Hearing from older students that high school gets better may help teenagers avoid depression.
Depression is common in teenagers, with 11 percent being diagnosed by age 18, and many more having depressive symptoms. Social and academic stress can trigger depression, and rates of depression tend to peak in adolescence around the age of 16.
It doesn’t help that stressed-out teens often fall into hopelessness, says David Yeager, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. “When kids have hard things happen to them, they think it’ll be like that way into the future.”
Researchers started noticing back in the 1980s that many teens felt that social and personality traits were immutable — that someone who is once a loser is always a loser.
So what if we could convince kids that things can change for the better — would that help mitigate the high rates of depression? Yeager tested that out. The results of his latest study, published Monday in Clinical Psychological Science, suggests that it does.
The study divided 600 ninth-graders into two groups. Half participated in a brief intervention program designed to help them understand that people and circumstances can change. These teenagers were shown several articles, including one about brain plasticity, and another about how neither bullies nor victims of bullying are intrinsically bad.
“We didn’t want to say something to teenagers that wasn’t believable,” Yeager says. “We just wanted to inject some doubt into that problematic world view that people couldn’t change.”
The students also read advice from older students reassuring them that high school gets better, and they were asked to draw from their own experience and write about how personalities can change.
Nine months later, the researchers checked up on all the students. Among those who didn’t participate in the intervention, rates of depression symptoms such as feeling constantly sad and feeling unmotivated rose from 18 percent to 25 percent — about what the researchers expected, Yeager says. The group that participated in this intervention showed no increase in depressive symptoms, even if they said they were bullied.
Of course this is a fairly small study. And the intervention doesn’t treat clinical depression. At most, it helps kids who may be prone to depression cope better.
“I would say the research is at an early stage,” says Gregory Walton, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University who wasn’t involved in the study. “But this is a fairly promising start.”
For one, the intervention is pretty easy to start and scale up, Walton says.
And Yeager’s previous research indicates that the intervention also helps with aggression and general health. Other researchers have found that similar interventions help teens do better academically.
Like teens, many adults tend to feel that people and circumstances don’t change, Walton says. “But adolescence might be a good window of opportunity to target that belief.”
Anything that could help prevent the onset of depression in teens is worth testing and trying out, he says. “Depression is a recurrent disorder. Kids who have an episode of depression in adolescence are likely to have another episode as adults,” he notes. So intervening early could make a huge impact in a teenager’s future.
The Ice Bucket Challenge isn’t the first social media charity campaign to go viral — and based upon the success of these other online movements, it certainly won’t be the last.
The videos filled your Facebook and Twitter feeds for weeks. Everyone from your great aunt to your favorite actor to politicians jumped on the bandwagon and doused themselves with ice-cold water all in the name of charity.
Whether you love it, hate it or experienced the challenge’s chill firsthand, it’s official: The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, in all its cold, wet glory, is a bona fide social media success. But it’s far from the first online marketing campaign to go viral. Here are five social media campaigns — and what you need to know about them — that have made a substantial impact on an organization’s efforts to raise awareness or funds for its cause.
1. The Ice Bucket Challenge
Origins: Oddly enough, the Ice Bucket Challenge wasn’t originally started to support the ALS Association, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing awareness of, and fundraising for, the neurodegenerative disorder known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. While its origins remain murky, the first person to connect icing oneself to ALS was Chris Kennedy, a minor-league golfer, who took up the challenge on July 14. From there, it reached Pat Quinn, an ALS patient who has also been credited with starting the campaign. Quinn challenged his friend, former Boston College baseball player Pete Frates, who also has ALS. After Frates took him up on the challenge and posted his video on Facebook, it exploded on social media. In late July, the ALS Association noticed a surprising uptick in online donations and moved to capitalize on the campaign. While the remarkable growth of the challenge happened organically, the ALS Association has made a concerted effort to educate new site visitors about the disease and their work, even allowing donors to funnel their contributions directly to research.
Virality: In a summer news cycle dominated by international wars and domestic unrest, the reason why the Ice Bucket Challenge has traveled as far as it has for as long is its simplicity: Dump a bucket of water on your head; challenge others to do the same; donate to charity. The opportunity to one-up your friends by creating an original response to the challenge kept it interesting. The celebrity response hasn’t hurt, either.
The Bottom Line: As of press time, more than 3 million people and organizations have donated to the ALS Association, accounting for more than $110 million in total donations (and growing). Additionally, $3 million has been raised for the ALS Therapy Development Institute, a nonprofit focused on treatments, and £3 million was raised for the Motor Neurone Disease Association, a British nonprofit. Overall, videos of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge have netted more than 1 billion views on YouTube.
2. It Gets Better Project
Origins: The It Gets Better Project was created by media personality Dan Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, in response to an uptick in suicides by teens who were bullied because of their sexual orientation (or suspected orientation). The mission was to let LGBT youth know that life does indeed “get better.” The project began when Savage and Miller uploaded the first “It Gets Better” video to the campaign’s official YouTube page on Sept. 21, 2010. This video has since been viewed more than 2 million times. From there, thousands of people from around the world uploaded their own messages of hope on the campaign’s website. The It Gets Better Project continues to engage the community — both online and in person — to rally for LGBT rights and equality.
Virality: Thousands of celebrities, activists, politicians and media personalities have contributed their own messages to the campaign’s growing catalog of more than 50,000 videos, which include President Barack Obama, Ellen DeGeneres, Lady Gaga, Hillary Clinton, Facebook and Google employees, the Broadway community and many more. The campaign has also gone international — deploying programs such as conferences, pride festivals and government outreach to benefit LGBT youths on six continents.
The Bottom Line: More than 50,000 entries have been uploaded on the campaign’s website since its inception. So far, these videos have received more than 50 million views.
3. Movember
Origins: The face of fundraising gets a bit hairy in November, when males around the world unite to grow mustaches to raise money and awareness for charities that support various men’s health issues, such as prostate and testicular cancers and mental health. Movember was started in Melbourne, Australia, in 2003 by two friends who were “questioning where the Mo had gone,” according to the Movember Foundation’s website (“mo” refers to the British spelling of “moustache”). About 30 friends got involved, but it wasn’t until a year later that Movember was connected to raising money for the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia. Over the next decade, the movement has gained traction and is now recognized and celebrated internationally.
Virality: There’s no denying that men love mustaches. They’re often considered a symbol of manhood (not to mention, good humor). But during the month of November, they become something more. As the Movember Foundation states, “Mo Bros, with their new mustaches, become walking, talking billboards,” using their social networks to garner support for their mustachioed journey. And with ambassadors like Nick Offerman of “Parks and Recreation”and his venerable ’stache, the campaign doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
The Bottom Line: In just over a decade, the Movember movement has grown to include 4 million participants worldwide. Together, these “Mo Bros” and “Mo Sistas” have raised $556 million, which has funded 832 men’s health programs internationally.
4. The Red Equal Sign for Marriage Equality
Origin: In March 2013, the United States Supreme Court was gearing up for hearings on two separate cases regarding gay marriage: one on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and another on California’s much-debated Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. In advance of the hearings, the nonprofit Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest lobby group for LGBT rights, outlined an extensive plan to bring the discussion about gay marriage front and center. One part of that plan is the now-iconic red-tinted version of their equal-sign logo. The organization posted the image on Facebook on March 25, 2013, urging supporters to make it their profile picture in support of gay marriage. The following day, actor and LGBT supporter George Takei changed his profile picture to the symbol, garnering more than 80,000 likes and 40,000 shares. From there, the campaign took on a life of its own.
Virality: For the next few weeks, the Internet was awash in red as people across the country and around the world showed their support for LGBT couples. According to the HRC, the images created upward of 10 million impressions. Celebrities, politicians and for-profit companies took up the logo, as well. And then came the memes. Marriage equality officially went viral.
The Bottom Line: HRC’s posts appeared more than 18 million times in people’s newsfeeds. The organization’s website received more than 700,000 unique visitors within a 24-hour period, with 86 percent of site visitors being new. More than 100,000 people signed the group’s “Majority Opinion” petition within 48 hours, and it was shared more than 30,000 times. HRC’s Facebook followers grew by over 200,000 in two days, and it gained 26,000 Twitter followers. As for the Supreme Court rulings? Gay marriage supporters were handed two small wins.
5. #BostonStrong for One Fund Boston
Origins: One simple hashtag, first used in a tweet of support from a Cleveland man, Curtis Clough, following the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, 2013, helped spur one of the most effective victim-relief efforts in U.S. history. As the nation reeled from this tragedy, which left three people dead and an estimated 264 injured, #bostonstrong started popping up all over social media as a rallying cry of solidarity and defiance. The slogan was printed on T-shirts, placed on billboards, written on the sidewalks, used in speeches and, eventually, utilized as a way to raise money for the victims through One Fund Boston, which was established by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino. (Read more about the story behind One Fund Boston.)
Virality: “There’s always been a social aspect to giving, even before the Internet,” says Rick Cohen, director of communications for the National Council of Nonprofits. “Now some groups are trying to find that magic formula for what’s going to take off. Unfortunately there no one equation that works. If there was, every organization would have something go viral. You have to have a little bit of luck, in addition to some good strategy, to make it work.” Since Clough’s first tweet was sent out (as of April 2014), The hashtag #bostonstrong has been used more than 1.5 million times, but the term has extended far beyond the Internet and has taken on a life of its own as a post-tragedy brand. “#Bostonstrong is about the triumph of community,” Gov. Patrick tweeted on the first anniversary of the bombings.
The Bottom Line: One Fund Boston has raised more than $72 million, which enabled each of the families of those killed and each victim with double amputations to receive $2.2 million, and each victim who lost one limb to receive $1.1 million.
ANYONE who has ever been online has witnessed, or been virtually walloped by, a mean comment. “If you’re going to be a blogger, if you’re going to tweet stuff, you better develop a tough skin,” said John Suler, a professor of psychology at Rider University who specializes in what he refers to as cyberpsychology. Some 69 percent of adult social media users said they “have seen people being mean and cruel to others on social network sites,” according to a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.
Posts run the gamut from barbs to sadistic antics by trolls who intentionally strive to distress or provoke. Last week, Zelda Williams, the daughter of Robin Williams, said she was going off Twitter, possibly for good, after brutal tweets by trolls about her father’s death. Yet comments do not even have to be that malevolent to be hurtful. The author Anne Rice signed a petition a few months ago asking Amazon.com to ban anonymous reviews after experiencing “personal insults and harassing posts,” as she put it on the site of the petition, Change.org. Whether you’re a celebrity author or a mom with a décor blog, you’re fair game. Anyone with a Twitter account and a mean streak can try to parachute into your psyche.
In the virtual world, anonymity and invisibility help us feel uninhibited. Some people are inspired to behave with greater kindness; others unleash their dark side. Trolls, who some researchers think could be mentally unbalanced, say the kinds of things that do not warrant deep introspection; their singular goal is to elicit pain. But then there are those people whose comments, while nasty, present an opportunity to learn something about ourselves.
Easier said than done. Social scientists say we tend to fixate on the negative. However, there are ways to game psychological realities. Doing so requires understanding that you are ultimately in charge. “Nobody makes you feel anything,” said Professor Suler, adding that you are responsible for how you interpret and react to negative comments. The key is managing what psychologists refer to as involuntary attention.
Just as our attention naturally gravitates to loud noises and motion, our minds glom on to negative feedback. Much discussed studies like “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” published in 2001 in the Review of General Psychology, have shown that we respond more strongly to bad experiences and criticism, and that we remember them more vividly. “These are things that stick in our brain,” said James O. Pawelski, the director of education and a senior scholar in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “If we allow our attention to move involuntarily, that’s where it goes.” The mind, however, can be tamed.
One way to become proactive is to ask yourself if those barbs you can’t seem to shrug off have an element of truth. (Glaringly malicious posts can be dismissed.) If the answer is yes, Professor Suler has some advice:
Let your critics be your gurus.
“You can treat them as an opportunity,” he said. Ask yourself why you’re ruminating on a comment. “Why does it bother you?” Professor Suler said. “What insecurities are being activated in you?”
For instance, maybe you have an unconscious worry that you’re somehow not good enough. Professor Suler said it was not uncommon for some digital luminaries (bloggers, social media power-users) to harbor such worries because one motivation, be it conscious or unconscious, is that they want to be liked. “They want to be popular,” he said, adding that it’s a goal easily pursued on the Internet. “It’s all about likes and pluses and favorites.” Yet if someone says something cruel, he continued, “it activates that unconscious worry.”
But let’s say the negative comment fails to induce self-psychologizing. Perhaps it can help you learn something about your work.
“It’s easy to feel emotionally attacked from these things,” said Bob Pozen, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School and a senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution. But he said that doesn’t mean that your critics don’t have a point.
Consider the more than 50 reviews of Mr. Pozen’s book “Extreme Productivity” on Amazon.com. Most were four and five stars, but for the purposes of this article, he conducted an unscientific experiment and checked out the handful of one- and two-star reviews. “You know, some of them are pretty negative,” said Mr. Pozen, the former chairman of MFS Investment Management, “but the question is, ‘How do you read them?’ ” One unfavorable review was easily dismissed, Mr. Pozen said, because it was apparent that the writer had not thoroughly read the material. Another reviewer criticized the book for being too “U.S.-centric.” Mr. Pozen considered that idea — and decided that the reader, despite not having put it particularly nicely, might be right. “So I thought, ‘Well if I ever write another version of this book I ought to take that into account,’ ” he said.
It’s not always possible, of course, to learn something from a nasty comment. Some are baseless; some are crass. One way to help them roll off you is to consider the writer’s motivation.
Professor Suler wrote in 2004 in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior about a concept known as “the online disinhibition effect” — the idea that “people say and do things in cyberspace that they wouldn’t ordinarily say and do in the face-to-face world.” In the virtual realm, factors including anonymity, invisibility and lack of authority allow disinhibition to flourish. The result can be benign (“unusual acts of kindness and generosity”), or it can be toxic: “rude language, harsh criticisms, anger, hatred, even threats,” as Professor Suler put it.
The latter is the realm of trolls. Some people think of their online life “as a kind of game with rules and norms that don’t apply to everyday living,” he wrote, a game for which they do not feel responsible. If bloggers and people who use social networks keep this concept in mind, he said, “they will see the psychology” of aggressors, and their comments may be easier to take — and possibly ignore. Sometimes it’s smart to do as Ms. Williams ultimately did: disconnect.
Harsh comments can also be made to feel less potent by directly disputing to yourself what was said. If, for example, someone writes, “You’re an idiot and no one likes you,” you can marshal evidence against it by reminding yourself, Stuart Smalley-style, of the obvious: You have an education, a job, more friends than you have time to see in a week.
Speaking of time, be mindful of when you choose to glance at your blog or social media feeds. Researchers have discovered that feeling blue or even being in a so-called neutral mood makes people more vulnerable to nasty comments. In other words: Stay off Twitter if you just bombed a presentation.
Another way to stop yourself from dwelling on negative feedback is to enter into what psychologists refer to as “flow,” a state in which the mind is completely engaged. Flow can be achieved when playing a piano concerto, practicing karate, writing code, being deep in conversation with a friend. “The toughest time is when the mind is not fully occupied,” said Professor Pawelski, who also prescribes humor as a way to deflect barbs. He joked that bars would make a killing if at the end of each semester they offered “professor happy hours” where teachers could bring their evaluations and pass the negative ones around. “Nobody should be alone when they’re reading these things,” he said.
Yet even when a person is alone, humor can be effective. Try reading nasty comments aloud in a goofy voice, Professor Pawelski advised, so that when your mind automatically plays back the comment it sounds absurd, or at the very least loses a bit of its bite.
Such prescriptions are in the spirit of Jimmy Kimmel’s “mean tweets” television segment, during which celebrities — Julia Roberts, Pharrell Williams, Robert De Niro — read aloud the rotten things people write about them on Twitter while R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” plays softly in the background. After reading the often expletive-riddled tweets — an act that Mr. Kimmel has said is meant “to help put a face on this unsavory activity” — some celebrities talk back to their detractors; others laugh; a few peer into the camera in silence. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that other shows have similar routines: The television hosts of “E! News” have taken to reading aloud the “sour” tweets they receive from viewers, though they read a few of the “sweet” tweets, too.
Turns out they may be on to something. In the quest to quell the cruel, we often fail to savor the good. And there is, despite the meanies, much good whirring around cyberspace. Some 70 percent of Internet users said they “had been treated kindly or generously by others online,” according to a Pew report early this year.
Rather than scrolling past a dozen positive comments and lingering on the sole exception, what if you did the opposite? And what if you shared a couple of the good ones with friends instead of sharing the one that hurt you? Research shows that it takes more time for positive experiences to become lodged in our long-term memory, so it’s not just pleasurable to dwell on a compliment — it’s shrewd.
“We’re really bad, typically, as a culture about accepting compliments,” Professor Pawelski said. “They’re meant to be taken in and really appreciated. They’re meant to be gifts.”
When Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962, with the cause listed as probable suicide, the nation reacted. In the months afterward, there was extensive news coverage, widespread sorrow and a spate of suicides. According to one study, the suicide rate in the United States jumped by 12 percent compared with the same months in the previous year.
Mental illness is not a communicable disease, but there’s a strong body of evidence that suicide is still contagious. Publicity surrounding a suicide has been repeatedly and definitively linked to a subsequent increase in suicide, especially among young people. Analysis suggests that at least 5 percent of youth suicides are influenced by contagion.
People who kill themselves are already vulnerable, but publicity around another suicide appears to make a difference as they are considering their options. The evidence suggests that suicide “outbreaks” and “clusters” are real phenomena; one death can set off others. There’s a particularly strong effect from celebrity suicides.
A sign at Kurt Cobain Memorial Park at Young Street Bridge in Aberdeen, Wash., his hometown. Coverage of his death was closely tied to messages about treatment for mental health and suicide prevention.
“Suicide contagion is real, which is why I’m concerned about it,” said Madelyn Gould, a professor of Epidemiology in Psychiatry at Columbia University, who has studied suicide contagion extensively.
She’s particularly concerned this week, after the high-profile death of the comedian and actor Robin Williams.
Suicide prevention advocates have developed guidelines for news media coverage of suicide deaths. The idea is to avoid emphasizing or glamorizing suicide, or to make it seem like a simple or inevitable solution for people who are at risk. The guidelines have been shown to make a difference: A study in Vienna documented a significant drop in suicide risk when reporters began adhering to recommendations for coverage.
That aim has to be weighed against a journalistic duty to keep the public informed. And in the Internet era, a person who wants to know details of a suicide won’t have a hard time finding them. Most of the research on suicide contagion predates the rise of social media.
Few of the experts’ recommendations make much sense in the case of Mr. Williams. Studies suggest avoiding repetitive or prominent coverage; keeping the word suicide out of news headlines; and remaining silent about the means of suicide. “How can it not be prominent?” Ms. Gould said.
Experts also say articles should include information about how suicide can be avoided (for instance, noting that the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24 hours a day at 800-273-8255).
They also recommend avoiding coverage that describes death as an escape for a troubled person. One example was the 1994 death of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, who was beloved among young music fans, including in Seattle, where his career rose and where he was found dead. Local coverage of his suicide was closely tied to messages about treatment for mental health and suicide prevention, along with a very public discussion of the pain his death caused his family. Those factors may explain why his death bucked the pattern. In the months after Mr. Cobain’s death, calls to suicide prevention lines in the Seattle area surged and suicides actually went down.
“It’s different from any other cause of death,” said Christine Moutier, the chief medical officer at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “When someone dies of cancer or heart disease or AIDS, you don’t have to worry about messaging it wrong.”
AT the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, I wheedled a ticket to “Becoming Chaz,” a documentary about the sex change of Chastity Bono. Having long admired the Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato World of Wonder productions — slyly edu-taining films like “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and oodles of just-louche-enough-for-reality-TV shows like “RuPaul’s Drag Race” — I anticipated their usual mix of human interest, alternative lifestyle and salacious tabloid.
Chaz (formerly Chastity Bono) at home in California.Chastity Bono with her parents, Sonny and Cher Bono, in 1972. Chaz Bono, after his sex change, with his girlfriend, Jennifer Elia, and with his mother.
This unflinchingly personal film, which will have its premiere on Oprah Winfrey’s network on Tuesday, details Chastity Bono’s journey from her spangled childhood in rhinestone pantsuits on “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” to a more recent two years in her televised life: Chastity, now Chaz, invited cameras to witness the searingly intimate experience of his gender transition.
Chaz, 42, and Jennifer Elia, his longtime girlfriend, must navigate his hormone injections, mood swings and personality changes, and live through a medical procedure that is part of the process of making Chaz a legal male in the State of California: he undergoes “top surgery” and has his breasts removed.
The operation is so graphic, and such a commitment — physically, emotionally and financially — that as a wincing viewer you come away with a palpable understanding of how unendurably he must be suffering in his body to want to have his own sex characteristics amputated.
Yet despite being a lifelong liberal from San Francisco and friendly with a number of transgender people, I found the film as unsettling as it was inspiring.
I came away forced to confront a whole swag-bag full of transphobias that I didn’t know I’d had. So I went to Los Angeles to talk to the filmmakers, and to Chaz himself.
Just sitting on a couch with Chaz at his publicist’s office is a consciousness-raising experience. He’s an affable, candid, pudgy, regular guy: very sweet, very comfortable in his skin, jeans, navy blue polo shirt and simple boots. His look might seem deliberately invisible if not for his hair, which he shapes into an excellent controlled pomp that could be described as Office-Casual Elvis.
At this point in his transition, Chaz is in his “second puberty,” a six- to seven-year process of hormone injections. The medical technology for genital reconstruction surgery (masculine genitoplasty, for a transgender man like Chaz) is still too new, expensive, imperfect and risky for him to opt for “bottom surgery.”
“I am in a holding pattern,” he said. “The payoff just isn’t quite enough. I wish I had a penis, but I am O.K. for now.”
At age 13, Chaz told me, he knew he was attracted to women, and assumed he was a lesbian.
“I knew my whole life something was different,” he said. “As a small kid, I could be one of the boys, playing sports, fitting in. When I hit puberty, I felt like my body was literally betraying me. I got smacked everywhere with femaleness. That was really traumatic.”
Realizing that he should be male took years of deduction.
“Around 2001, I started analyzing lesbians. I started to realize that even really butch-acting or -dressing women still had a strong female identity that I never had.”
Though emboldened by seeing transgender people in the media, he still thought of gender-transition as the last resort of the suicidal: “I thought, transgender people are much worse off than I am. That’s why they’re willing to risk everything to be who they are. But the older I got, the harder it got to stay in my body.”
Several scenes in the film are interviews with Cher, who I assumed would act as a guide and interpreter through this signal event in her family. Yet Cher struggles throughout the film and never quite offers a sound bite of unequivocal support for her transgender son. Seeing Cher — gay icon nonpareil — so uncharacteristically jangled raised a sticky batch of questions:
Could it be possible that the fact that Chaz is now a man is somehow Cher’s fault? Did the toxic culture of celebrity damage Chastity/Chaz’s gender identity? Did Cher’s almost drag-queenlike hyper-female persona somehow devour Chastity’s emerging femininity? Could Chaz’s transition have been motivated by gender-bent Oedipal revenge? Is he reclaiming the childhood attention his superstar mother always diverted?
I had to ask: It is remotely possible that he needed to make the transition because his mom is Cher?
He gave me a warm and genuine smile.
“I don’t think the way I grew up had any effect on this issue,” Chaz said. “There’s a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they’re mismatched. That’s all it is. It’s not complicated, it’s not a neurosis. It’s a mix-up. It’s a birth defect, like a cleft palate.”
But being born into celebrity created a different hurdle: Chaz knew he would not be able to change sexes privately. “I thought, the whole world is going to find out! How am I going to be able to live a life after that? I was scared. I believed that people were going to be actively hostile towards me.”
As a “last ditch effort,” he tried to live as a male but without medical intervention. It didn’t work. “I feel very traditionally male,” he said. “I needed a male body.”
Being in-between genders, Chaz said, was far more difficult than becoming a man. He was a misfit. Now, he said, he is treated much better by people, especially men.
“I’m constantly shocked by how friendly and cool straight men are to each other. ‘Hey, buddy, how’s it going?’ I expected to feel better and happier, but I really underestimated the impact my transition would have. I didn’t realize that life could be this easy, that I could ever feel this comfortable. It was unimaginable.”
In the film, Jennifer is hilariously outspoken about her ordeal, coming to terms with her lover’s gender transition.
“Jenny and I had to relearn how to be together,” Chaz said. “I never really understood women before, to be honest, but I had a tolerance for women that I don’t have now.”
I laughed. Chaz blushed.
“No, really. There is something in testosterone that makes talking and gossiping really grating. I’ve stopped talking as much. I’ve noticed that Jen can talk endlessly.” He shrugged. “I just kind of zone out.”
“You just don’t care!”
“I just don’t care!” He laughed. “I’ve learned that the differences between men and women are so biological. I think if people realized that, it would be easier. I would be a great relationship counselor. I know the difference that hormones really make.”
Sex, for him, is completely different now. “I am completely monogamous,” he said, “but I need release much more often than Jen does.”
The weirdest guy thing he does now?
“I got way more gadget-oriented, I have to say. I don’t know why. Definitely since transitioning I’ve wanted to be up on the latest, coolest toy.”
IN their offices on Hollywood Boulevard, Messrs. Bailey and Barbato, the directors, disabused me of the rest of my Cher-related notions.
“That’s a sexy theory, but no,” Mr. Barbato told me. “People don’t change their sex to get back at their parents, any more than people become gay to get back at their parents.”
The two men compared today’s cultural blind spot regarding transgender people to attitudes about homosexuality during World War II, when homosexuals in the armed forces were considered psychiatrically abnormal and were court-martialed and dishonorably discharged. Although many in the psychiatric and transgender communities consider gender identity disorder a medical issue, it is still classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association — a stigma that is difficult for any marginalized group to shake.
“The notion of trans is incomprehensible to most people,” Mr. Bailey said. “It is so foreign.”
One of the most interesting aspects of their film is the fact that although Chaz makes the physical transition, the more demanding transition, arguably, is the emotional one that everyone around him must make. There is, in essence, a death and mourning of Chastity, the woman, and an adjustment to Chaz, whom his girlfriend now compares to dating “Chastity’s twin brother.”
But I couldn’t stop asking about Cher.
“Cher is very real in this film,” Mr. Barbato said. “She’s not editing herself. She’s processing this majorly traumatic thing for any mother: She’s struggling with the fact that her daughter has turned into a man.”
Mr. Bailey brings up a fascinating moment in the film: He asks Cher a question, and she just stares, motionless and unblinking as a cobra — an excruciatingly long and pregnant pause. Then her whole posture shifts. She says, “If I woke up tomorrow in the body of a man, I couldn’t get to the surgeon fast enough.” Right then and there it occurs to her how to relate to it.
I bring up how uncomfortable we are as a society with people who don’t fit into the usual gender roles, how they can seem unsettling on a visceral level, like a dangling participle or an unresolved chord.
“I like things that are incomplete,” Mr. Bailey said. “Life is unresolvedness.”
I felt slightly less lame about my own process of understanding when Rosie O’Donnell (a curator of OWN’s social documentary series) told me, in a phone interview, that she, too, had to pave some inner potholes en route to accepting gender transitioning.
“As a gay woman, I found it hard to understand,” she said. “I know some very masculine gay women, and I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of repressed homophobia, where being straight makes it more O.K. But all of us struggle with whatever it is: special-needs kids, gay people. We all have our speed bumps.”
History mostly demonstrates the violence of embracing either pole of moral certainty. The black and white of gender identification has always pushed an infinitude of differences into the margins. Who knows? To finally usher a complete color wheel of sexuality into the mainstream, perhaps it takes a child of Cher.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 15, 2011
An article last Sunday about the gender transitioning of Chaz (formerly Chastity) Bono misstated the classification of gender identity disorder. Although many in the psychiatric and transgender communities consider it a medical issue and there is considerable debate over whether to classify it as such, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — IV, the standard reference for psychiatric disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association, classifies it as a mental disorder; that classification did not end in 1999.
A version of this article appeared in print on May 8, 2011, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Reluctant Transgender Role Model.
Last week MSNBC took a big step into 21st-century reality when, for the first time in the network’s history, it demonstrated that it understands that the modern civil rights movement isn’t entirely wrapped up in whether gays and lesbians can serve in the military or marry each other, that just like every other segment of American society, one of our community’s key concerns is jobs and employment.
There’s no question that the intention of host Thomas Roberts, an openly gay man, in bringing this issue to MSNBC’s air is a good one, and we should be thankful and appreciative that out of all of his on-air colleagues, up to and including even the also-openly-gay Rachel Maddow and major civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton, Mr. Roberts is leading the way at the network in covering this critical issue. Yet as is so often the case when mainstream media cover an important and well-established issue for the first time, mistakes were made, mistakes that could have been easily avoided had there been more prep work and research done on the issue before it was presented on-air for public consumption.
Thomas Roberts’ first question was also the most revealing. After using about a third of the slightly less than five minutes allotted for the topic on his introduction, Roberts asked Traynham the leading question, “Is DOMA the next biggest obstacle to fair and equal treatment in the eyes of our government?” Traynham eagerly took the bait, beginning his response with “Without question….” While Thomas Roberts accepted Traynham’s inaccurate response without challenge, anyone who’s done their homework on these issues knows well that nothing could be further from the truth.
Leaving aside the patently obvious reality that the ability to make a living and provide for one’s family is of far greater concern to a much larger number of LGBT Americans than the right to legally marry their partner, even a cursory examination of the known facts surrounding these issues will inevitably lead one to the conclusion that marriage is chiefly the pet issue of well-heeled 1-percenters and the organizations that cater to them, such as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), while workplace rights are the primary concern of the working-class majority, particularly those who live in any of the 34 states where LGBT Americans are still denied fully inclusive basic civil rights in the workplace. At this point, with the economy and the state of our civil rights laws being what they are, it’s mainly only the Beltway-bubble 1-percenters, their political patrons in Washington, D.C., and those in the mainstream media who are still eagerly gulping down that elitist Kool-Aid who still believe any differently.
The second problem with the segment was in the time allotted for it. As someone who regularly covers these issues in print and on my weekly Internet radio show, I found it particularly frustrating as a viewer that just as the conversation on this long-ignored topic was starting to get interesting, it came to an end.
I wanted to hear more from Janet Mock, who is emerging as an excellent media spokesperson for transgender people and the issues that impact our lives. I also wanted to see Robert Traynham challenged on his completely inaccurate and utterly unsupportable contention that the right of a same-sex couple to marry and file joint tax returns is somehow of greater urgency than the right of that same couple to be able to earn a living and generate enough income to provide for their family and thus make the ability to file a joint tax return, as well as many of the other federally mandated benefits associated with marriage, a valid concern in the first place.
As someone intimately familiar with these issues, it was almost humorous to watch Robert Traynham try to justify prioritizing the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) because it is “outdated” while completely ignoring (or demonstrating his ignorance of) the reality that the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has been around in some form since the early 1970s and has been introduced in every session of Congress since 1994, except for the 109th. Mr. Traynham also seemed completely unaware that no less of an authority than Congressman Barney Frank, the Democratic Party’s go-to guy on LGBT civil rights, has said that he expects the repeal of DOMA to happen through the courts and that ENDA will be the next major LGBT civil rights legislation to be taken up by Congress.
Also very concerning was Thomas Roberts’ suggestion that all three of them could legally be fired under current laws regarding LGBT workers. The truth is that because Thomas Roberts works in New York and Robert Traynham works in Washington D.C., neither of these men can be legally fired for being gay in their jurisdictions. The same would also be true of Janet Mock, assuming she works in New York City, where she was speaking on-set with Mr. Roberts. On the other hand, however, Ms. Mock would enjoy no such protections if her employer were based in most areas of New York outside New York City, while both Mr. Roberts and Mr. Traynham would be fully protected against workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation anywhere in New York State.
Another concern was how it seemed that LGBT workplace rights were presented in the segment as a new issue, instead of more truthfully as one that has simply been consistently ignored for many years by MSNBC and the mainstream news media in general in favor of the flashier, more media-friendly issues of same-sex marriage and military service.
The segment began and ended with the 1-percenter issues of military service and same-sex marriage, with only two questions from Mr. Roberts to Ms. Mock on employment rights before moving on to the already-well-covered issue of same-sex marriage. While thrilled and grateful to Thomas Roberts for covering LGBT employment rights, I found it incredibly disappointing that the issue, which is so critical in the lives of millions of LGBT workers, was sandwiched between the already-covered-to-death issues of marriage and military service rather than given the focus it really deserves in a segment devoted specifically to that topic. It’s my hope that Thomas Roberts, or whoever next takes on the topic at MSNBC, will devote more on-air time to an in-depth exploration of the state of LGBT employment-rights protections in the United States.
In addition, I question the inclusion of Robert Traynham in this segment, given that he’s someone who was clearly focused on the single issue of same-sex marriage and apparently has little to no interest in or expertise when it comes to the issue of LGBT workplace rights. When MSNBC has covered same-sex marriage and military service in the past, the network has frequently used well-informed and supportive activists and politicians to address those issues.
In this case, however, for some reason the network saw fit to employ a conservative commentator who has worked for one of the most aggressively anti-LGBT U.S. politicians in modern history, apparently simply because he himself is gay. The results were unsurprising, perhaps even inevitable. I hope that when MSNBC next takes on the topic of LGBT employment rights, an effort will be made to eschew a one-issue same-sex-marriage-focused commentator like Mr. Traynham in favor of a more well-rounded and well-informed expert who can speak to the diversity of issues faced by LGBT Americans, not just those favored by wealthy Beltway insiders.
Thomas Roberts deserves our gratitude and our respect for bringing the issue of employment rights into the public discourse on LGBT equality on MSNBC and in the mainstream media in general, but this was just a start, a beginning of that conversation, not in any way a full or definitive examination of the topic. American LGBT workers need and deserve more, deeper, and better coverage of the issues that most directly affect our lives and the lives of the families that depend upon us to keep them out of homelessness and poverty.
Here’s hoping that the next time we see LGBT employment rights covered on MSNBC, the coverage will reflect the kind of quality, in-depth attention the network already provides so well on LGBT-relevant issues favored by upper-class elites, like marriage and military service.
A young gay man’s poignant coming out to his mother is making the blogosphere rounds.
As Dan Brian notes on his YouTube page, “Finally got the strength to come out to my mom…I decided to post this so that I could share my experience with you. Hopefully it will give hope to those who do not have such supportive families.”
Though heartwarming, the authenticity of the video has been questioned on Twitter, to which the 24-year-old has responded, “If she did know [it was being filmed] she would’ve worn better pants!”
Tyler Clementi killed himself in 2010 after his roommate at Rutgers University filmed him kissing another man. Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old girl who moved to the U.S. from Ireland, killed herself the same year after being bullied by high school classmates in Massachusetts. Fifteen-year-old Amanda Cummings from Staten Island made headlines early this January when her family said that relentless bullying was to blame for her suicide.
Each of these tragedies mobilized a cultural army of anti-bullying advocates, celebrities, the media and policymakers who have said — or at least strongly implied — that bullying can lead to suicide.
But mental health professionals and those who work in suicide prevention say bullying-related suicides that reach the spotlight are painted far too simplistically. Bullying and suicide can indeed be connected, though the relationship between the two is much more complicated than a tabloid headline might suggest. To imply clear-cut lines of cause and effect, many experts maintain, is misleading and potentially damaging as it ignores key underlying mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety.
“Bullying is so at the top of our consciousness that we’re bending over backwards to get it into the story,” said Ann Haas, a senior project specialist with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. “Years and years of research has taught us that the overwhelming number of people who die by suicide had a diagnosable mental disorder at the time of their death.”
Haas argues that failing to look at the other contributing factors, from depression to family life to the ending of a relationship, is problematic and even perilous from a suicide prevention standpoint. “I am very concerned about the narrative that these stories collectively are writing, which is that suicide is a normal, understandable response to this terrible [bullying] behavior,” said Haas. “In suicide prevention, we tend to favor the explanation that there are multiple causes.”
Lidia Bernik, an associate project director with National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, said that people often seek a simple explanation when something as difficult to understand as suicide occurs. “I speak from personal experience,” she said. “I lost my sister to suicide. You’re left with, ‘Why did this happen?'”
Bullying can offer an answer, she said: “It’s almost easier to understand — someone was victimized, and then they killed themselves.”
Nicole Cardarelli, 27, who works in state advocacy outreach for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, admits that for years after her brother Greg’s suicide in 2004, she also blamed bullying. While in high school, Greg began what he thought was a relationship with a girl he met online in a Ford Thunderbird car club. It turned out that two of his friends were behind the fake account. After several months, the boys exposed the prank to Greg. Hours later, he killed himself. His family opted not to press charges but they couldn’t help placing blame when Greg had named what the boys did in his suicide note as the reason he could no longer go on living.
“If you had asked me after Greg died what I wanted to have happen, I probably would have said I want to kill those boys,” said Cardarelli. “It’s so much harder to look at the person you loved so much and ask, what was going on inside him?”
At the time, Cardarelli didn’t see the signs that Greg was troubled, she recalled. But in the subsequent years, she has thought about his behavior a few months before he died. He had lost interest in baseball and Boy Scouts — two activities he’d been involved with for years. He was sleeping more than usual, pulling away from his family and spending a lot of time on his computer. Cardarelli even remembers a conversation where her mother told her she thought there might be something really wrong with Greg.
“I believe that he was depressed,” she said recently.
Just as that suicide may have been more complicated than Cardarelli initially thought, several high-profile cases have exhibited similar, deeper patterns upon further investigation.
Emily Bazelon’s 2010 article for Slate exploring the suicide of Phoebe Prince, the teen from Ireland, serves as a powerful example of what can be learned when a suicide is examined more closely. There’s no doubt that Prince endured cruel treatment from a group of classmates, but Bazelon reported that Prince had attempted suicide in the past, that she’d gone off antidepressants, and that she frequently cut herself. (In December, Bazelon followed up on the Prince case by reporting that Prince’s family members had reached a settlement with the town of South Hadley, Mass., for $225,000.)
The death of Staten Island teen Amanda Cummings, whose family primarily blamed bullying for her death, is proving to be less straight-forward as well. The NYPD has yet to find any evidence of bullying, and she was reportedly devastated over the end of a relationship with an older boy.
Last week, the New Yorkerrevisited the Clementi case at Rutgers from 2010 and offered a more nuanced view of the tragedy. News stories initially reported that Clementi was outed by his roommate, and that the video of him with another man was posted to the Internet, neither of which is true.
According to the New Yorker, Clementi came out to family members three days before he started at Rutgers — he told a friend his mother didn’t respond well — and he attended a meeting of the school’s Bisexual, Gay, and Lesbian Alliance. Documents found on Clementi’s computer, the piece reported, were titled “sorry” and “Why is everything so painful.” He had told a friend, “I would consider myself out if only there was someone for me to come out to.” His roommate’s actions were reprehensible, and they may have contributed to Clementi’s death, but these new details suggest the possibility of a far more complex situation.
Even though suicides often prove to involve multiple factors, most experts are still quick to add that bullying can aggravate depression and increase suicide risk, and its seriousness shouldn’t be minimized.
Clayton Cook, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, argues that because mental health issues are often a common thread running through bullying and suicide, schools should not have a narrowly-focused solution.
“The idea is that if you adopt a broad spectrum approach to preventing mental health problems, that you’re also going to reduce the bullying,” said Cook. “If you look at the scientific literature, bullying prevention programs haven’t shown to be effective. It’s addressing the symptom and not the cause.” Cook suggests teachers adopt a social emotional learning curriculum as they would a reading curriculum. “We’d teach kids how to exhibit care and concern for others, how to manage their emotions before they get the best of them,” Cook explained.
The good news, according to Cook, is that the prevalence of bullying has likely been overstated. Catherine Bradshaw, deputy director of the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at Johns Hopkins, agrees. “We don’t have data to show that bullying is an epidemic or that it’s increasing,” she said.
The Centers for Disease Control’s bullying task force, of which Cook and Bradshaw are members, is working to establish a uniform definition of bullying for research purposes, but results may not be available until this summer. The task force is treating bullying as a public health concern and developing policy-based solutions.
As far as the prevalence of youth suicide goes, the most recent numbers from the CDC show that, among 15 to 19 year-olds, suicides fell marginally from 8.02 per 100,000 in 2000 to 7.79 per 100,00 in 2009. Those numbers have fluctuated in the years between though, and the 10-year low was in 2007.
“We don’t know about 2009 to 2011,” said Madelyn Gould, a professor of clinical epidemiology in psychiatry at Columbia who studies youth suicide and prevention efforts. “But probably, the accessibility of the Internet has made it such that there are many more stories about suicide, not necessarily more suicides.” Since January of 2010, the words bullying and suicide have appeared together in 592 articles — and that’s only print newspapers.
“I would just hope that these stories also talk about the other risks involved with suicidal behavior,” said Gould. “If someone is being bullied, they should not jump to the conclusion that one of [their] options is suicide. What they should jump to is, one of the options I have is to get help.”
Megan Meier killed herself in 2006 after a cruel MySpace prank orchestrated by an adult neighbor. Her mother, Tina Meier, argues that the pros of linking bullying and suicide still outweigh the cons. “I think since Megan’s story there has been a lot more awareness,” she explained. “Before, everybody was kind of like, ‘Okay, well kids get bullied and we’ll deal with it.’ We didn’t realize the impact that it truly has.”
Young people may not be able to avoid exposure to bullying or suicide, but David Litts, an associate director with the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, said parents should take these tragic stories as an opportunity to talk to their children, especially if already concerned.
“You really need to open up the dialogue in a way that he or she can risk being honest,” said Litts. “To look someone in the eye and say, ‘Yes, I want to kill myself,’ is a hard thing to do. So it’s important that whoever asks the question asks it in a way that conveys they’re ready to hear an honest answer.”
Need help? In the U.S., call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.You can also visit The Trevor Project’s website, a national organization providing support to LGBT youth, or call them at 1-866-488-7386. And if you’re worried about a friend on Facebook, you can report troubling posts. They’ll connect your friend with a representative from National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Chris (right) and Renee Wiley pose for a wedding photo on Times Square in New York in December. Same-sex marriage in New York state became legal in July 2011.
From the sparks lit at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 to the whirl of same-sex marriage laws, the gay rights movement has made a lot of advances. But has it now reached a plateau?
Nine states and Washington, D.C., now legally recognize gay marriage, and the Supreme Court will take up same-marriage cases this session. American support for gay marriage has crossed a threshold, the Pew research center finds, and now more people support it than oppose it.
With the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the Pentagon is moving toward extending some of the benefits for married heterosexual couples to same-sex couples.
In his inaugural address, President Obama mentioned gay rights alongside the civil rights and women’s rights movements.
“For me, at my age to see the president of the United States … compare gay rights to the civil rights movement — I never thought I’d see this day,” says veteran journalist Hank Plante, one of the first gay reporters on TV. “A lot of people worked hard for this over the years. I just feel very grateful about it all.”
Plante tells NPR’s Jackie Lyden that the gay rights movement is “nearing an end.” He says younger people feel even more positive than he does.
“This whole thing is generational,” he says. “Young people, they don’t care.”
He notes a Public Religion Research Institute study in 2011 that showed 44 percent of evangelical millennials (those aged 18-29) support gay marriage. That’s compared to 12 percent of evangelicals 65 and older.
Beyond Marriage Fight, Daily Battles
At 66, Plante believes there’s “no question” gays will see full and equal rights in his lifetime. But he says there’s still work to be done: The Supreme Court’s decisions await, for example, as do employment protections for the LGBT community in certain states.
One of those states is Kentucky.
“It is still legal currently, in most of our state, to fire someone from a job, deny them a place to live, or kick someone off a bus or out of a restaurant if someone thinks that they’re lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender,” says Chris Hartman, who directs the Fairness Campaign, a gay rights advocacy organization in Louisville.
The Kentucky Civil Rights Act protects a number of things, including race, religion, color and disability, but not sexual orientation or gender identity.
“This type of discrimination occurs many places,” Hartman says, “but in places that don’t have these types of protections, people who are prone to prejudice or who would commit discriminatory acts are emboldened to do so when leaders in their community will not step up and extend these types of anti-discrimination and fairness protections.”
There’s a lot more work ahead before the fight is over, Hartman says.
“In a lot of places in the country, folks feel that we’re so close, that marriage is sort of the final frontier. And, of course, Barack Obama has created some watershed civil rights moments,” he says. “But in a state like Kentucky, where you can still be fired from your job, it feels like the battle has just begun.”
Visibility And Representation
Part of the struggle has also been reflected in popular culture. Back in 1994, actor Wilson Cruz played one of the first gay Hispanic characters on TV, Rickie Vasquez in My So-Called Life. In the show, the teenager comes out to his family and then is kicked out of his house.
Cruz got the role when he was 19, and it mimicked his own life. He became homeless after he told his family he was gay. He says when he auditioned for My So-Called Life, he was just grateful the part existed — whether or not he was cast.
“I knew how powerful it would be to me to see it, and how powerful it would have been for me as a teenager to have seen Rickie Vasquez on television,” Cruz says.
He says people still tell him how much the half-black, half-Puerto Rican character affected them.
“For the most part — even, sadly, still — most of the LGBT characters that we see are white men. … And I was not. And Rickie really was saddling a few different communities,” Cruz says.
Cruz wishes he could see more diversity on TV, even now. But there are characters that stand out to him, like Unique, the black transgender teen on Glee. Cruz expects these contemporary actors won’t realize the impact of their portrayals until they’re much older.
“I feel like the granddaddy of them all, and I couldn’t be prouder,” he says.
Want to make sure the money you’re spending on your clothes, gadgets and travel is going towards companies that support you and the LGBT community? These ten companies have all shown their support for equal rights for all via political activism, fund-raising and equal rights and benefits for same sex partners of their employees.
1. Levi’s
Big supporters of the No to Prop 8 campaign in California, Levi’s have continued their backing of the LGBT community by joining the White Knot movement earlier this year and tying white ribbons to their mannequins in continued support of gay marriage. The company is also as supportive of it’s LGBt workforce being the first Fortune 500 company to offer unmarried domestic partners health benefits.
2. American Apparel
Another Californian company putting it’s support behind the repeal of Proposition 8, American Apparel went very public with it’s support producing a Legalize Gay T-shirt in 2008 for protestors. Overwhelmed by the response of the tee American Apparel went on to sell it in stores and online even though they were met with protests for doing so. Like Levi’s the guys at American Apparel have also continued with their support of the LGBT community offering two new gay rights tees as part of their new library range.
3. Nike
Going on record in support of Referendum 71 in Washington, Nike have made a very clear statement that they are in support of equal rights for all. In the past they have also shown their willingness to listen to and support the views of the LGBT community by shelving an advertising campaign after there were complaints that it was sending out anti-gay messages.
4. Microsoft
Another company that received some criticism from the LGBT community in the past, Microsoft recently made it’s position on gay rights crystal clear by donating $100,000 to Washington Families Standing Together in support of Referendum 71. Bill Gates, the chairman, and Steven A Ballmer, the chief executive also showed their personal support with additional contributions.
5. American Airlines
By setting up the Rainbow Team, the first LGBT dedicated airline sales division and website, American Airlines have made themselves stand out for the rest of the airlines, and don’t just stop at this service. Also working hard to offer the LGBT community useful services, AA also list gay themed national events on their events calendars and often attend Pride parades with their very own floats.
6. Apple
Speaking out in support of gay marriage and opposing Proposition 8, Apple put it’s money where it’s mouth was donating $100,000 to the No on Prop 8 campaign, and also like Levi’s shows it’s support through the benefits it offers start which includes equal rights and benefits to their employees’ same sex partners.
7. Google
Not a company usually known for speaking out on social issues, Google made the unusual step to do just that last September, releasing a statement stating that “while there are many objections to this proposition – further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text – it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8.” Alongside this Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, also donated $140,000 to the No campaign.
8. Starbucks
Calling for the approval of Referendum 71 Starbucks are another company showing their support for gay rights, and whilst they haven’t donated to the campaign in the same way as Microsoft have, they have been long term supporters of the LGBT community featuring a pro-gay message by Armistead Maupin on their coffee cups back in 2005.
9. Boeing
Standing alongside Starbucks, Nike and Microsoft in their support of Referendum 71, Boeing, the commercial airline manufacturer has shown that it is in full support of equal rights for gays and lesbians..
10. IBM
Constantly finding itself at the top of gay friendly employee lists, IBM has worked hard to make its work environment an inclusive one, offering health benefits to it’s employees’ same sex partners and also having an anti discrimination clause. And it’s definitely not just all talk with the Human Rights Campaign having rated IBM 100% on it’s gay friendly index since 2003, and IBM winning over 40 LGBT awards globally.
