This Valentine’s Day, Say ‘I Love You’ By Being an Ally

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, we have a couple of ways you can show your love for LGBTQ+ youth, and it’s all about being a visible and vocal ally.

1. Through February 14, donate $50 or more to It Gets Better and receive our limited run collection of LGBTQ+ friendship bracelets. Each bracelet pack comes with seven bracelets showcasing LGBTQ+ identities and at least one uplifting and empowering message. These bracelets were originally created for distribution to our our Youth Voices ambassadors and grantee network, but we had some extras. Either claim a set for yourself to wear and show your allyship, or give them to an LGBTQ+ young person in your life. Donate by February 4 for delivery in time for Valentine’s Day.

2. Join the nearly 800,000 who have committed to being an outspoken ally for LGBTQ+ youth and take the It Gets Better Pledge. When you do, you’ll be taken to a page where you can download the Pledge as a jpg that you can share on your social media channels to encourage others to sign. Post and tag It Gets Better. Let’s see how many folks we can get to take the pledge before February 14.

If you’ve made it this far, chances are you know a bit about the importance of being a visible and vocal ally. But in case you’re in need of a reminder, our Deputy Director Justin Tindall shared a memory of a time when he was able to be that ally for an LGBTQ+ young person and what that moment meant to them (and meant to Justin).

When I was a teenager in the mid-2000s, I thought I was the only queer person in the world. Many queer people my age and older felt the same thing. We didn’t know there were other people out there like us, especially not people raised in the Mormon faith like I was.

That was by design. My community actively ostracized and excommunicated queer people who had come before me, ridding me of any opportunity to learn their stories, their challenges, and their triumphs.

When I finally found the courage to embrace and accept my queer identity in my mid-20s, I learned quickly that I was never alone. This beautiful, broad community taught me queer people have always existed—always worthy of visibility and opportunity, even when it’s been denied to us. Learning that, I promised I would never hide again, not just for my sake, but for any queer kids I might encounter down the road.

Fast forward a few years to a youth conference I attended in New York as a representative of It Gets Better. I met a high school student who told me they’d been bullied by other kids attending the conference for wearing nail polish. They’d removed it in shame. It broke my heart to see queer teenagers still dealing with the same blowback for their gender expression that I had when I was their age.

The following day, as I was about to take the stage for an education panel in front of 500+ young attendees, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I turned to a fellow panelist and asked if they had any nail polish. Deep in my gut, I felt the need to be the kind of representation I’d been denied as a kid—on stage, wearing bright red nail polish, showing the world who I am and how I was born to express myself.

I’ll never know what that moment meant to that young person—if they even noticed, or if it shifted anything for the people who bullied them.

But I do know this: visibility matters. Showing up counts. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to help us make it better for LGBTQ+ youth. You just have to be willing to take that extra step, whatever it looks like for you.