Hi, this is Steven Colbert.   I have a message for any gay and lesbian teens out there — and, I’m being told, also bisexual and transgendered — really, anybody who’s being picked on.   It sucks.   I agree.

When I was in 7th grade, I remember being picked on all the time, and I got called queer a lot, and it was just, sort of, the word that got thrown as a weapon at people when I was a kid, and this is the most hurtful thing that I think the bullies could think of calling you and I didn’t like it; and one day I had a revelation because a friend of mine, Pat, who also got picked on by the bullies was called a queer by one of the bullies — a big jock — and Pat, instead of flinching or running away, turned around and said, “Yeah, I am a queer.  Kiss me,”  and the bully said, “What are you talking about?”  And he said, “I am a queer. You called me a queer, and I am a queer.  Kiss me, I’ll prove it,” and the bully didn’t know what to say; and he just turned around and walked away quietly, and I was stunned.

I couldn’t believe the magic that Pat had just worked.   He had somehow figured out that if you don’t give power to the words that people throw at you to hurt you, they don’t hurt you anymore and you actually have power over those people.   And that’s a lesson that I am grateful to him for, for my entire life.

So if you can,  realize the things that people say about you don’t really matter — it’s who you are — and the older you get, the more you’ll understand that, because it gets better.   People get nicer, too.