Authors: Dan Savage

It Gets Better (37 page)

BOOK: It Gets Better

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All of our work is designed to ensure student safety and champion students' success. Our programs include:

â¢ Leadership development training and support to individual student leaders and more than four thousand Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs)

â¢ National sponsorship of the Day of Silence, a student-led day of action that has reached hundreds of thousands of students

â¢ Federal- and state-level legislative and policy advocacy for effective measures to reduce bullying and bias in schools

â¢ Professional development trainings on LGBT issues for thousands of teachers, administrators, and other school staff

â¢ The Safe Space Campaign to place critical information in all one hundred thousand middle and high schools nationwide

These are just a few of the ways that GLSEN works to improve school climate on LGBT issues nationwide, and contribute to the creation of great schools that serve all of their students. To learn more about GLSEN and our work, visit
www.glsen.org
.

GLSEN is grateful to Dan Savage and the It Gets Better Project for selecting GLSEN as an official beneficiary.

ACLU LGBT Project

America's foremost advocate of individual rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, is a nonpartisan organization founded in 1920. With national headquarters in New York and Washington and fifty-three affiliates throughout the country, the ACLU has played a major role in nearly every critical civil liberties battle of the last century.

The ACLU has advocated on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people for more than seventy years and in 1986 founded its LGBT Project, a division of the national ACLU Foundation. Today, the ACLU does more court cases, legislative lobbying, and grassroots policy advocacy on LGBT matters than any other national civil rights organization. The ACLU also works in the media to change public attitudes and provide advocacy tools to help people take action in their own communities.

The LGBT Project's Youth & Schools program works to make public schools safe and bias-free for LGBTQ students and teachers and helps students stand up to discrimination, harassment, and censorship.

The project's website provides several resources for young people, including information on their legal rights in school and printable letters that students and parents can give to their schools about LGBTQ students' free speech rights and their right to attend school without fear of harassment, to bring same-sex dates to the prom, to have Internet access that doesn't illegally censor pro-LGBT content, to form Gay-Straight Alliance clubs, and other such issues. We promise that every young person who writes or calls the ACLU LGBT Project will get a response.

For more information on the project's work on behalf of LGBTQ youth, visit
http://www.aclu.org/safeschools
.

To donate to the ACLU's LGBT work, visit
http://www.aclu.org/lgbtdonate
.

WRITE TO US

American Civil Liberties Union Foundation LGBT Project, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York, NY 10004-2400

PHOTO AND COMIC CREDITS

FEATURED COMIC ARTISTS

Alison Bechdel
wrote the comic strip
Dykes to Watch Out For
from 1983 to 2008. Her graphic memoir about her closeted-gay dad,
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
, was nominated for a 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Vermont.

Seattle cartoonist
Ellen Forney
created several Eisner-nominated comic books, including
I Love Led Zeppelin
and
Monkey Food,
and collaborated with Sherman Alexie on National Book Award-winning novel
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
She teaches comics studio and graphic novels lit at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and is currently working on her first graphic novel for Gotham/Penguin Books.

PHOTO CREDITS

Taylor Bailey, photo by Annette Haynes
Kate Bornstein, photo by Maxwell Ander
AgustÃn Cepeda, photo by Angela Hsieh
Andy Cohen, photo courtesy of Bravo Media
Ivan Coyote, photo by Laura Sawchuk
Angelo D'Agostino, photo by Eric Scot
Philip Deal, photo by Wendy Werner Maness Photography
Ellen DeGeneres, photo by Andrew Eccles/Warner Bros.
Barbara Gaines, photo by JP Filo
Brian Gallivan, photo by David Zaugh
Terry Galloway, photo by Alan Pogue
Kevin Hague, photo by Alan Liefting
Murray Hill, photo by Allison Michael Orenstein
Perez Hilton, photo by Austin Young
Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, photo by Jicky Leidicke
Wayne Knaub, photo by Rex Rogosch
Gregory Maguire, photo by Andy Newman, Â© 2008,
used with permission
Kyle Dean Massey, photo by Susan Shacter
Patrick Murphy, photo by Allyson Murphy
Meshell Ndegeocello, photo by Mark Seliger
Bishop Gene Robinson, photo by BProud Photography, Philadelphia
Urvashi Vaid, photo by Tom Genarra
Kevin Yee, photo by Louisa Podlich
Mark Ramirez, photo courtesy of Jonathan McMillan
randy roberts potts, photo by Ange Fitzgerald
Bishop Mark Hanson, photo by the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America

PERMISSIONS

God Believes in
You
used by permission of Bishop Gene Robinson, Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, copyright Â© 2011 by Bishop Gene Robinson, Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire.

A Message from Ellen DeGeneres used by permission of Ellen DeGeneres, copyright Â© Ellen DeGeneres 2011.

And the Emmy Goes To . . . used by permission of the author, copyright Â© 2011 by Barbara Gaines. Originally created as part of the Strength Through Community Project of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York.

A Message from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used by permission of the U.S. Department of State.

A Message from Prime Minister David Cameron used by permission of the Prime Minister's Office, London.