Savage was also bullied but didn't tell his parents what was going on, partly because he didn't want to implicate himself and tell them why he was being bullied. 'I think if I had come out to my mom or dad at that point, they probably would have worked a little harder to protect me, but I was so ashamed of it too - the hassle I was getting at school, that I just wanted to not live it anymore.' 'When I talked to my mom about this years later - after high school - she just said, 'It was so hard we didn't know what to say to you,' ' he says. Miller spent two more years at his high school and found a group of friends who accepted him - but still remembers how the first two years of high school were just horrible. His mother was appalled but felt helpless. If he looks that way, if he talks that way, if he walks that way, there's absolutely nothing they could do to protect me and it was probably just going to happen and that my family should probably just get used to it.' ' 'Their response was, 'There's nothing that they could do.

Miller's mother went to the school and asked the school counselor what she could do to help him. It was all hardened with rocks from being plowed and it scraped the skin off my face.' 'At one point I had a pretty bad bullying incident where I was thrown down on some sort of hardened snow in the school parking lot and they shoved my face into it. 'I couldn't walk down the hall without getting spit at, shoved or pushed around,' he says. He was teased for how he dressed, how his voice sounded and how he expressed his feelings. But when he was growing up in Spokane, Wash., he says, high school was rough - really rough. Terry Miller is now a stay-at-home father and event promoter living in Seattle. Terry Miller's And Dan Savage's Own High School Experiences In an interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross, Savage and Miller talk about their marriage, the adoption of their son D.J., the impact their movement has had on teenage bullying, and their own coming out experiences. This month, Savage and Miller published a companion book, It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying and Creating a Life Worth Living, featuring essays from more than 100 of the video contributors.

President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Anne Hathaway, Sarah Silverman, Tim Gunn, Ellen DeGeneres, Vice President Biden, Ke$ha and the staffs of Google, Facebook and Pixar all have contributed to the project. The 'It Gets Better' movement, as it's now called, has since received over 10,000 video submissions, including entries from both gay and straight people.

It Gets Better by Dan Savage