Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
$12.20$12.20
FREE delivery: Thursday, April 25 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: alibabaa
Buy used: $9.01
Other Sellers on Amazon
FREE Shipping
100% positive over last 12 months
FREE Shipping
98% positive over last 12 months
FREE Shipping
97% positive over lifetime
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Image Unavailable
Color:
-
-
-
- To view this video download Flash Player
-
-
VIDEO -
Follow the authors
OK
It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living Hardcover – March 22, 2011
Purchase options and add-ons
- Watch a video
After a number of tragic suicides by LGBT students who were bullied in school, syndicated columnist and author Dan Savage uploaded a video to YouTube with his partner Terry Miller to inspire hope for LGBT youth facing harassment. Speaking openly about the bullying they suffered as teenagers, and how they both went on to lead rewarding adult lives, their video launched the It Gets Better Project YouTube channel and initiated a worldwide phenomenon. With over 6,000 videos posted and over 20 million views in the first three months alone, the world has embraced the opportunity to provide personal, honest and heartfelt support for LGBT youth everywhere.
It Gets Better is a collection of expanded essays and new material from celebrities, everyday people and teens who have posted videos of encouragement, as well as new contributors who have yet to post videos to the site. While many of these teens couldn't see a positive future for themselves, we can. We can show LGBT youth the levels of happiness, potential and positivity their lives will reach if they can just get through their teen years. By sharing these stories, It Gets Better reminds teenagers in the LGBT community that they are not alone - and it WILL get better.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherDutton
- Publication dateMarch 22, 2011
- Reading age14 years and up
- Dimensions5.75 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100525952330
- ISBN-13978-0525952336
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
Review
"A masterstroke . . . revolutionary." — Armistead Maupin, author of Tales of the City
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Dutton; First Edition (March 22, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0525952330
- ISBN-13 : 978-0525952336
- Reading age : 14 years and up
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,114,361 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,436 in LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies
- #13,367 in Self-Esteem (Books)
- #167,830 in Reference (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
Videos
Videos for this product

2:51
Click to play video

Watch an Author Video
Merchant Video
About the authors

Dan Savage is a writer, activist, and TV personality best known for his political and social commentary, as well as his honest approach to sex, love and relationships.
Savage is the author of: American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics; The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage and My Family; Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America (Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction); The Kid: What Happened When My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant (PEN West Award for Creative Nonfiction); and Savage Love. He co-authored How to be a Person. The Kid was adapted into an Off-Broadway play and has recently been optioned for film.
Savage is the Editorial Director of The Stranger, Seattle's weekly alternative newspaper, and his writing has appeared in widely in publications including The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Rolling Stone, The Onion, and Salon.com. Savage is also a contributor to Ira Glass's This American Life. "Savage Love" is syndicated in newspapers and websites throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia.
In 2010, Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, launched a YouTube video meant to offer hope to bullied LGBTQ youth. The It Gets Better Project has become a global movement, inspiring more than 50,000 videos. Savage and Miller co-edited the It Gets Better book, published in March 2011. In 2012, the It Gets Better Project received the Governors Award at the Creative Arts Emmys.
Savage grew up in Chicago and now lives in Seattle, Washington with his husband and their son, DJ.
Photos by LaRae Lobdell.

Kay Rivers, Ph.D. is a credentialed teacher, the Founder of Reimagining Ourselves, and a New York Times Bestselling Author.
She holds a doctorate degree in psychology and uses her knowledge and experience as an educator and sexual assault survivor to help people who use weight as protection (and our supporters) to feel safe in our bodies, so we can finally have the body we want and deserve. Her website is: www.reimaginingourselves.org
Dr. Rivers lives and works in Northern California where she is married with three amazing children.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
It seems a little backwards, doesn't it? Doesn't the movie usually get made from the book? Well yes, but Dan and Terry had a great idea to use social networking as a way to speak directly to LGBT youth. The phenomenal success of the project (at present, there are more than 10,000 videos at the It Gets Better website) demonstrates that there is a need, interest, and support for outreach to young people who may be struggling with their feelings and fears.
And now there is the book. One goal of the project is to have a copy of the book in every single library in the US. Because, guess what--there are probably kids out there who don't have access to the Internet, or whose parents won't let them watch YouTube, or who are so fearful and afraid of what might happen to them if someone found out they were surfing the `net for info on being gay that they don't. So this vast resource that has been created in six short months is not available to them. But hopefully they have access to a library, whether in their school or town, and they can go there and find this book and realize: it gets better.
If you've watched any of the videos, you know what the essays in the book are like. Many are transcribed from the videos but there is also new content, or in Terry Miller's words, "Videos that haven't been made yet." There are lots of famous names but also plenty of stories from ordinary people. The variety of emotions, topics, and thoughts that are presented are important--it is clear that Savage and Miller wanted to make sure that every base was covered so that no child who reads this would feel left out--no matter who you are, where you live, or what your circumstance there is someone else out there in the world who has gone through what you are going through and came out on the other side--and is able to say: it gets better.
This is not the sort of book to read straight through--it's not a novel, after all. It's better to flip though and read essays at random, bookmark those that resonate, and make notes (if you are a note-making-in-the-book type of person). Fortunately, the publisher realized these features apply to e-readers as well as those who enjoy print. The table of contents is linked so that on my Kindle, it was very easy to skip from chapter to chapter.
I think this is an important book to own and equally important to pass on. Consider, please, if you can afford it, buying a copy to give to a friend, a young person, or a library. I just gifted a copy of the paperback to my daughter's high school. Won't you join me and do the same?
Highly recommended.
Among my personal favorites by known names within the community are the contributors Alison Bechdel, Kate Bornstein, Kate Clinton and Urvashi Vaid. And I must mention that the book includes an essay by one of my favorite writers, David Sedaris.
In his essay, Sedaris notes: "A gay fourteen-year-old in the year 2010, even one living in the smallest of towns, must surely know that he's not the only homosexual on earth. He might need reminding, though, that all the best people are tormented in junior high school. If they're not getting harassed for being gay, they're bound to get it for being too smart, too loud, or too independent. It's always something, and then you get older, and things change for the better."
Many of the essays that touched me the most are from everyday people, and from various artists with whom I've been introduced by reading this book. For me, a particularly memorable essay is by Gabrielle Rivera, a writer, poet and film director, born and raised in the Bronx, NY.
"First of all," Rivera writes, "it doesn't get better but what does happen is this: You get stronger. You realize what's going on; you see how people are; you see how the world is. And as an adult, you learn how to deal with it. You learn that other people are just crazy and caught up in their own crap."
No matter what our age or the progression of our coming-out process, there are always times when we need encouragement. I suggest reading "It Gets Better." And afterward, consider giving the book to someone else -- perhaps an LGBT or questioning youth.
Looking for another reason to buy the book? All proceeds will be donated to LGBT youth charities.
Great read with critically important life lessons on supporting the LGBTQ community as they seek to find acceptance and peace in a world of misunderstanding.
Top reviews from other countries
His initiative in launching YouTube messages to try to stem the flow of gay and lesbian teen suicides - and suicides of those fingered as gay but not - mushroomed well beyond his own and anyone else's imagination so that now there have been thousands of such messages.
This is a compilation of barely a hundred of those messages, and in a way the warmth of the human straight to camera messages on YouTube is slightly lost in the cold print on page. That's a great shame. Personally I would have omitted the messages from Nancy Pelosi and David Cameron, which read to me like going through motions messages, though keeping that from President Obama. It is the messages from folk who are actually lesbian or gay and who now live happy lives despite all they went through that are the most inspirational.
With that caveat I thoroughly commend this book. Every school library and youth club should have it, casually left where a teen can pick it up. And if you're the parent of a kid you suspect might be gay, get it and leave it around likewise - this may help him/her come out to you, the first step in the rest of their life.







