sentence that sounds straightforward and turns out to contain quite a lot. The argument it makes is not that discomfort is illegitimate. It is that discomfort is a private experience, not a public license. It belongs to the person feeling it, and it does not travel outward and become a claim on what someone else is allowed to do.

He pointed that argument toward a particular situation: young people who may already be scared, or isolated, or working out where they fit in the world. His phrasing was that the people around those young people could spend less time telling them who they are supposed to be and more time making sure they know they have a future. That is not a new idea. It is, in fact, the idea It Gets Better was built on in 2010. Harry Hayman’s view is that it has not stopped being true.

His summary of his own philosophy on the subject was spare: if you do not like it, do not participate. He called that easy. The part he described as not easy was the situation of young people who have not yet reached the point in their own life where they can see past the environment they are in. That is the gap It Gets Better exists to address, and it is the gap Harry Hayman has chosen, repeatedly, to put money toward closing.

Why Harry Hayman Comes Back to This

Harry Hayman described himself as proud to support It Gets Better again, and prouder still of the young people who, as he put it, have the courage to be exactly who they are. The statement moves in a specific direction: not toward the people who require persuading, but toward the people who are already doing the harder thing.

That orientation is consistent with the rest of his public work. His involvement with the Feed Philly Coalition and his fellowship at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia are not one-time appearances. He comes back because the conditions he is working against continue to exist. The same reasoning appears to govern his support for It Gets Better. The need for an organization telling young LGBTQ+ people that their lives are worth living has not become smaller. He returns because the work has not finished.

His closing observation was the shortest piece of the argument: “The world has plenty of real problems. Who somebody loves isn’t one of them.” That is about as uncomplicated as a position can get. More of Harry Hayman’s work across civic life, food security, and culture in Philadelphia is at harryhayman.com.

What It Gets Better Does

The Research Behind the Ask

A Philosophy That Does Not Require Agreement

Why Harry Hayman Comes Back to This

Sources and references