TAMPA – Suicide is the leading cause of death among LGBTQ young people in the U.S., according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate of suicide attempts is four times greater for LGBTQ youth than their straight counterparts, and many of these cases have been the result of bullying.
Statistics like these have lead to the creation of organizations such as The Trevor Project, Stomp Out Bullying and the It Gets Better Project, the latter of which is traveling the country with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles and Speak Theater Arts and holding educational workshops to help curb the epidemic of bullying and LGBT teen suicide. The group will visit Tampa the fourth week of March.
“We’re mindful that there are already a lot of amazing leaders in these communities doing great work, but we just use our time in town to help shine a little more spotlight on them,” says Liesel Reinhart.
Reinhart is the writer and director of the stage work it gets better, based on the It Gets Better Project. She helps to organize the week of workshops which finishes up with a performance of the show.
“We go in and we talk with everyone, from kids in schools, school board members and educators, to health care professionals, law enforcement, civic leaders, clergy, you name it,” she says. “We get them all in a room and we do facilitated dialogues.”
The road to Reinhart building the workshops and show began in 2010. After the news was becoming saturated with stories of bullying and suicides among LGBT youth, columnist and author Dan Savage and his partner, Terry Miller, created a YouTube video telling the at-risk youth that “it gets better.” The video went viral and started a worldwide movement that became the It Gets Better Project.
“It’s rooted in suicide prevention at its core but it also quickly became a ‘hang in there’ through bullying, ‘hang in there’ through adversity and was sort of co-opted by not just kids but this general broader movement of persistence,” Reinhart says.
The It Gets Better Project lead to the creation of more than 50,000 user-created videos from members of the LGBT community from around the globe: Ellen DeGeneres, Adam Lambert, Tim Gunn; even then president Barack Obama and secretary of state Hillary Clinton made videos.
“The Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles made a video singing the Cyndi Lauper song ‘True Colors’ in the basement of a church that they rehearse in,” Reinhart says. “It was super powerful and it suddenly, like overnight, had a million views from around the world. It was one of the most far reaching things the chorus had ever done after being around for 30 years.”
Reinhart was on the board for the chorus at the time and saw this as an opportunity to make some real change in the country with LGBT advocacy through theater.
“We called the It Gets Better Project and we did it as a co-production of my theater company and the gay men’s chorus and we premiered it in 2012,” Reinhart says.
The show, which will play at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts March 24, will conclude the week of workshops and outreach the group will be doing throughout Tampa Bay.
“This is the third iteration of this show that we are bringing to the area,” Reinhart says. “It consists of music and interviews we have done with people, starting with members of the chorus and branching out to people who posted up videos for It Gets Better. Now that we have been touring with this show for a while, we conduct interviews with people in the areas we visit and we incorporate those interviews into the show, so it’s always changing and evolving.”