Nerve is featuring Stephen Colbert’s “It Gets Better” video. They’re amazed that he can be straightforward and without irony. I’m more impressed with the friend he mentions, who turned around to a bully who was calling him queer and said … well, watch it.

It reminded me of a woman I knew who, when being gay-baited by some kids on a Cambridge street back in Ye Old Bad Days, turned around and said, “That’s Mr. Dyke to you.” How cool is that?

E.J. Graff writes on social-justice and human-rights issues, particularly discrimination and violence against women and children; marriage and family policy; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lives. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and the author of What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution (Beacon Press, 1999, 2004).