I remember being fifteen. I remember a burgeoning sense of who I was, when the swirl of half-knowledge and whole-feelings that I contained were starting to focus. I realised they had a name, and the name was a word that I’d heard before but hadn’t really understood, let alone thought to relate to myself. I remember realising that I was gay. And, following hard after, that the subject was as important as the object: I was gay – no one else that I knew, no one else that I could talk to, no one else. No one.

I remember starting the most heated correspondence the Catholic Herald letters’ page had seen for years, partly as the process that led towards me shedding my own faith, but mainly as validation: if people were talking about the sexuality of ‘name and address supplied’ then it meant that I had a sexuality. I existed! There was a gay man I knew: me, hidden, in print.

But there was little sustenance in that thin gruel. Oh, those nights when I would boggle that no one could see how lonely, how scared, how miserable I was. Those mornings, when I would wake up, and still, against all hope, be me.

But mornings became days, weeks, years. The boy became a man, and the man made friends, good friends, and then, one day, a friend who shared his bed, his house, his life.

That’s a story worth telling, and I wish I could tell it to my fifteen year old self – crippled by the opprobrium of a non-existent creator (who had perversely created the boy in a form unpalatable to himself); gasping for the oxygen of empathy, understanding, friendship.

Stories like this are now being told. Angry at the suicide of Billy Lucas – a fifteen year old boy who endured worse treatment than I did, as his was doled out daily, inescapably, with cruelty by his classmates – American author Dan Savage responded:

I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren’t allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don’t bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don’t have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

He recorded a video with his partner, talking about their lives and how, for them, it got better. Hundreds of other people have since done the same: http://www.youtube.com/itgetsbetterproject

This is remarkable. We are now able to make our stories, our testimonies, accessible. The idea that a young person, floundering in recognising, embracing, and growing into their homosexuality, scared and alone, might see these videos and take comfort from them, might draw some strength from them, I find wonderful and astonishing.

This is the internet working, the power of being able to talk to each other in a way previously unthinkable; a point Sarah Ditum makes in response to another tedious Twitter-bashing salvo.

Is there a caveat? You could, of course, suggest that for some people it doesn’t get better; there’s no gainsaying that, except that it would be to miss the point. This initiative allows a myriad of happy, contented, gay voices to be heard. They claim to speak for no one but themselves, but the message is ‘I thought it would never get better for me. It did. It can for you too’. That these testimonies are being shared, and LGBT people staking a claim as happy, healthy members of society, makes that outcome more likely. Thoughtfully, Guy, Interrupted explores the idea that, in creating our own stratified culture, the project is founded on a falsehood; however, his conclusion that it is worthwhile is, I think, the right one.

Hearing a story won’t stop an insult or a fist. But stories can affect how we feel. Loneliness and fear are feelings; they resonate down the years and I can see my fifteen year old self clicking through those videos and I can feel some of the bewildered loneliness receding and I can feel him grow. I hope that that’s true for a teenager somewhere in the world right now. I feel that it is.