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dan savage on the it gets better project
After the suicides of several gay teens got national coverage in September (perhaps most notably Rutgers student Tyler Clementi last week), the media has spent a lot of time discussing the bullying of GLBTQ youth both in schools and online.

Inspired by the boys' untimely deaths, and in an effort to prevent future suicides, columnist Dan Savage has urged his readers who had been victims of bullying themselves to record videos about what they experienced and how they got through it. The popular video project is called It Gets Better.

The great thing about the videos is the huge range of people who are leaving them -- there are messages from celebrities like Kathy Griffin, Neil Patrick Harris and Ke$ha alongside the video your friend submitted from his living room -- and there are thousands of them.

Obviously, it's important for there to be a national discourse about bullying on TV and in the paper, but for the kids who have to wake up every morning and deal with victimization on a personal level, the fact that The Huffington Post covered the issue might not do a lot to make them feel less alone.

That's where It Gets Better comes in. It's the internet at its best: connecting people to one another through their personal stories and letting them know that they're not alone.

After the jump, five of the most touching video messages.
Dan Savage
Abby Miller
Dave Holmes
Tim Gunn
Chris Colfer