The Disregarding of Heteronormativity: Emphasizing a Happy Queer Adulthood and Localizing Anti-Queer Violence to Adolescent Schools Doug Meyer 1 Published online: 10 January 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract This article focuses on how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) adults in 159 BIt Gets Better^ videos used happiness discourse to provide advice for an assumed adolescent viewer experiencing anti-queer bullying. Employing a grounded theory approach to analyze the videos and building on sociological analyses of changing sexuality norms, the author develops the concept of Bdisregarding heteronormativity^ to account for processes that draw attention away from the widespread privileging and nor- malizing of heterosexuality. Indeed, findings reveal that makers of the videos not only localized anti-LGBTQ violence and harassment to adolescent schools, emphasizing the de- cline or disappearance of discriminatory events into adult- hood, but also emphasized happiness and positivity more than power relations and structural constraints. At times, this em- phasis included suggestions that bullied LGBTQ youth could improve their lives by adopting a more positive outlook or ignoring the negative opinions of other people. Thus, makers of the videos generally positioned violence against queer youth as primarily solvable through emotional management, contributing to the individualizing and depoliticizing of this social problem. In contrast, the author argues for analyses that resist the disregarding of heteronormativity and instead posi- tion unequal power relations as enduring and widespread structural features of US society. Keywords It Gets Better . Post-gay . Age . Positive thinking . Sexual fluidity . Sociology . Bullying Sociological scholarship has increasingly contributed to cri- tiques of contemporary emphasis and research focusing on happiness, particularly the expansion of positive psychology and the promotion of positive thinking as a solution to a wide range of social problems (Bauman 2008; Cieslik 2015; Frawley 2015). These critiques have emphasized not only methodological shortcomings with research that attributes enormous causal power to happiness but also problematic underpinnings of the shift toward positive thinking, with the positioning of social inequality as solvable through individual emotional management (Hughes 2016; Jugureanu et al. 2014; Wright 2013). Although the intensifying of what has been characterized as Bthe happiness industry^—an exploding for-profit self-help sector devoted to selling consumers hope of a happier life—is only part of the ongoing depoliticizing and individualizing of social issues, it remains an important one, given that happiness scripts may discourage participation in social movements (Ahmed 2010; Davies 2016; Gunnell 2004; Mentinis 2013). In this regard, problems as deeply structural as poverty, unemployment, and economic collapse have been positioned as issues to be solved by insulating the self from negativity rather than organizing for collective change (Binkley 2014; Ehrenreich 2009; Hochschild 2003). Some of this scholarship has suggested that happiness dis- course has merely replaced its earlier iterations of self- esteem and emotional intelligence, which indicates that posi- tive thinking may decline in importance in the future, yet this research generally agrees that emphasis on happiness and pos- itivity has become an important mechanism for reducing so- cial life to the individual, at the exclusion of the context (Cieslik 2015; Frawley 2015; Miller 2008; Smith 2008). Whereas some sociological research has been critical of the individualizing aspects of happiness scripts, sexuality schol- arship has more frequently emphasized their normalizing ef- fects, particularly work in queer theory that has problematized * Doug Meyer dom6e@virginia.edu 1 The University of Virginia, Levering Hall, PO Box 400172, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA Sex Res Soc Policy (2017) 14:331–344 DOI 10.1007/s13178-016-0272-7