LGBTEENS??

SF Giants: “It Gets Non-Specifically Better”

Kudos to musical YouTube protestor Sean Chapin for successfully petitioning MLB’s San Francisco Giants to make an “It Gets Better” video—a first for any major league sports team! Especially considering the spate of athletes using anti-gay slurs and the comings-out by 25 different sports figures last month, their multi-cultural message is a welcome and much needed for all gay and straight teens who idolize the Giants. But, (and there’s always a but)…

… there’s no overt mention of gay kids or anti-gay bullying. One of the players does slip in the buzzword “LGBTeens” (a word I didn’t even catch watching it the first time around), but do most kids even know what an “LGBTeen” is? It sounds like a kid with a protein deficiency.

Do bullies say, “I beat the crap out of that LGBTeen”? No, they say, “I beat the crap out of that GAY kid because he’s gay—gay, Gay, GAY!!!”

Now, the Giants do tell viewers to visit ItGetsBetter.org a site that explicitly mentions “lesbian, gay, bi, trans and other bullied teens”, so it’s not like they’re completely shying away from the whole gay thing. But the other IGB videos have made repeated mentions of gays outright, so its exclusion and the quick LGBTeen reference both seem a tad curious.

Have the Giants done a very clever thing by letting teens discover the issue for themselves instead of scaring away potentially timid or biased kids by mentioning a gay website? Some teens make a practice of regularly clearing out their internet history and cache just so no one will know that they’ve ever been to a gay site.

Now if anyone asks why they’ve visited a queer site, bashful kids can just say, “The Giants told me to do it.”

Apparently there are now petitions for the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox to make IGB videos too. Every-body dance!!

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