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Human beings start putting each other into boxes

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the second that they see each other --

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Is that person dangerous? Are they attractive?

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Are they a potential mate? Are they a potential networking opportunity?

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We do this little interrogation when we meet people

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to make a mental resume for them.

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What's your name? Where are you from?

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How old are you? What do you do?

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Then we get more personal with it.

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Have you ever had any diseases?

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Have you ever been divorced?

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Does your breath smell bad while you're answering my interrogation right now?

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What are you into? Who are you into?

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What gender do you like to sleep with?

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I get it.

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We are neurologically hardwired

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to seek out people like ourselves.

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We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enough

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to know what acceptance feels like.

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We bond together based on anything that we can --

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music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on.

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We seek out environments that reinforce our personal choices.

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Sometimes, though, just the question "what do you do?"

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can feel like somebody's opening a tiny little box

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and asking you to squeeze yourself inside of it.

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Because the categories, I've found, are too limiting.

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The boxes are too narrow.

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And this can get really dangerous.

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So here's a disclaimer about me, though,

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before we get too deep into this.

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I grew up in a very sheltered environment.

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I was raised in downtown Manhattan in the early 1980s,

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two blocks from the epicenter of punk music.

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I was shielded from the pains of bigotry

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and the social restrictions of a religiously-based upbringing.

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Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinker

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or a performance artist of some kind,

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you were the weirdo.

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(Laughter)

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It was an unorthodox upbringing,

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but as a kid on the streets of New York,

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you learn how to trust your own instincts,

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you learn how to go with your own ideas.

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So when I was six, I decided that I wanted to be a boy.

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I went to school one day and the kids wouldn't let me play basketball with them.

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They said they wouldn't let girls play.

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So I went home, and I shaved my head,

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and I came back the next day and I said, "I'm a boy."

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I mean, who knows, right?

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When you're six, maybe you can do that.

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I didn't want anyone to know that I was a girl, and they didn't.

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I kept up the charade for eight years.

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So this is me when I was 11.

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I was playing a kid named Walter

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in a movie called "Julian Po."

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I was a little street tough that followed Christian Slater around and badgered him.

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See, I was also a child actor,

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which doubled up the layers of the performance of my identity,

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because no one knew that I was actually a girl really playing a boy.

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In fact, no one in my life knew that I was a girl --

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not my teachers at school, not my friends,

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not the directors that I worked with.

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Kids would often come up to me in class

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and grab me by the throat to check for an Adam's apple

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or grab my crotch to check what I was working with.

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When I would go to the bathroom, I would turn my shoes around in the stalls

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so that it looked like I was peeing standing up.

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At sleepovers I would have panic attacks

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trying to break it to girls that they didn't want to kiss me

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without outing myself.

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It's worth mentioning though

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that I didn't hate my body or my genitalia.

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I didn't feel like I was in the wrong body.

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I felt like I was performing this elaborate act.

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I wouldn't have qualified as transgender.

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If my family, though, had been the kind of people to believe in therapy,

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they probably would have diagnosed me

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as something like gender dysmorphic

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and put me on hormones to stave off puberty.

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But in my particular case,

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I just woke up one day when I was 14,

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and I decided that I wanted to be a girl again.

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Puberty had hit, and I had no idea what being a girl meant,

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and I was ready to figure out who I actually was.

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When a kid behaves like I did,

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they don't exactly have to come out, right?

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No one is exactly shocked.

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(Laughter)

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But I wasn't asked to define myself by my parents.

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When I was 15, and I called my father

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to tell him that I had fallen in love,

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it was the last thing on either of our minds

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to discuss what the consequences were

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of the fact that my first love was a girl.

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Three years later, when I fell in love with a man,

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neither of my parents batted an eyelash either.

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See, it's one of the great blessings of my very unorthodox childhood

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that I wasn't ever asked to define myself

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as any one thing at any point.

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I was just allowed to be me, growing and changing in every moment.

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So four, almost five years ago,

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Proposition 8, the great marriage equality debate,

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was raising a lot of dust around this country.

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And at the time, getting married wasn't really something

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I spent a lot of time thinking about.

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But I was struck by the fact that America,

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a country with such a tarnished civil rights record,

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could be repeating its mistakes so blatantly.

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And I remember watching the discussion on television

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and thinking how interesting it was

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that the separation of church and state

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was essentially drawing geographical boundaries throughout this country,

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between places where people believed in it

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and places where people didn't.

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And then, that this discussion was drawing geographical boundaries around me.

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If this was a war with two disparate sides,

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I, by default, fell on team gay,

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because I certainly wasn't 100 percent straight.

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At the time I was just beginning to emerge

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from this eight-year personal identity crisis zigzag

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that saw me go from being a boy

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to being this awkward girl that looked like a boy in girl's clothes

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to the opposite extreme of this super skimpy,

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over-compensating, boy-chasing girly-girl

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to finally just a hesitant exploration of what I actually was,

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a tomboyish girl

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who liked both boys and girls depending on the person.

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I had spent a year photographing this new generation of girls, much like myself,

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who fell kind of between-the-lines --

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girls who skateboarded but did it in lacy underwear,

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girls who had boys' haircuts but wore girly nail polish,

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girls who had eyeshadow to match their scraped knees,

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girls who liked girls and boys who all liked boys and girls

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who all hated being boxed in to anything.

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I loved these people, and I admired their freedom,

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but I watched as the world outside of our utopian bubble

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exploded into these raging debates

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where pundits started likening our love to bestiality on national television.

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And this powerful awareness rolled in over me

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that I was a minority, and in my own home country,

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based on one facet of my character.

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I was legally and indisputably a second-class citizen.

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I was not an activist.

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I wave no flags in my own life.

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But I was plagued by this question:

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How could anyone vote to strip the rights

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of the vast variety of people that I knew

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based on one element of their character?

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How could they say that we as a group

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were not deserving of equal rights as somebody else?

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Were we even a group? What group?

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And had these people ever even consciously met a victim of their discrimination?

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Did they know who they were voting against and what the impact was?

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And then it occurred to me,

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perhaps if they could look into the eyes

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of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship

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it might make it harder for them to do.

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It might give them pause.

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Obviously I couldn't get 20 million people to the same dinner party,

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so I figured out a way where I could introduce them to each other photographically

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without any artifice, without any lighting,

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or without any manipulation of any kind on my part.

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Because in a photograph you can examine a lion's whiskers

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without the fear of him ripping your face off.

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For me, photography is not just about exposing film,

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it's about exposing the viewer

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to something new, a place they haven't gone before,

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but most importantly, to people that they might be afraid of.

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Life magazine introduced generations of people

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to distant, far-off cultures they never knew existed through pictures.

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So I decided to make a series of very simple portraits,

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mugshots if you will.

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And I basically decided to photograph anyone in this country

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that was not 100 percent straight,

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which, if you don't know, is a limitless number of people.

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(Laughter)

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So this was a very large undertaking,

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and to do it we needed some help.

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So I ran out in the freezing cold,

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and I photographed every single person that I knew that I could get to

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in February of about two years ago.

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And I took those photographs, and I went to the HRC and I asked them for some help.

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And they funded two weeks of shooting in New York.

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And then we made this.

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(Music)

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Video: I'm iO Tillett Wright, and I'm an artist born and raised in New York City.

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(Music)

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Self Evident Truths is a photographic record of LGBTQ America today.

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My aim is to take a simple portrait

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of anyone who's anything other than 100 percent straight

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or feels like they fall in the LGBTQ spectrum in any way.

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My goal is to show the humanity that exists in every one of us

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through the simplicity of a face.

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(Music)

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"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."

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It's written in the Declaration of Independence.

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We are failing as a nation

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to uphold the morals upon which we were founded.

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There is no equality in the United States.

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["What does equality mean to you?"]

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["Marriage"] ["Freedom"] ["Civil rights"]

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["Treat every person as you'd treat yourself"]

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It's when you don't have to think about it, simple as that.

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The fight for equal rights is not just about gay marriage.

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Today in 29 states, more than half of this country,

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you can legally be fired just for your sexuality.

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["Who is responsible for equality?"]

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I've heard hundreds of people give the same answer:

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"We are all responsible for equality."

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So far we've shot 300 faces in New York City.

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And we wouldn't have been able to do any of it

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without the generous support of the Human Rights Campaign.

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I want to take the project across the country.

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I want to visit 25 American cities, and I want to shoot 4,000 or 5,000 people.

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This is my contribution to the civil rights fight of my generation.

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I challenge you to look into the faces of these people

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and tell them that they deserve less than any other human being.

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(Music)

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["Self evident truths"]

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["4,000 faces across America"]

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(Music)

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(Applause)

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iO Tillett Wright: Absolutely nothing could have prepared us for what happened after that.

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Almost 85,000 people watched that video,

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and then they started emailing us from all over the country,

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asking us to come to their towns and help them to show their faces.

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And a lot more people wanted to show their faces than I had anticipated.

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So I changed my immediate goal to 10,000 faces.

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That video was made in the spring of 2011,

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and as of today I have traveled to almost 20 cities

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and photographed almost 2,000 people.

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I know that this is a talk,

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but I'd like to have a minute of just quiet

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and have you just look at these faces

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because there is nothing that I can say that will add to them.

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Because if a picture is worth a thousand words,

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then a picture of a face needs a whole new vocabulary.

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So after traveling and talking to people

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in places like Oklahoma or small-town Texas,

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we found evidence that the initial premise was dead on.

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Visibility really is key.

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Familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy.

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Once an issue pops up in your own backyard or amongst your own family,

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you're far more likely to explore sympathy for it

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or explore a new perspective on it.

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Of course, in my travels I met people

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who legally divorced their children for being other than straight,

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but I also met people who were Southern Baptists

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who switched churches because their child was a lesbian.

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Sparking empathy had become the backbone of Self Evident Truths.

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But here's what I was starting to learn that was really interesting:

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Self Evident Truths doesn't erase the differences between us.

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In fact, on the contrary, it highlights them.

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It presents, not just the complexities

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found in a procession of different human beings,

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but the complexities found within each individual person.

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It wasn't that we had too many boxes, it was that we had too few.

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At some point I realized that my mission to photograph "gays" was inherently flawed,

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because there were a million different shades of gay.

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Here I was trying to help,

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and I had perpetuated the very thing I had spent my life trying to avoid --

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yet another box.

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At some point I added a question to the release form

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that asked people to quantify themselves

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on a scale of one to 100 percent gay.

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And I watched so many existential crises unfold in front of me.

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(Laughter)

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People didn't know what to do

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because they had never been presented with the option before.

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Can you quantify your openness?

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Once they got over the shock, though,

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by and large people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent

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or the 3 to 20 percent marks.

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Of course, there were lots of people who opted for a 100 percent one or the other,

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but I found that a much larger proportion of people

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identified as something that was much more nuanced.

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I found that most people fall on a spectrum of what I have come to refer to as "Grey."

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Let me be clear though -- and this is very important --

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in no way am I saying that preference doesn't exist.

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And I am not even going to address the issue of choice versus biological imperative,

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because if any of you happen to be of the belief

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that sexual orientation is a choice,

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I invite you to go out and try to be grey.

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I'll take your picture just for trying.

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(Laughter)

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What I am saying though is that human beings are not one-dimensional.

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The most important thing to take from the percentage system is this:

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If you have gay people over here

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and you have straight people over here,

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and while we recognize that most people identify

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as somewhere closer to one binary or another,

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there is this vast spectrum of people that exist in between.

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And the reality that this presents is a complicated one.

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Because, for example, if you pass a law

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that allows a boss to fire an employee for homosexual behavior,

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where exactly do you draw the line?

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Is it over here, by the people who have had one or two heterosexual experiences so far?

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Or is it over here

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by the people who have only had one or two homosexual experiences thus far?

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Where exactly does one become a second-class citizen?

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Another interesting thing that I learned from my project and my travels

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is just what a poor binding agent sexual orientation is.

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After traveling so much and meeting so many people,

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let me tell you, there are just as many jerks and sweethearts

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and Democrats and Republicans and jocks and queens

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and every other polarization you can possibly think of

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within the LGBT community

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as there are within the human race.

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Aside from the fact that we play with one legal hand tied behind our backs,

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and once you get past the shared narrative of prejudice and struggle,

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just being other than straight

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doesn't necessarily mean that we have anything in common.

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So in the endless proliferation of faces that Self Evident Truths is always becoming,

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as it hopefully appears across more and more platforms,

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bus shelters, billboards, Facebook pages, screen savers,

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perhaps in watching this procession of humanity,

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something interesting and useful will begin to happen.

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Hopefully these categories, these binaries,

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these over-simplified boxes

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will begin to become useless and they'll begin to fall away.

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Because really, they describe nothing that we see

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and no one that we know and nothing that we are.

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What we see are human beings in all their multiplicity.

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And seeing them makes it harder to deny their humanity.

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At the very least I hope it makes it harder to deny their human rights.

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So is it me particularly

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that you would choose to deny the right to housing,

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the right to adopt children, the right to marriage,

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the freedom to shop here, live here, buy here?

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Am I the one that you choose to disown

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as your child or your brother or your sister or your mother or your father,

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your neighbor, your cousin, your uncle, the president,

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your police woman or the fireman?

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It's too late.

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Because I already am all of those things.

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We already are all of those things, and we always have been.

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So please don't greet us as strangers,

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greet us as your fellow human beings, period.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)