Fifty shades of gay
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0:01 - 0:03Human beings start putting each other into boxes
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0:03 - 0:05the second that they see each other --
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0:05 - 0:08Is that person dangerous? Are they attractive?
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0:08 - 0:11Are they a potential mate? Are they a potential networking opportunity?
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0:11 - 0:14We do this little interrogation when we meet people
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0:14 - 0:16to make a mental resume for them.
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0:16 - 0:18What's your name? Where are you from?
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0:18 - 0:21How old are you? What do you do?
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0:21 - 0:24Then we get more personal with it.
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0:24 - 0:27Have you ever had any diseases?
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0:27 - 0:29Have you ever been divorced?
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0:29 - 0:32Does your breath smell bad while you're answering my interrogation right now?
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0:32 - 0:34What are you into? Who are you into?
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0:34 - 0:36What gender do you like to sleep with?
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0:36 - 0:38I get it.
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0:38 - 0:40We are neurologically hardwired
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0:40 - 0:42to seek out people like ourselves.
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0:42 - 0:45We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enough
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0:45 - 0:47to know what acceptance feels like.
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0:47 - 0:49We bond together based on anything that we can --
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0:49 - 0:54music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on.
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0:54 - 1:01We seek out environments that reinforce our personal choices.
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1:01 - 1:04Sometimes, though, just the question "what do you do?"
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1:04 - 1:06can feel like somebody's opening a tiny little box
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1:06 - 1:07and asking you to squeeze yourself inside of it.
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1:07 - 1:11Because the categories, I've found, are too limiting.
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1:11 - 1:13The boxes are too narrow.
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1:13 - 1:15And this can get really dangerous.
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1:15 - 1:17So here's a disclaimer about me, though,
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1:17 - 1:18before we get too deep into this.
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1:18 - 1:21I grew up in a very sheltered environment.
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1:21 - 1:25I was raised in downtown Manhattan in the early 1980s,
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1:25 - 1:29two blocks from the epicenter of punk music.
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1:29 - 1:31I was shielded from the pains of bigotry
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1:31 - 1:35and the social restrictions of a religiously-based upbringing.
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1:35 - 1:39Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinker
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1:39 - 1:41or a performance artist of some kind,
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1:41 - 1:43you were the weirdo.
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1:43 - 1:44(Laughter)
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1:44 - 1:46It was an unorthodox upbringing,
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1:46 - 1:49but as a kid on the streets of New York,
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1:49 - 1:51you learn how to trust your own instincts,
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1:51 - 1:53you learn how to go with your own ideas.
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1:53 - 1:57So when I was six, I decided that I wanted to be a boy.
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1:57 - 2:00I went to school one day and the kids wouldn't let me play basketball with them.
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2:00 - 2:02They said they wouldn't let girls play.
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2:02 - 2:03So I went home, and I shaved my head,
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2:03 - 2:06and I came back the next day and I said, "I'm a boy."
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2:06 - 2:07I mean, who knows, right?
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2:07 - 2:10When you're six, maybe you can do that.
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2:10 - 2:14I didn't want anyone to know that I was a girl, and they didn't.
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2:14 - 2:17I kept up the charade for eight years.
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2:17 - 2:21So this is me when I was 11.
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2:21 - 2:22I was playing a kid named Walter
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2:22 - 2:25in a movie called "Julian Po."
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2:25 - 2:28I was a little street tough that followed Christian Slater around and badgered him.
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2:28 - 2:30See, I was also a child actor,
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2:30 - 2:33which doubled up the layers of the performance of my identity,
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2:33 - 2:39because no one knew that I was actually a girl really playing a boy.
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2:39 - 2:42In fact, no one in my life knew that I was a girl --
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2:42 - 2:44not my teachers at school, not my friends,
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2:44 - 2:46not the directors that I worked with.
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2:46 - 2:48Kids would often come up to me in class
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2:48 - 2:51and grab me by the throat to check for an Adam's apple
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2:51 - 2:54or grab my crotch to check what I was working with.
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2:54 - 2:56When I would go to the bathroom, I would turn my shoes around in the stalls
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2:56 - 2:59so that it looked like I was peeing standing up.
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2:59 - 3:01At sleepovers I would have panic attacks
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3:01 - 3:03trying to break it to girls that they didn't want to kiss me
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3:03 - 3:05without outing myself.
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3:05 - 3:07It's worth mentioning though
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3:07 - 3:11that I didn't hate my body or my genitalia.
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3:11 - 3:13I didn't feel like I was in the wrong body.
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3:13 - 3:15I felt like I was performing this elaborate act.
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3:15 - 3:19I wouldn't have qualified as transgender.
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3:19 - 3:21If my family, though, had been the kind of people to believe in therapy,
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3:21 - 3:23they probably would have diagnosed me
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3:23 - 3:24as something like gender dysmorphic
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3:24 - 3:27and put me on hormones to stave off puberty.
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3:27 - 3:28But in my particular case,
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3:28 - 3:29I just woke up one day when I was 14,
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3:29 - 3:32and I decided that I wanted to be a girl again.
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3:32 - 3:35Puberty had hit, and I had no idea what being a girl meant,
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3:35 - 3:39and I was ready to figure out who I actually was.
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3:39 - 3:41When a kid behaves like I did,
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3:41 - 3:43they don't exactly have to come out, right?
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3:43 - 3:45No one is exactly shocked.
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3:45 - 3:49(Laughter)
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3:49 - 3:53But I wasn't asked to define myself by my parents.
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3:53 - 3:55When I was 15, and I called my father
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3:55 - 3:57to tell him that I had fallen in love,
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3:57 - 3:59it was the last thing on either of our minds
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3:59 - 4:01to discuss what the consequences were
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4:01 - 4:03of the fact that my first love was a girl.
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4:03 - 4:05Three years later, when I fell in love with a man,
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4:05 - 4:08neither of my parents batted an eyelash either.
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4:08 - 4:11See, it's one of the great blessings of my very unorthodox childhood
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4:11 - 4:13that I wasn't ever asked to define myself
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4:13 - 4:16as any one thing at any point.
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4:16 - 4:20I was just allowed to be me, growing and changing in every moment.
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4:20 - 4:23So four, almost five years ago,
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4:23 - 4:26Proposition 8, the great marriage equality debate,
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4:26 - 4:28was raising a lot of dust around this country.
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4:28 - 4:31And at the time, getting married wasn't really something
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4:31 - 4:32I spent a lot of time thinking about.
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4:32 - 4:35But I was struck by the fact that America,
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4:35 - 4:37a country with such a tarnished civil rights record,
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4:37 - 4:39could be repeating its mistakes so blatantly.
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4:39 - 4:41And I remember watching the discussion on television
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4:41 - 4:43and thinking how interesting it was
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4:43 - 4:46that the separation of church and state
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4:46 - 4:50was essentially drawing geographical boundaries throughout this country,
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4:50 - 4:51between places where people believed in it
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4:51 - 4:53and places where people didn't.
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4:53 - 4:59And then, that this discussion was drawing geographical boundaries around me.
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4:59 - 5:02If this was a war with two disparate sides,
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5:02 - 5:05I, by default, fell on team gay,
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5:05 - 5:08because I certainly wasn't 100 percent straight.
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5:08 - 5:12At the time I was just beginning to emerge
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5:12 - 5:15from this eight-year personal identity crisis zigzag
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5:15 - 5:17that saw me go from being a boy
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5:17 - 5:21to being this awkward girl that looked like a boy in girl's clothes
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5:21 - 5:23to the opposite extreme of this super skimpy,
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5:23 - 5:26over-compensating, boy-chasing girly-girl
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5:26 - 5:30to finally just a hesitant exploration of what I actually was,
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5:30 - 5:32a tomboyish girl
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5:32 - 5:36who liked both boys and girls depending on the person.
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5:36 - 5:41I had spent a year photographing this new generation of girls, much like myself,
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5:41 - 5:42who fell kind of between-the-lines --
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5:42 - 5:46girls who skateboarded but did it in lacy underwear,
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5:46 - 5:50girls who had boys' haircuts but wore girly nail polish,
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5:50 - 5:53girls who had eyeshadow to match their scraped knees,
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5:53 - 5:56girls who liked girls and boys who all liked boys and girls
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5:56 - 5:58who all hated being boxed in to anything.
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5:58 - 6:02I loved these people, and I admired their freedom,
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6:02 - 6:05but I watched as the world outside of our utopian bubble
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6:05 - 6:06exploded into these raging debates
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6:06 - 6:12where pundits started likening our love to bestiality on national television.
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6:12 - 6:14And this powerful awareness rolled in over me
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6:14 - 6:20that I was a minority, and in my own home country,
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6:20 - 6:22based on one facet of my character.
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6:22 - 6:28I was legally and indisputably a second-class citizen.
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6:28 - 6:29I was not an activist.
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6:29 - 6:32I wave no flags in my own life.
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6:32 - 6:34But I was plagued by this question:
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6:34 - 6:37How could anyone vote to strip the rights
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6:37 - 6:39of the vast variety of people that I knew
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6:39 - 6:43based on one element of their character?
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6:43 - 6:44How could they say that we as a group
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6:44 - 6:47were not deserving of equal rights as somebody else?
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6:47 - 6:49Were we even a group? What group?
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6:49 - 6:53And had these people ever even consciously met a victim of their discrimination?
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6:53 - 6:57Did they know who they were voting against and what the impact was?
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6:57 - 6:59And then it occurred to me,
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6:59 - 7:02perhaps if they could look into the eyes
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7:02 - 7:05of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship
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7:05 - 7:07it might make it harder for them to do.
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7:07 - 7:09It might give them pause.
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7:09 - 7:15Obviously I couldn't get 20 million people to the same dinner party,
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7:15 - 7:19so I figured out a way where I could introduce them to each other photographically
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7:19 - 7:22without any artifice, without any lighting,
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7:22 - 7:26or without any manipulation of any kind on my part.
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7:26 - 7:28Because in a photograph you can examine a lion's whiskers
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7:28 - 7:31without the fear of him ripping your face off.
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7:31 - 7:34For me, photography is not just about exposing film,
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7:34 - 7:36it's about exposing the viewer
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7:36 - 7:38to something new, a place they haven't gone before,
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7:38 - 7:42but most importantly, to people that they might be afraid of.
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7:42 - 7:44Life magazine introduced generations of people
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7:44 - 7:48to distant, far-off cultures they never knew existed through pictures.
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7:48 - 7:54So I decided to make a series of very simple portraits,
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7:54 - 7:56mugshots if you will.
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7:56 - 7:59And I basically decided to photograph anyone in this country
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7:59 - 8:02that was not 100 percent straight,
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8:02 - 8:05which, if you don't know, is a limitless number of people.
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8:05 - 8:07(Laughter)
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8:07 - 8:10So this was a very large undertaking,
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8:10 - 8:12and to do it we needed some help.
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8:12 - 8:14So I ran out in the freezing cold,
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8:14 - 8:18and I photographed every single person that I knew that I could get to
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8:18 - 8:22in February of about two years ago.
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8:22 - 8:26And I took those photographs, and I went to the HRC and I asked them for some help.
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8:26 - 8:28And they funded two weeks of shooting in New York.
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8:28 - 8:31And then we made this.
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8:31 - 8:43(Music)
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8:43 - 8:48Video: I'm iO Tillett Wright, and I'm an artist born and raised in New York City.
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8:48 - 9:01(Music)
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9:01 - 9:05Self Evident Truths is a photographic record of LGBTQ America today.
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9:05 - 9:07My aim is to take a simple portrait
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9:07 - 9:10of anyone who's anything other than 100 percent straight
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9:10 - 9:15or feels like they fall in the LGBTQ spectrum in any way.
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9:15 - 9:18My goal is to show the humanity that exists in every one of us
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9:18 - 9:20through the simplicity of a face.
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9:20 - 9:23(Music)
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9:23 - 9:26"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."
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9:26 - 9:28It's written in the Declaration of Independence.
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9:28 - 9:30We are failing as a nation
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9:30 - 9:32to uphold the morals upon which we were founded.
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9:32 - 9:34There is no equality in the United States.
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9:34 - 9:36["What does equality mean to you?"]
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9:36 - 9:38["Marriage"] ["Freedom"] ["Civil rights"]
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9:38 - 9:40["Treat every person as you'd treat yourself"]
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9:40 - 9:44It's when you don't have to think about it, simple as that.
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9:44 - 9:46The fight for equal rights is not just about gay marriage.
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9:46 - 9:51Today in 29 states, more than half of this country,
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9:51 - 9:55you can legally be fired just for your sexuality.
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9:55 - 9:58["Who is responsible for equality?"]
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9:58 - 10:01I've heard hundreds of people give the same answer:
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10:01 - 10:05"We are all responsible for equality."
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10:05 - 10:07So far we've shot 300 faces in New York City.
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10:07 - 10:09And we wouldn't have been able to do any of it
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10:09 - 10:12without the generous support of the Human Rights Campaign.
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10:12 - 10:14I want to take the project across the country.
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10:14 - 10:18I want to visit 25 American cities, and I want to shoot 4,000 or 5,000 people.
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10:18 - 10:22This is my contribution to the civil rights fight of my generation.
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10:22 - 10:24I challenge you to look into the faces of these people
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10:24 - 10:27and tell them that they deserve less than any other human being.
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10:27 - 10:29(Music)
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10:29 - 10:31["Self evident truths"]
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10:31 - 10:33["4,000 faces across America"]
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10:33 - 10:37(Music)
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10:37 - 10:46(Applause)
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10:46 - 10:50iO Tillett Wright: Absolutely nothing could have prepared us for what happened after that.
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10:50 - 10:53Almost 85,000 people watched that video,
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10:53 - 10:56and then they started emailing us from all over the country,
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10:56 - 11:00asking us to come to their towns and help them to show their faces.
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11:00 - 11:05And a lot more people wanted to show their faces than I had anticipated.
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11:05 - 11:08So I changed my immediate goal to 10,000 faces.
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11:08 - 11:12That video was made in the spring of 2011,
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11:12 - 11:16and as of today I have traveled to almost 20 cities
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11:16 - 11:19and photographed almost 2,000 people.
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11:19 - 11:22I know that this is a talk,
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11:22 - 11:25but I'd like to have a minute of just quiet
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11:25 - 11:26and have you just look at these faces
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11:26 - 11:30because there is nothing that I can say that will add to them.
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11:30 - 11:32Because if a picture is worth a thousand words,
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11:32 - 11:36then a picture of a face needs a whole new vocabulary.
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11:57 - 12:01So after traveling and talking to people
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12:01 - 12:05in places like Oklahoma or small-town Texas,
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12:05 - 12:08we found evidence that the initial premise was dead on.
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12:08 - 12:10Visibility really is key.
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12:10 - 12:13Familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy.
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12:13 - 12:17Once an issue pops up in your own backyard or amongst your own family,
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12:17 - 12:20you're far more likely to explore sympathy for it
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12:20 - 12:21or explore a new perspective on it.
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12:21 - 12:24Of course, in my travels I met people
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12:24 - 12:28who legally divorced their children for being other than straight,
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12:28 - 12:30but I also met people who were Southern Baptists
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12:30 - 12:33who switched churches because their child was a lesbian.
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12:33 - 12:38Sparking empathy had become the backbone of Self Evident Truths.
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12:38 - 12:41But here's what I was starting to learn that was really interesting:
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12:41 - 12:45Self Evident Truths doesn't erase the differences between us.
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12:45 - 12:49In fact, on the contrary, it highlights them.
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12:49 - 12:51It presents, not just the complexities
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12:51 - 12:53found in a procession of different human beings,
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12:53 - 12:57but the complexities found within each individual person.
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12:57 - 13:01It wasn't that we had too many boxes, it was that we had too few.
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13:08 - 13:14At some point I realized that my mission to photograph "gays" was inherently flawed,
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13:14 - 13:17because there were a million different shades of gay.
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13:17 - 13:20Here I was trying to help,
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13:20 - 13:23and I had perpetuated the very thing I had spent my life trying to avoid --
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13:23 - 13:26yet another box.
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13:26 - 13:29At some point I added a question to the release form
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13:29 - 13:31that asked people to quantify themselves
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13:31 - 13:34on a scale of one to 100 percent gay.
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13:34 - 13:38And I watched so many existential crises unfold in front of me.
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13:38 - 13:41(Laughter)
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13:41 - 13:42People didn't know what to do
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13:42 - 13:44because they had never been presented with the option before.
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13:44 - 13:46Can you quantify your openness?
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13:46 - 13:48Once they got over the shock, though,
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13:48 - 13:52by and large people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent
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13:52 - 13:55or the 3 to 20 percent marks.
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13:55 - 13:58Of course, there were lots of people who opted for a 100 percent one or the other,
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13:58 - 14:00but I found that a much larger proportion of people
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14:00 - 14:03identified as something that was much more nuanced.
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14:03 - 14:09I found that most people fall on a spectrum of what I have come to refer to as "Grey."
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14:09 - 14:13Let me be clear though -- and this is very important --
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14:13 - 14:18in no way am I saying that preference doesn't exist.
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14:18 - 14:23And I am not even going to address the issue of choice versus biological imperative,
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14:23 - 14:25because if any of you happen to be of the belief
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14:25 - 14:27that sexual orientation is a choice,
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14:27 - 14:29I invite you to go out and try to be grey.
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14:29 - 14:31I'll take your picture just for trying.
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14:31 - 14:33(Laughter)
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14:33 - 14:37What I am saying though is that human beings are not one-dimensional.
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14:37 - 14:43The most important thing to take from the percentage system is this:
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14:43 - 14:45If you have gay people over here
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14:45 - 14:49and you have straight people over here,
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14:49 - 14:52and while we recognize that most people identify
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14:52 - 14:54as somewhere closer to one binary or another,
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14:54 - 14:59there is this vast spectrum of people that exist in between.
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14:59 - 15:02And the reality that this presents is a complicated one.
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15:02 - 15:05Because, for example, if you pass a law
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15:05 - 15:08that allows a boss to fire an employee for homosexual behavior,
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15:08 - 15:11where exactly do you draw the line?
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15:11 - 15:17Is it over here, by the people who have had one or two heterosexual experiences so far?
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15:17 - 15:18Or is it over here
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15:18 - 15:22by the people who have only had one or two homosexual experiences thus far?
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15:22 - 15:27Where exactly does one become a second-class citizen?
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15:27 - 15:32Another interesting thing that I learned from my project and my travels
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15:32 - 15:36is just what a poor binding agent sexual orientation is.
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15:36 - 15:38After traveling so much and meeting so many people,
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15:38 - 15:42let me tell you, there are just as many jerks and sweethearts
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15:42 - 15:45and Democrats and Republicans and jocks and queens
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15:45 - 15:48and every other polarization you can possibly think of
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15:48 - 15:50within the LGBT community
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15:50 - 15:53as there are within the human race.
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15:53 - 15:58Aside from the fact that we play with one legal hand tied behind our backs,
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15:58 - 16:02and once you get past the shared narrative of prejudice and struggle,
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16:02 - 16:03just being other than straight
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16:03 - 16:08doesn't necessarily mean that we have anything in common.
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16:08 - 16:17So in the endless proliferation of faces that Self Evident Truths is always becoming,
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16:17 - 16:20as it hopefully appears across more and more platforms,
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16:20 - 16:25bus shelters, billboards, Facebook pages, screen savers,
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16:25 - 16:28perhaps in watching this procession of humanity,
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16:28 - 16:31something interesting and useful will begin to happen.
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16:31 - 16:35Hopefully these categories, these binaries,
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16:35 - 16:37these over-simplified boxes
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16:37 - 16:42will begin to become useless and they'll begin to fall away.
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16:42 - 16:45Because really, they describe nothing that we see
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16:45 - 16:49and no one that we know and nothing that we are.
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16:49 - 16:54What we see are human beings in all their multiplicity.
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16:54 - 16:58And seeing them makes it harder to deny their humanity.
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16:58 - 17:02At the very least I hope it makes it harder to deny their human rights.
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17:02 - 17:06So is it me particularly
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17:06 - 17:09that you would choose to deny the right to housing,
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17:09 - 17:12the right to adopt children, the right to marriage,
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17:12 - 17:16the freedom to shop here, live here, buy here?
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17:16 - 17:18Am I the one that you choose to disown
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17:18 - 17:22as your child or your brother or your sister or your mother or your father,
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17:22 - 17:25your neighbor, your cousin, your uncle, the president,
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17:25 - 17:28your police woman or the fireman?
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17:28 - 17:31It's too late.
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17:31 - 17:34Because I already am all of those things.
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17:34 - 17:39We already are all of those things, and we always have been.
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17:39 - 17:42So please don't greet us as strangers,
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17:42 - 17:45greet us as your fellow human beings, period.
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17:45 - 17:46Thank you.
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17:46 - 17:57(Applause)
- Title:
- Fifty shades of gay
- Speaker:
- iO Tillett Wright
- Description:
-
Artist iO Tillett Wright has photographed 2,000 people who consider themselves somewhere on the LBGTQ spectrum and asked many of them: Can you assign a percentage to how gay or straight you are? Most people, it turns out, consider themselves to exist in the gray areas of sexuality, not 100% gay or straight. Which presents a real problem when it comes to discrimination: Where do you draw the line? (Filmed at TEDxWomen.)
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- closed TED
- Project:
- TEDTalks
- Duration:
- 18:18
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for Fifty shades of gay | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for Fifty shades of gay | ||
Thu-Huong Ha approved English subtitles for Fifty shades of gay | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for Fifty shades of gay | ||
Morton Bast accepted English subtitles for Fifty shades of gay | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for Fifty shades of gay | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for Fifty shades of gay | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for Fifty shades of gay |