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xvi Introduction **** In 2010 there seemed to be a surge in LGBT adolescent suicides in response to school harassment. Media attention encouraged many schools to address the issue with antibullying programs. Mallory Garrett, a mar- riage and family therapist in California, wrote an essay to chronicle the problems—“ ‘It Gets Better’ Media Campaign and Gay Youth Suicide.” With today’s media platforms like Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, and others, adolescents are faced with social pressures not seen before. In earlier years, bullying mostly occurred in the school setting. Students could escape most of the dynamics of harassment at school once they returned home or elsewhere away from school. But with social media, a barrage of messages, tweets, and alerts can flood the inbox or messenger application any time of day or evening and on weekends. There is no escaping the potential flood of hateful messages. In response to the suicides and the media attention on school bullying, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage and his husband, Terry Miller, founded the It Gets Better Project in 2010. Their message to LGBT adolescents was sim- ple: Life gets better. The implication was that suicide was not the answer— that if adolescents would wait it out, their lives would be the lives they choose when they became adults that as adults, they would have control over who they knew and who became their family and friends. For the project, Savage and Miller uploaded a video to YouTube that told their stories of being har- assed while adolescents and coming out gay. They demonstrated that life got better for them once they became adults and could control their surround- ings, keeping bullies out of their lives. Viewers were encouraged to create their own video and upload it to the project Web site. Within a very short time, tens of thousands of videos were shared through the project’s Web site. There are other organizations that provide support for LGBT youths. One is the Trevor Project. Named after an Academy Award–winning short film about LGBT teen suicide in 1994, the Trevor Project was formed in 1998 specifically to provide a nationwide crisis hotline for LGBT youths to call if in emotional distress or considering suicide. The therapeutic approach used by the It Gets Better Project and the Trevor Project is to instill hope. Hope is the belief that a better future is possible and that current situations are temporary and will pass. The thousands of videos express hope and give a face to the coming-out pro- cess. Adolescents watching the videos find many videos of people coming from their same ethnic, racial, social background, thereby helping to fight the isolation that so many adolescents feel. Coming out is not just for