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The “Epidemic of Bullying and Gay Teen Suicide”: Tyler Clementi and It Gets Better

Chapter 3 examines the first gay death that incited national outrage after Matthew Shepard’s murder: Tyler Clementi’s suicide in 2010. Twelve years after Shepard’s murder, another white, Protestant, gay college student became a national name. The chapter explores why many elected officials and heterosexual citizens viewed Clementi’s suicide as an atrocity that the country needed to address. The chapter also investigates how several anti-gay Christian groups reframed their rhetoric about homosexuality as a direct response to Clementi’s suicide. The chapter’s other focus is the It Gets Better Project. It Gets Better became a cultural phenomenon soon after news broke of Clementi’s death. The chapter considers why It Gets Better achieved remarkable popularity, what messages the campaign has promoted as necessary for a “better” life, and how those largely Protestant messages are based on the assimilationist trends of white, middle-class, gender-typical, gay Americans.