Seth Levy of It Gets Better: Combining Legal and Social Activism
Photo courtesy of Seth Levy
Seth Levy is a partner at Nixon Peabody LLP and the President of the Board Of Directors of the It Gets Better Project—a nonprofit focused on connecting and supporting queer youth around the world. In his conversation with Love to All Project, Levy discusses his perspective and activism as an openly gay man in the world of law.
LTA: Could you introduce yourself and explain what you do?
Sure! My name is Seth Levy. I am a partner at Nixon Peabody law firm. Most of what I do is representing universities and different research hospitals in their intellectual property and clinical research matters. But for the last almost 10 years, I have also served as the President Chair of the board of the It Gets Better Project, which is a non-profit using mostly the power of storytelling to make the world a better place for LGBTQ+ young people.
LTA: What would you say like your personal journey with your LGBTQ+ identity has been like, and like how would you say that experiences shaped how you’ve lived your life?
Sure—these are big questions! Well I guess in a lot of ways, right, it's changed over the years. It's a journey, right? That really is the way to talk about it. Because certainly as a kid growing up in Long Island in New York, it was a very different kind of experience—in the 80s, when to be queer of any sort meant you're gonna get AIDS and die. Yeah, that was it. And so it was a frightening time. This was well before there was any social media; there was no access to information, it was very isolating, there were no GSAs, there were no resources at the school, and maybe there were one or two people in the community that people talked about as being gay but it was definitely not in a like supportive, welcoming way, right? It was usually as the butt of a joke. That seems like ages and ages and ages ago. You know, now being married to my husband, being out in a very public nonprofit, being out at work for many years—I’m just living a very, very different lifestyle. So the journey has been a long one. I'm always careful to say, too, that I have plenty of friends—and certainly a lot of people that I’ve just interacted with or learned about over the years, particularly through some of the nonprofit work—who obviously had much, much, much more difficult experiences that I have. And I feel grateful that, for wherever the bumps were along the way, some of them were either self-imposed because you're just frightened and didn't know any better, but I’ve been very fortunate to have a supportive family.
LTA: How do you think your experience of navigating your identity—especially how you touched on growing up in New York in the midst of the AIDS epidemic—contrasts with the experience of queer youth in 2019, with the use of social media and the internet?
So in a lot of ways, it couldn't be more different. The biggest thing is that it's also a lesson that's become very, very clear through It Gets Better: which is the ability of social media and even just the internet, more generally, to give you access to communities that you're not already a part of physically, is just massive. Unlike other other minority communities, communities of color, or however it is we choose to organize people for the most part, if they're of a certain ethnic or religious minority, they probably have that in the home, or there's some of that in their town, or there are people that they can identify with, or it's not stigmatized to the point that you have to hide it. Or even have an ability to hide it, right? I mean if you’re wheelchair-bound, everyone knows that, so you can't really hide that. That's not the case with the LGBT community, and so having access to stories, being able to connect with people, being able to learn about other people even if the culture wasn't as open as it's becoming, you would at least have an ability to learn something about yourself particularly as a young person when things are that much harder, right? Because you're young, you just haven't had a lot of stuff yet. So one of the ways that really resonated with me, at least through It Gets Better, was that from the very first days of that project we were getting contacted by young people in other parts of the world that were much more dangerous for LGBT youth who really had no access, and in many cases have controlled access even to the internet, but even their ability to navigate through to learn something and connect with other people in the most profound in ways—that just didn't exist for a kid growing up in the 80s.
LTA: Talking about the It Gets Better Project—could you give a short description or timeline of the project's work for those who don't know about it?
Sure. So the project started in the fall of 2010. So we are coming up on 10 years now, which is still sort of mind-boggling. It really was started in response to a number of suicides that had been widely publicized of young gay kids who were taking their own lives. And you know, sadly, those issues weren't new, but they were getting new attention outside the LGBT community and so our co-founders really responded to that by saying: look, in this era of social media and in this era of YouTube, there are ways that the LGBT adult community can reach out to young people and let them know there is a positive future for them. Like: “we made it; you can make it too.” So it gives people some sense of hope that there are folks just like you out there who are living happy, successful, wonderful lives. We've all had our challenges getting there, but we’re there and you gotta hang in there. Those early videos went viral very quickly. Many other people shared their stories, tens and tens and tens of thousands of these videos were created, and from that starting point we built a non-profit around it to continue finding other ways to collect stories from the community and share them in positive ways to continue showing them that there's a brighter future for them and to remind everybody else around them who has a role to play in ensuring that their lives are better; they need to be engaged and supportive as well. So we now operate with—I sort of lost count—I think there's 22 international affiliates all over the world that are doing similar work under our umbrella. We all coordinate our activities together—just tons of stuff over the last decade.
LTA: It’s amazing.
Yeah, it’s been quite a ride.
LTA: After witnessing the impact of those videos and the project since then, do you have a particular moment or aspect that has been the most fulfilling part of your work?
It’s funny, we get asked this question a lot. It’s just always interesting. We all kind of share stories within the team. I mean, for me, I would say some of the most profound moments have been some of the work we’ve done internationally, like speaking on radio for Europe to parts of the old Soviet block, and reaching out to young people there. You know, there I was in a crummy old broadcast studio in the Czech Republic, and I’m like “What am I doing? How did I get here?” The first year, our co founders were the Grand Marshals of the Pride Parade in New York, so my husband Brian and I—who started this with them—we were both from Long Island and we’d both had those experiences in the 80s growing up the way we did. To be marching down 5th Avenue, shouting “It gets better!” at the head of the Pride Parade was sort of wild for us, right? But there have been so many moments talking to the parents of young people who want so much to do the right thing but don’t know how. All of those kinds of conversations are just so powerful.
LTA: Have there been any difficult moments? Especially with the use of the internet and the loss of control you have on that front?
Yeah, that’s a great question. That is the very dark, other side of social media that precipitated and led to the founding of our organization. For example, cyberbullying and all of the awful treatment that social media allows. Because suddenly, in the same way that you can reach everybody out there in the positive ways, you can do it in a negative way and without consequences. And so people say and do really awful stuff that you would never do in person, you know? You would never say that or do that, but it provides that space, which is really quite dangerous and ugly. We’ve always viewed our work as trying to provide a positive message so that even if somebody has a bunch of ugly stuff coming in on their social media feed, they’ve got our stuff too trying to push back, not with more hate or criticism but with positive messaging. Give somebody that other place to look, but it’s a huge issue, not just in this space; I see it in the adult community and among friends. It’s just amazing the things we allow when we all have our avatars or whatever. It’s just amazing to me.
LTA: Besides being a part of this project, you are also a lawyer. Can you describe what it’s like navigating the legal field as a queer individual?
Yeah, I guess I would kinda describe it as two things: One: as just how the culture has changed over the years. You know, when I was in law school, there was a very small LGBT group of like, six people, and the big questions were, “Should you be out on your resume? Should you come out in the interview process? How do you manage that during your internship? Is it okay then? Well, what if you work for a judge?” And it was really more about managing this issue and trying to get a job, so a lot of it was this very practical idea of ‘If you’re going to change the system, you have to get into it first.’ And so we have the superpower of being able to hide who we are, and it’s awful, but if you’re a pragmatist, then maybe you can get into some of these institutions and change them from the inside. So there was that at the time; that by and large just doesn’t exist today, particularly not in the same way and certainly not with the kinds of diversity programs that exist. That’s not to say that there aren’t bigots and homophobes out there. That’s not going away soon, but particularly in major metro areas, it’s a different environment. The other thing though, as a lawyer, part of what we’re all trying to do is advocate, change systems, and be a part of the resolution, and so to me, this is where the lawyer and It Gets Better and the other aspects all collide, you know. You’ve got these skills that you’re getting, and it’s fine to be representing hospitals and universities and all that—I really enjoy my legal practice—but I’m also representing an incarcerated transgender individual in Idaho who wasn’t able to get her hormone therapy. We have these powers we can use for good, and I think it’s really important that we’re doing that.
LTA: You’ve also been a part of a little It Gets Better video yourself, but right now, in this interview, what advice would you give to any queer youth that might be confronting the internet with all of its positive aspects and all of its difficult ones as well?
I hate to sound trite, but haters gonna hate. People are gonna say nasty stuff, and it can happen in person, it can happen online. You’ve got to find ways to rise above. If there’s something positive about those—and this is gonna sound weird—at least it’s just online, right? I totally acknowledge that that’s awful and terrible and all of those things, but it also exists in a universe where at least it’s not physical. You’re not being physically harmed. You can distance yourself from it. You can turn off your computer, you can walk away from your phone. And the other thing is that people out there know it too. So if you’re being publicly embarrassed or ashamed, you also have to have at least enough faith in people to realize that others are going to look at that and go “oh that’s shitty.” They’re going to side with you. They might not say that, but the tolerance for some of this stuff is not what it was either, as we continue to educate society. But you just gotta have thick skin to get through it. You can. Many of us have.
Written by Adelaide Graham
Edited by Maureena Murphy and Morgan Lee
February 2020