The following podcast contains explicit language.

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Carbonite.com. That offer code is Slate. I'm Stephen Metcalfe, and this is the Slate Culture

Gab Fest. Does It Get Better? Edition. It's Wednesday, October 13th, 2010. On today's program,

a web campaign against gay bullying and for hope, a new Ted

Hughes poem spells out the final days of Sylvia Plath and Bruce Springsteen's darkness on

the edge of town reconsidered thanks to a box set and a documentary film. Joining me today are Slate's

deputy editor Julia Turner. Julia, we should say you're not in the studio. You're in, well,

you are, you're in the Washington,. You're in, well, you are.

You're in the Washington, D.C. studio coming to us remotely. I'm all alone in a padded room, which is maybe how things should always be. Hi. And we're, uh, we're joined face to face by Dana Stevens, our film critic. Hey, Dana. Hey, Steve. How you doing today? Pretty well. Good, good. And finally, we're joined, lucky us by June, Thomas Slate's foreign editor.

June, explain to us how this, I think, very, we will all agree, quite moving campaign emerged out of Dan Savage's imagination.

His filthy brain. Yes, exactly. Well, as I gleaned from his podcast, the Savage Lovecast,

there was, at the beginning of his podcast, he usually starts with a rant, which often is about

homophobic politicians who then later are revealed to be doing things with young boys. But,

you know, he rails against their hypocrisy and so on.

But there was a period where there seemed to be an endless list of suicides, of kids

who had been bullied, had been harassed and killed themselves.

And he announced at the beginning of his podcast, before he even got to all the Faldoral, that, hey, it struck me that when I hear these stories, I just think, if only someone could talk to these kids, if only someone could say to these kids, don't kill yourself. It really does get passionate. If you can just get through this, if you could just let these horrible people say things to you, just let it survive this, persist.

Things get better.

And then you realize that, well, today, thanks to the web, thanks to YouTube, you can give a message.

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