Pamela Morris and Mandy Blackburn—a lesbian couple who live in Massachusetts—were among the very first folks to contribute a video to the IGBP. Their video is very, very sweet and it's still one of my favorites:

Today Morris and Blackburn were profiled in their hometown newspaper:

Asked why they'd made the video, they said they'd felt strongly that the idea behind "It Gets Better" was too important to let pass.

In high school, said Morris, it's so easy for almost anyone to feel as though "you're the only one, an oddball." It's only years later, Blackburn added, that you're apt to discover that it wasn't just you at all, that even the popular kids sometimes felt awkward or unloved.

Beyond that, said Morris, the "It Gets Better" videos were offering teenagers a rare chance to see and hear gay people speak candidly, on their own terms, about their own lives—about what they've been through and even about their normal and "boring and happy" lives today. On TV, gay characters who seem like down-to-earth, real people are still "extremely rare," Morris pointed out. And so gay teenagers may not always know where to turn, she said, to learn how people deal with hardship and what their lives are actually like.

To that point, Blackburn talks on camera about growing up in a conservative, Christian household in Colorado. It took her years, she says, to sift through the confusion and try to understand why God would have made her gay if being gay was so wrong. "How could he create me and hate me?" she says she often wondered. In time, she says, she came to a view of a more loving God, who loves gay and straight alike. She also talks of the process she went through with her parents. They first assured her that being gay was "just a phase," she says, though they have since been able to express greater acceptance.

Morris describes "the confrontation" that ensued at home when she came out to her parents. Her mother, she recalls, asked what she had done to make her daughter a lesbian. Gradually, they "kinda grasped it," Morris says, and came to terms with the fact that being gay "was the way I was. ... When I met Mandy eight years ago, they welcomed her as part of the family."

...

Morris and Blackburn recount the story of meeting at a concert held on an outdoor patio at a bar in Colorado. As shy, reserved types, neither was especially adept in these situations. She rarely went to bars, Blackburn recalls on the video, and "Lord knows," she was never going to talk to anyone she saw at one. As they shared a bench and a spot of shade on the patio, a few glances were exchanged. Hours passed. Finally, Morris said, "Look, if I wasn't so socially inept, I'd be trying to hold a conversation with you."

So successful was the icebreaker line that Morris jokes on the video that she's happy to share it with others. "There's your pick-up line, kids, so take it and run with it! I'm sure you can meet the person of your dreams if you admit what a social idiot you are."