Thanks for the measured response. I regret making it sound like I was lapsing into personal attacks instead of responding solely to the article. It's a side-effect of stewing on it for a few weeks and then writing the whole thing in a single stream-of-consciousness. And also, taking a lot of cinema studies classes in college. I'll add a note but I decided a while back not to do stealth-edits on posts except for typos.

First, you say that because the videos were not made for straight people, it’s invalid to talk about how they might be functioning among straight people.
Well no, I didn't say that, and on re-reading the post I don't think I gave the impression I was saying that. It's completely valid to talk about how they're perceived by straight people (and, I'll add, openly gay people who are no longer struggling with their sexuality). I believe what's invalid is to focus on how they function among straight people.

One of my biggest problems with the original article is how it treats the original purpose of the videos as an afterthought; "oh yeah, suicide." As I acknowledge, I do understand that the article's on a specific topic and directed at a specific audience. But it's still jarring to see something as weighty as teen suicide given such cursory treatment, in favor of immediately launching into how a bunch of YouTube videos play for "liberal city-dwellers."

Gay kids (and closeted adults) so often get compartmentalized or see stuff that's very personal to them being treated clinically — you often see yourself being compared to penguins or seeing strangers debate whether you're a sexual predator and making a big deal about how much of a choice you have. It's nice to see something that addresses people directly and says, "We have a good idea what you're feeling, and it doesn't have to be so scary or miserable."

When somebody's on the roof of a building about to jump off because he lost his job, you don't immediately go back home and write a blog post saying that something really should be done about the issue of rising unemployment in the United States. The first thing you do is help the guy down off the roof.

As I say in the article, I think the videos are a good thing, it’s just their viral spread among a lot of non-LGBT people that I find possibly problematic. [...] But I’m pretty sure they found a large audience outside the LGBT community. If someone wrote an article about yuppies wearing Che Guevera T-shirts, it doesn’t necessarily makes sense to say, “Oh, of course, talking about yuppies instead of Latin American revolutionaries! Che didn’t
pose in that photo for them! It’s not for them!” Isn’t that sort of the issue being discussed?
For starters, I'm definitely not saying that the videos, or for that matter any of what these kids are going through, are exclusive to some insular LGBT community. The whole notion of a shared LGBT identity is extraordinarily useful to some people, but it can also be problematic: in the attempt to identify a common "gay culture," it's gotten exclusionary and conformist, even if not intentionally. And if you don't feel you fit in with the public face of "what gay people are like," then it's even more isolating than trying to fit in with "what straight people are like." And on the other side, putting forward a shared identity gives homophobes a convenient stereotype to rail against.

That said: of course the videos have a wider audience than just LGBT teens in crisis. That's what I acknowledge with everything after the "Except..." in my post. That's part of the power of these videos: they don't just reassure younger people that their lives will get better; they reassure everybody that it's stupid to think of any of this as some big, scary, alien thing. That is going to do more to change the big picture than any number of earnest but mis-directed videos complaining about DADT or Prop 8.

And as for your Che Guevara analogy: I believe the tone of your article is more dismissive, or skeptical, of the It Gets Better project than you're making it sound now. It would be as if you said Che Guevara obviously accomplished nothing because there are so many yuppies and college students wearing Che shirts with no idea what they actually represent. And the much bigger difference: an American yuppie seeing someone with a Che shirt has no possible benefit for people in Latin America or Cuba. But a straight person watching an It Gets Better video does indirectly and slowly improve life for gay people in the US, because it lets more people know that this is real discrimination affecting real people.

As regards the Pixar video, I would point out that I was pretty careful with my language; I said it can seem opportunistic when corporations and politicians make these videos, and I think it can. That the makers can seem like opportunists doesn’t prevent the videos from helping young people or even being moving, it just, I think, makes them complicated documents. And I would it argue that it can be worthwhile to tease out possible contradictions in our cultural objects.
It's possible that here we'll just have to agree to disagree, because I think the tone of your article was pretty clearly an indictment of the Pixar video, with Silverman's video put forward as an example of what they should have done. I've read it over again a couple of times now, and I just can't hear the other interpretation.

That was my second biggest issue with your article, because as I mentioned, I believe the Pixar video speaks directly to the experience of people struggling to come out (like I was), and it communicates it so well. And I was particularly annoyed to see it labeled as opportunistic since I'd learned how it was made. It was not an obligatory self-serving PR piece like the ones from Obama, Clinton, or Biden. It started as a genuine, earnest attempt to help, mainly (I heard) from the producer who introduces the video, and it gradually gained support from other LGBT employees and then eventually the company itself.

And so I have to disagree that saying "it's a complicated document" is any kind of justification. It's not a complicated document. The beauty of it is that it's not complicated — there's no sense of worry about how it'll be perceived by some audiences, or whether it'll affect Disney's market share, or whether it politicizes a movie company, or whether these employees are going to be made fun of, or even whether it's cool to be crying tears of joy in front of so many people. It is completely genuine, heartfelt, and sincere, and that is the rarest thing to see after so many decades buried under layer after layer of bullshit lazy cynicism.

It’s unfortunate that I seem to have garnered some ill will, because I think we probably agree on a lot.
Again, it is unfortunate that my post came across as such a personal attack, instead of talking about the tone of detached cynicism in the article.

And while I strongly disagree with some of your points, I do of course agree with your main point: everything is most definitely not okay, and we should all be much more alarmed at the need for these videos in the first place. Anyone who says that we just need to be patient and wait for the homophobes to die off, or that it's not such a big deal when there are bigger issues than "marriage" to deal with, or that gay people need to stop shoving their sexuality in everybody's faces — these people seriously need a wake-up call.

And after spending six years or so watching and occasionally taking part in debates about gay rights over the internet, I've seen that arguing against homophobes is pretty much pointless. Their position is inherently irrational, so attempting to rationally argue against it just introduces more noise into the conversation. It's depressing how long — decades — they managed to distract everyone by making people think "Is homosexuality a CHOICE?!" was actually a topic worth discussing. And that's assuming that you even get around to trying to debate salient points, and aren't just yelling "homophobe!" and "deviant!" back and forth.

Instead, it's usually more productive to argue the finer points with people who are either mostly or somewhat in agreement with you. At first it comes across as "dissension in the ranks" or something, but eventually you see that it results in a clearer message. So that may help explain why it comes across as an attack; I do believe we're mostly in agreement, and I just spent way too many years of my life trying to argue with people whose opinions I don't even care about.