Watch on YouTube

1.  From the description on YouTube:

TESTIMONY - Music by Stephen Schwartz
Lyrics taken from and inspired by the It Gets Better Project
http://bit.ly/Testimonysong

In writing TESTIMONY, Stephen Schwartz collaborated with Dan Savage, creator of the groundbreaking "It Gets Better Project." Schwartz has set the heartfelt words from the "It Gets Better" videos to music, weaving them into a breathtaking, emotional new masterpiece that speaks to anyone who has ever felt out of place.

TESTIMONY was recorded and engineered by Leslie Ann Jones, the legendary multi Grammy award-winning Director of Music Recording at Skywalker Sound. Performed by the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus under the direction of Dr. Timothy Seelig.

DOWNLOAD THE SONG
http://www.sfgmc.org/store

Via Towleroad.

2.  This is an example of how I think the autism community can borrow from the gay community.

The messages of self-hatred and self-destruction at the beginning of the song are not very different from messages I see from young autistic people today:

I don't want to be like this.

I don't want to be who I am.

Every day that I don't change, I blame myself.

I am not trying hard enough .

When they find out, no one will love me. . .

I am impersonating the person I show as me. . .

Every night I ask God to end my life.

God, take this away or take me away

 

3.  I could not make an autistic "It Gets Better" video.  No one could honestly have sent that message to gay kids forty years ago, either.  It did not get better then for most gay people.  It does not get better for most autistic people now.  Not enough for that to be the truth, not really, not yet.

What I can do is try to do what I can so that a generation of autistic people who come after me will have the self-confidence that young gay people have today.  What I can do is try to make things so that people who are kids today will be able to honestly tell autistic kids, when they are my age, that it does get better.

4.  The last line of this song is almost too painful for to me, because it is the last thing I want.  When I die, I want to be cremated, so that my molecules can go be other things, as quickly as possible.  Life has always been too painful for me, I have I have always been too conflicted about my own existence, for reincarnation, or even being preserved in any way, to have any appeal to me.

I dream a world where I could say and mean this:

And when I die. . . I want to come back as me.

And I know that that is beyond me, forever.

So instead I want it for you.