Artist Post, Or Something Similar...

From class on Wednesday, I pointed out that the current issue that I considered a driving force to my work (or that I would otherwise wish to be behind my work at some point) to be the issues of gay persecution, specifically that of children and teens who all too often learn that they have no one to turn to when they come out of the proverbial closet; either because of their peers or parents.  Shane started my research with the website Born This Way.  Of which I highly recommend anyone visit, as it contains the reflections of older individuals on their lives through photographs they deemed suggestive of their homosexuality at an early age (usually between two and twelve).  From there, I began clicking around and came across the It Gets Better Project that I had heard about a few months prior on no other than Facebook itself.  The Project is set with no particular artist in mind, rather it represents the collective approach of people of all ages, ethnicities, and so on acting in a way to provide gay youth a shoulder to cry on, for lack of a better phrase.  Within this website, you will find over one thousand video entries (and those are only official entries listed on the website, there are many more that appear elsewhere on the Internet) that seek to tell children and teens in middle school and high school, that while life seems like it is constantly acting against you now, it in time gets better and that people, such as activists, are acting at all hours to try to make it even better.  To quote directly from the website's About page:

In September 2010, syndicated columnist and author Dan Savage created a YouTube video with his partner Terry to inspire hope for young people facing harassment. In response to a number of students taking their own lives after being bullied in school, they wanted to create a personal way for supporters everywhere to tell LGBT youth that, yes, it does indeed get better.

This website best represents the function I would like my work to take on at some point in the future, sooner rather than layer.  While it is no specific artist, honestly in reality there would be thousands of them, it represents what I would categorize as either what one could consider a very loose cooperation of artists or a  cultural or political movement with visual and auditory elements of varying qualities and compositions.  They suggest reality, documentation of something real and honest.  These entries include many different people, both famous and not, telling today's youth that suicide should not be the only option.  As for an example of the video projects created, I'm going to provide you all with a link to the video my professor from years ago made most recently:  Example of It Gets Better.