WEBVTT 00:00:00.737 --> 00:00:03.166 Human beings start putting each other into boxes 00:00:03.166 --> 00:00:04.983 the second that they see each other -- 00:00:04.983 --> 00:00:08.053 Is that person dangerous? Are they attractive? 00:00:08.053 --> 00:00:11.319 Are they a potential mate? Are they a potential networking opportunity? 00:00:11.319 --> 00:00:13.853 We do this little interrogation when we meet people 00:00:13.853 --> 00:00:16.020 to make a mental resume for them. 00:00:16.020 --> 00:00:17.537 What's your name? Where are you from? 00:00:17.537 --> 00:00:20.898 How old are you? What do you do? 00:00:20.898 --> 00:00:23.699 Then we get more personal with it. 00:00:23.699 --> 00:00:26.847 Have you ever had any diseases? 00:00:26.847 --> 00:00:28.834 Have you ever been divorced? 00:00:28.834 --> 00:00:32.280 Does your breath smell bad while you're answering my interrogation right now? 00:00:32.280 --> 00:00:33.997 What are you into? Who are you into? 00:00:33.997 --> 00:00:35.863 What gender do you like to sleep with? NOTE Paragraph 00:00:35.863 --> 00:00:38.293 I get it. 00:00:38.293 --> 00:00:40.045 We are neurologically hardwired 00:00:40.045 --> 00:00:42.429 to seek out people like ourselves. 00:00:42.429 --> 00:00:44.614 We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enough 00:00:44.614 --> 00:00:46.547 to know what acceptance feels like. 00:00:46.547 --> 00:00:48.897 We bond together based on anything that we can -- 00:00:48.897 --> 00:00:54.349 music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on. 00:00:54.349 --> 00:01:01.237 We seek out environments that reinforce our personal choices. 00:01:01.237 --> 00:01:03.698 Sometimes, though, just the question "what do you do?" 00:01:03.698 --> 00:01:05.658 can feel like somebody's opening a tiny little box 00:01:05.658 --> 00:01:07.187 and asking you to squeeze yourself inside of it. 00:01:07.187 --> 00:01:10.754 Because the categories, I've found, are too limiting. 00:01:10.754 --> 00:01:12.638 The boxes are too narrow. 00:01:12.638 --> 00:01:14.755 And this can get really dangerous. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:14.755 --> 00:01:16.536 So here's a disclaimer about me, though, 00:01:16.536 --> 00:01:18.138 before we get too deep into this. 00:01:18.138 --> 00:01:21.123 I grew up in a very sheltered environment. 00:01:21.123 --> 00:01:25.069 I was raised in downtown Manhattan in the early 1980s, 00:01:25.069 --> 00:01:28.964 two blocks from the epicenter of punk music. 00:01:28.964 --> 00:01:31.054 I was shielded from the pains of bigotry 00:01:31.054 --> 00:01:35.154 and the social restrictions of a religiously-based upbringing. 00:01:35.154 --> 00:01:38.575 Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinker 00:01:38.575 --> 00:01:40.703 or a performance artist of some kind, 00:01:40.703 --> 00:01:42.687 you were the weirdo. 00:01:42.687 --> 00:01:43.970 (Laughter) 00:01:43.970 --> 00:01:46.055 It was an unorthodox upbringing, 00:01:46.055 --> 00:01:48.566 but as a kid on the streets of New York, 00:01:48.566 --> 00:01:50.537 you learn how to trust your own instincts, 00:01:50.537 --> 00:01:53.470 you learn how to go with your own ideas. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:53.470 --> 00:01:56.709 So when I was six, I decided that I wanted to be a boy. 00:01:56.709 --> 00:02:00.176 I went to school one day and the kids wouldn't let me play basketball with them. 00:02:00.176 --> 00:02:01.609 They said they wouldn't let girls play. 00:02:01.609 --> 00:02:03.019 So I went home, and I shaved my head, 00:02:03.019 --> 00:02:05.641 and I came back the next day and I said, "I'm a boy." 00:02:05.641 --> 00:02:06.655 I mean, who knows, right? 00:02:06.655 --> 00:02:10.468 When you're six, maybe you can do that. 00:02:10.468 --> 00:02:14.101 I didn't want anyone to know that I was a girl, and they didn't. 00:02:14.101 --> 00:02:16.743 I kept up the charade for eight years. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:16.743 --> 00:02:20.910 So this is me when I was 11. 00:02:20.910 --> 00:02:22.421 I was playing a kid named Walter 00:02:22.421 --> 00:02:24.610 in a movie called "Julian Po." 00:02:24.610 --> 00:02:28.044 I was a little street tough that followed Christian Slater around and badgered him. 00:02:28.044 --> 00:02:30.094 See, I was also a child actor, 00:02:30.094 --> 00:02:32.776 which doubled up the layers of the performance of my identity, 00:02:32.776 --> 00:02:38.864 because no one knew that I was actually a girl really playing a boy. 00:02:38.864 --> 00:02:41.980 In fact, no one in my life knew that I was a girl -- 00:02:41.980 --> 00:02:44.296 not my teachers at school, not my friends, 00:02:44.296 --> 00:02:46.148 not the directors that I worked with. 00:02:46.148 --> 00:02:48.413 Kids would often come up to me in class 00:02:48.413 --> 00:02:50.647 and grab me by the throat to check for an Adam's apple 00:02:50.647 --> 00:02:53.996 or grab my crotch to check what I was working with. 00:02:53.996 --> 00:02:56.357 When I would go to the bathroom, I would turn my shoes around in the stalls 00:02:56.357 --> 00:02:58.912 so that it looked like I was peeing standing up. 00:02:58.912 --> 00:03:00.980 At sleepovers I would have panic attacks 00:03:00.980 --> 00:03:03.364 trying to break it to girls that they didn't want to kiss me 00:03:03.364 --> 00:03:05.096 without outing myself. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:05.096 --> 00:03:07.148 It's worth mentioning though 00:03:07.148 --> 00:03:10.997 that I didn't hate my body or my genitalia. 00:03:10.997 --> 00:03:12.764 I didn't feel like I was in the wrong body. 00:03:12.764 --> 00:03:14.796 I felt like I was performing this elaborate act. 00:03:14.796 --> 00:03:18.623 I wouldn't have qualified as transgender. 00:03:18.623 --> 00:03:20.869 If my family, though, had been the kind of people to believe in therapy, 00:03:20.869 --> 00:03:22.592 they probably would have diagnosed me 00:03:22.592 --> 00:03:24.378 as something like gender dysmorphic 00:03:24.378 --> 00:03:26.781 and put me on hormones to stave off puberty. 00:03:26.781 --> 00:03:27.665 But in my particular case, 00:03:27.665 --> 00:03:29.380 I just woke up one day when I was 14, 00:03:29.380 --> 00:03:31.963 and I decided that I wanted to be a girl again. 00:03:31.963 --> 00:03:34.963 Puberty had hit, and I had no idea what being a girl meant, 00:03:34.963 --> 00:03:38.588 and I was ready to figure out who I actually was. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:38.588 --> 00:03:40.993 When a kid behaves like I did, 00:03:40.993 --> 00:03:42.829 they don't exactly have to come out, right? 00:03:42.829 --> 00:03:45.090 No one is exactly shocked. 00:03:45.090 --> 00:03:48.834 (Laughter) 00:03:48.834 --> 00:03:53.297 But I wasn't asked to define myself by my parents. 00:03:53.297 --> 00:03:55.163 When I was 15, and I called my father 00:03:55.163 --> 00:03:56.863 to tell him that I had fallen in love, 00:03:56.863 --> 00:03:59.163 it was the last thing on either of our minds 00:03:59.163 --> 00:04:00.779 to discuss what the consequences were 00:04:00.779 --> 00:04:03.197 of the fact that my first love was a girl. 00:04:03.197 --> 00:04:05.479 Three years later, when I fell in love with a man, 00:04:05.479 --> 00:04:08.063 neither of my parents batted an eyelash either. 00:04:08.063 --> 00:04:11.446 See, it's one of the great blessings of my very unorthodox childhood 00:04:11.446 --> 00:04:13.480 that I wasn't ever asked to define myself 00:04:13.480 --> 00:04:15.827 as any one thing at any point. 00:04:15.827 --> 00:04:19.646 I was just allowed to be me, growing and changing in every moment. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:19.646 --> 00:04:22.691 So four, almost five years ago, 00:04:22.691 --> 00:04:26.006 Proposition 8, the great marriage equality debate, 00:04:26.006 --> 00:04:27.981 was raising a lot of dust around this country. 00:04:27.981 --> 00:04:30.592 And at the time, getting married wasn't really something 00:04:30.592 --> 00:04:31.725 I spent a lot of time thinking about. 00:04:31.725 --> 00:04:34.531 But I was struck by the fact that America, 00:04:34.531 --> 00:04:36.596 a country with such a tarnished civil rights record, 00:04:36.596 --> 00:04:39.212 could be repeating its mistakes so blatantly. 00:04:39.212 --> 00:04:41.180 And I remember watching the discussion on television 00:04:41.180 --> 00:04:42.981 and thinking how interesting it was 00:04:42.981 --> 00:04:46.012 that the separation of church and state 00:04:46.012 --> 00:04:49.631 was essentially drawing geographical boundaries throughout this country, 00:04:49.631 --> 00:04:51.213 between places where people believed in it 00:04:51.213 --> 00:04:52.998 and places where people didn't. 00:04:52.998 --> 00:04:59.246 And then, that this discussion was drawing geographical boundaries around me. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:59.246 --> 00:05:02.364 If this was a war with two disparate sides, 00:05:02.364 --> 00:05:05.145 I, by default, fell on team gay, 00:05:05.145 --> 00:05:08.331 because I certainly wasn't 100 percent straight. 00:05:08.331 --> 00:05:11.580 At the time I was just beginning to emerge 00:05:11.580 --> 00:05:15.497 from this eight-year personal identity crisis zigzag 00:05:15.497 --> 00:05:17.330 that saw me go from being a boy 00:05:17.330 --> 00:05:20.552 to being this awkward girl that looked like a boy in girl's clothes 00:05:20.552 --> 00:05:23.342 to the opposite extreme of this super skimpy, 00:05:23.342 --> 00:05:26.008 over-compensating, boy-chasing girly-girl 00:05:26.008 --> 00:05:29.976 to finally just a hesitant exploration of what I actually was, 00:05:29.976 --> 00:05:32.383 a tomboyish girl 00:05:32.383 --> 00:05:35.592 who liked both boys and girls depending on the person. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:35.592 --> 00:05:40.743 I had spent a year photographing this new generation of girls, much like myself, 00:05:40.743 --> 00:05:42.409 who fell kind of between-the-lines -- 00:05:42.409 --> 00:05:45.946 girls who skateboarded but did it in lacy underwear, 00:05:45.946 --> 00:05:49.904 girls who had boys' haircuts but wore girly nail polish, 00:05:49.904 --> 00:05:52.899 girls who had eyeshadow to match their scraped knees, 00:05:52.899 --> 00:05:55.997 girls who liked girls and boys who all liked boys and girls 00:05:55.997 --> 00:05:57.846 who all hated being boxed in to anything. 00:05:57.846 --> 00:06:01.597 I loved these people, and I admired their freedom, 00:06:01.597 --> 00:06:04.530 but I watched as the world outside of our utopian bubble 00:06:04.530 --> 00:06:06.380 exploded into these raging debates 00:06:06.380 --> 00:06:11.946 where pundits started likening our love to bestiality on national television. 00:06:11.946 --> 00:06:14.279 And this powerful awareness rolled in over me 00:06:14.279 --> 00:06:19.646 that I was a minority, and in my own home country, 00:06:19.646 --> 00:06:22.297 based on one facet of my character. 00:06:22.297 --> 00:06:27.912 I was legally and indisputably a second-class citizen. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:27.912 --> 00:06:29.446 I was not an activist. 00:06:29.446 --> 00:06:31.946 I wave no flags in my own life. 00:06:31.946 --> 00:06:34.085 But I was plagued by this question: 00:06:34.085 --> 00:06:37.031 How could anyone vote to strip the rights 00:06:37.031 --> 00:06:39.196 of the vast variety of people that I knew 00:06:39.196 --> 00:06:42.630 based on one element of their character? 00:06:42.630 --> 00:06:44.146 How could they say that we as a group 00:06:44.146 --> 00:06:47.079 were not deserving of equal rights as somebody else? 00:06:47.079 --> 00:06:49.446 Were we even a group? What group? 00:06:49.446 --> 00:06:53.313 And had these people ever even consciously met a victim of their discrimination? 00:06:53.313 --> 00:06:57.356 Did they know who they were voting against and what the impact was? NOTE Paragraph 00:06:57.356 --> 00:06:59.247 And then it occurred to me, 00:06:59.247 --> 00:07:01.530 perhaps if they could look into the eyes 00:07:01.530 --> 00:07:05.311 of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship 00:07:05.311 --> 00:07:07.213 it might make it harder for them to do. 00:07:07.213 --> 00:07:09.197 It might give them pause. 00:07:09.197 --> 00:07:15.037 Obviously I couldn't get 20 million people to the same dinner party, 00:07:15.037 --> 00:07:19.368 so I figured out a way where I could introduce them to each other photographically 00:07:19.368 --> 00:07:22.334 without any artifice, without any lighting, 00:07:22.334 --> 00:07:25.568 or without any manipulation of any kind on my part. 00:07:25.568 --> 00:07:28.318 Because in a photograph you can examine a lion's whiskers 00:07:28.318 --> 00:07:31.034 without the fear of him ripping your face off. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:31.034 --> 00:07:34.431 For me, photography is not just about exposing film, 00:07:34.431 --> 00:07:36.384 it's about exposing the viewer 00:07:36.384 --> 00:07:38.485 to something new, a place they haven't gone before, 00:07:38.485 --> 00:07:41.800 but most importantly, to people that they might be afraid of. 00:07:41.800 --> 00:07:43.644 Life magazine introduced generations of people 00:07:43.644 --> 00:07:47.718 to distant, far-off cultures they never knew existed through pictures. 00:07:47.718 --> 00:07:53.951 So I decided to make a series of very simple portraits, 00:07:53.951 --> 00:07:55.701 mugshots if you will. 00:07:55.701 --> 00:07:59.469 And I basically decided to photograph anyone in this country 00:07:59.469 --> 00:08:01.870 that was not 100 percent straight, 00:08:01.870 --> 00:08:05.053 which, if you don't know, is a limitless number of people. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:05.053 --> 00:08:07.103 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:08:07.103 --> 00:08:09.769 So this was a very large undertaking, 00:08:09.769 --> 00:08:11.653 and to do it we needed some help. 00:08:11.653 --> 00:08:14.186 So I ran out in the freezing cold, 00:08:14.186 --> 00:08:17.594 and I photographed every single person that I knew that I could get to 00:08:17.594 --> 00:08:21.564 in February of about two years ago. 00:08:21.564 --> 00:08:25.687 And I took those photographs, and I went to the HRC and I asked them for some help. 00:08:25.687 --> 00:08:28.053 And they funded two weeks of shooting in New York. 00:08:28.053 --> 00:08:31.064 And then we made this. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:31.064 --> 00:08:43.341 (Music) NOTE Paragraph 00:08:43.341 --> 00:08:47.524 Video: I'm iO Tillett Wright, and I'm an artist born and raised in New York City. 00:08:47.524 --> 00:09:00.832 (Music) NOTE Paragraph 00:09:00.832 --> 00:09:05.494 Self Evident Truths is a photographic record of LGBTQ America today. 00:09:05.494 --> 00:09:07.117 My aim is to take a simple portrait 00:09:07.117 --> 00:09:09.767 of anyone who's anything other than 100 percent straight 00:09:09.767 --> 00:09:14.987 or feels like they fall in the LGBTQ spectrum in any way. 00:09:14.987 --> 00:09:17.985 My goal is to show the humanity that exists in every one of us 00:09:17.985 --> 00:09:20.103 through the simplicity of a face. 00:09:20.103 --> 00:09:22.791 (Music) NOTE Paragraph 00:09:22.791 --> 00:09:25.881 "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal." 00:09:25.881 --> 00:09:28.298 It's written in the Declaration of Independence. 00:09:28.298 --> 00:09:29.565 We are failing as a nation 00:09:29.565 --> 00:09:31.674 to uphold the morals upon which we were founded. 00:09:31.674 --> 00:09:33.881 There is no equality in the United States. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:33.896 --> 00:09:36.279 ["What does equality mean to you?"] 00:09:36.279 --> 00:09:37.917 ["Marriage"] ["Freedom"] ["Civil rights"] 00:09:37.917 --> 00:09:40.043 ["Treat every person as you'd treat yourself"] NOTE Paragraph 00:09:40.043 --> 00:09:43.663 It's when you don't have to think about it, simple as that. 00:09:43.663 --> 00:09:46.453 The fight for equal rights is not just about gay marriage. 00:09:46.453 --> 00:09:50.549 Today in 29 states, more than half of this country, 00:09:50.549 --> 00:09:54.920 you can legally be fired just for your sexuality. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:54.920 --> 00:09:58.071 ["Who is responsible for equality?"] NOTE Paragraph 00:09:58.071 --> 00:10:01.082 I've heard hundreds of people give the same answer: 00:10:01.082 --> 00:10:04.558 "We are all responsible for equality." 00:10:04.558 --> 00:10:07.411 So far we've shot 300 faces in New York City. 00:10:07.411 --> 00:10:08.827 And we wouldn't have been able to do any of it 00:10:08.827 --> 00:10:11.712 without the generous support of the Human Rights Campaign. 00:10:11.712 --> 00:10:13.661 I want to take the project across the country. 00:10:13.661 --> 00:10:17.744 I want to visit 25 American cities, and I want to shoot 4,000 or 5,000 people. 00:10:17.744 --> 00:10:21.727 This is my contribution to the civil rights fight of my generation. 00:10:21.727 --> 00:10:23.904 I challenge you to look into the faces of these people 00:10:23.904 --> 00:10:26.766 and tell them that they deserve less than any other human being. 00:10:26.766 --> 00:10:28.806 (Music) NOTE Paragraph 00:10:28.806 --> 00:10:31.073 ["Self evident truths"] 00:10:31.088 --> 00:10:32.752 ["4,000 faces across America"] NOTE Paragraph 00:10:32.753 --> 00:10:37.309 (Music) 00:10:37.309 --> 00:10:45.557 (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:10:45.557 --> 00:10:49.840 iO Tillett Wright: Absolutely nothing could have prepared us for what happened after that. 00:10:49.840 --> 00:10:53.090 Almost 85,000 people watched that video, 00:10:53.090 --> 00:10:55.590 and then they started emailing us from all over the country, 00:10:55.590 --> 00:11:00.257 asking us to come to their towns and help them to show their faces. 00:11:00.257 --> 00:11:04.607 And a lot more people wanted to show their faces than I had anticipated. 00:11:04.607 --> 00:11:08.108 So I changed my immediate goal to 10,000 faces. 00:11:08.108 --> 00:11:12.173 That video was made in the spring of 2011, 00:11:12.173 --> 00:11:15.630 and as of today I have traveled to almost 20 cities 00:11:15.630 --> 00:11:18.536 and photographed almost 2,000 people. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:18.536 --> 00:11:21.546 I know that this is a talk, 00:11:21.546 --> 00:11:24.812 but I'd like to have a minute of just quiet 00:11:24.812 --> 00:11:26.061 and have you just look at these faces 00:11:26.061 --> 00:11:29.931 because there is nothing that I can say that will add to them. 00:11:29.931 --> 00:11:32.464 Because if a picture is worth a thousand words, 00:11:32.464 --> 00:11:35.803 then a picture of a face needs a whole new vocabulary. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:57.069 --> 00:12:00.748 So after traveling and talking to people 00:12:00.748 --> 00:12:04.596 in places like Oklahoma or small-town Texas, 00:12:04.596 --> 00:12:08.131 we found evidence that the initial premise was dead on. 00:12:08.131 --> 00:12:10.017 Visibility really is key. 00:12:10.017 --> 00:12:13.280 Familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy. 00:12:13.280 --> 00:12:16.730 Once an issue pops up in your own backyard or amongst your own family, 00:12:16.730 --> 00:12:19.647 you're far more likely to explore sympathy for it 00:12:19.647 --> 00:12:21.213 or explore a new perspective on it. 00:12:21.213 --> 00:12:23.864 Of course, in my travels I met people 00:12:23.864 --> 00:12:28.063 who legally divorced their children for being other than straight, 00:12:28.063 --> 00:12:30.431 but I also met people who were Southern Baptists 00:12:30.431 --> 00:12:33.447 who switched churches because their child was a lesbian. 00:12:33.447 --> 00:12:37.597 Sparking empathy had become the backbone of Self Evident Truths. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:37.597 --> 00:12:41.013 But here's what I was starting to learn that was really interesting: 00:12:41.013 --> 00:12:45.363 Self Evident Truths doesn't erase the differences between us. 00:12:45.363 --> 00:12:48.747 In fact, on the contrary, it highlights them. 00:12:48.747 --> 00:12:50.846 It presents, not just the complexities 00:12:50.846 --> 00:12:53.013 found in a procession of different human beings, 00:12:53.013 --> 00:12:56.613 but the complexities found within each individual person. 00:12:56.613 --> 00:13:01.498 It wasn't that we had too many boxes, it was that we had too few. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:07.518 --> 00:13:14.303 At some point I realized that my mission to photograph "gays" was inherently flawed, 00:13:14.303 --> 00:13:17.491 because there were a million different shades of gay. 00:13:17.491 --> 00:13:20.237 Here I was trying to help, 00:13:20.237 --> 00:13:23.430 and I had perpetuated the very thing I had spent my life trying to avoid -- 00:13:23.430 --> 00:13:25.936 yet another box. 00:13:25.936 --> 00:13:29.156 At some point I added a question to the release form 00:13:29.156 --> 00:13:31.085 that asked people to quantify themselves 00:13:31.085 --> 00:13:33.885 on a scale of one to 100 percent gay. 00:13:33.885 --> 00:13:37.801 And I watched so many existential crises unfold in front of me. 00:13:37.801 --> 00:13:40.602 (Laughter) 00:13:40.602 --> 00:13:41.802 People didn't know what to do 00:13:41.802 --> 00:13:44.205 because they had never been presented with the option before. 00:13:44.205 --> 00:13:46.392 Can you quantify your openness? NOTE Paragraph 00:13:46.392 --> 00:13:48.302 Once they got over the shock, though, 00:13:48.302 --> 00:13:52.385 by and large people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent 00:13:52.385 --> 00:13:54.902 or the 3 to 20 percent marks. 00:13:54.902 --> 00:13:57.603 Of course, there were lots of people who opted for a 100 percent one or the other, 00:13:57.603 --> 00:14:00.071 but I found that a much larger proportion of people 00:14:00.071 --> 00:14:02.920 identified as something that was much more nuanced. 00:14:02.920 --> 00:14:09.129 I found that most people fall on a spectrum of what I have come to refer to as "Grey." NOTE Paragraph 00:14:09.129 --> 00:14:13.113 Let me be clear though -- and this is very important -- 00:14:13.113 --> 00:14:17.829 in no way am I saying that preference doesn't exist. 00:14:17.829 --> 00:14:22.629 And I am not even going to address the issue of choice versus biological imperative, 00:14:22.629 --> 00:14:25.496 because if any of you happen to be of the belief 00:14:25.496 --> 00:14:27.363 that sexual orientation is a choice, 00:14:27.363 --> 00:14:28.896 I invite you to go out and try to be grey. 00:14:28.896 --> 00:14:31.162 I'll take your picture just for trying. 00:14:31.162 --> 00:14:32.545 (Laughter) 00:14:32.545 --> 00:14:36.962 What I am saying though is that human beings are not one-dimensional. 00:14:36.962 --> 00:14:42.730 The most important thing to take from the percentage system is this: 00:14:42.730 --> 00:14:44.947 If you have gay people over here 00:14:44.947 --> 00:14:48.595 and you have straight people over here, 00:14:48.595 --> 00:14:51.563 and while we recognize that most people identify 00:14:51.563 --> 00:14:54.266 as somewhere closer to one binary or another, 00:14:54.266 --> 00:14:59.212 there is this vast spectrum of people that exist in between. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:59.212 --> 00:15:02.246 And the reality that this presents is a complicated one. 00:15:02.246 --> 00:15:04.530 Because, for example, if you pass a law 00:15:04.530 --> 00:15:08.033 that allows a boss to fire an employee for homosexual behavior, 00:15:08.033 --> 00:15:10.800 where exactly do you draw the line? 00:15:10.800 --> 00:15:16.666 Is it over here, by the people who have had one or two heterosexual experiences so far? 00:15:16.666 --> 00:15:17.967 Or is it over here 00:15:17.967 --> 00:15:22.066 by the people who have only had one or two homosexual experiences thus far? 00:15:22.066 --> 00:15:26.716 Where exactly does one become a second-class citizen? NOTE Paragraph 00:15:26.716 --> 00:15:31.532 Another interesting thing that I learned from my project and my travels 00:15:31.532 --> 00:15:35.834 is just what a poor binding agent sexual orientation is. 00:15:35.834 --> 00:15:38.445 After traveling so much and meeting so many people, 00:15:38.445 --> 00:15:41.950 let me tell you, there are just as many jerks and sweethearts 00:15:41.950 --> 00:15:44.899 and Democrats and Republicans and jocks and queens 00:15:44.899 --> 00:15:47.849 and every other polarization you can possibly think of 00:15:47.849 --> 00:15:49.983 within the LGBT community 00:15:49.983 --> 00:15:53.499 as there are within the human race. 00:15:53.499 --> 00:15:58.117 Aside from the fact that we play with one legal hand tied behind our backs, 00:15:58.117 --> 00:16:01.782 and once you get past the shared narrative of prejudice and struggle, 00:16:01.782 --> 00:16:03.183 just being other than straight 00:16:03.183 --> 00:16:08.199 doesn't necessarily mean that we have anything in common. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:08.199 --> 00:16:16.600 So in the endless proliferation of faces that Self Evident Truths is always becoming, 00:16:16.600 --> 00:16:19.799 as it hopefully appears across more and more platforms, 00:16:19.799 --> 00:16:25.258 bus shelters, billboards, Facebook pages, screen savers, 00:16:25.258 --> 00:16:28.333 perhaps in watching this procession of humanity, 00:16:28.333 --> 00:16:31.250 something interesting and useful will begin to happen. 00:16:31.250 --> 00:16:34.967 Hopefully these categories, these binaries, 00:16:34.967 --> 00:16:36.716 these over-simplified boxes 00:16:36.716 --> 00:16:41.782 will begin to become useless and they'll begin to fall away. 00:16:41.782 --> 00:16:45.200 Because really, they describe nothing that we see 00:16:45.200 --> 00:16:48.549 and no one that we know and nothing that we are. 00:16:48.549 --> 00:16:54.150 What we see are human beings in all their multiplicity. 00:16:54.150 --> 00:16:57.733 And seeing them makes it harder to deny their humanity. 00:16:57.733 --> 00:17:02.074 At the very least I hope it makes it harder to deny their human rights. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:02.074 --> 00:17:05.633 So is it me particularly 00:17:05.633 --> 00:17:09.135 that you would choose to deny the right to housing, 00:17:09.135 --> 00:17:12.116 the right to adopt children, the right to marriage, 00:17:12.116 --> 00:17:15.749 the freedom to shop here, live here, buy here? 00:17:15.749 --> 00:17:17.828 Am I the one that you choose to disown 00:17:17.828 --> 00:17:22.250 as your child or your brother or your sister or your mother or your father, 00:17:22.250 --> 00:17:24.598 your neighbor, your cousin, your uncle, the president, 00:17:24.598 --> 00:17:28.048 your police woman or the fireman? 00:17:28.048 --> 00:17:31.066 It's too late. 00:17:31.066 --> 00:17:34.367 Because I already am all of those things. 00:17:34.367 --> 00:17:38.732 We already are all of those things, and we always have been. 00:17:38.732 --> 00:17:41.538 So please don't greet us as strangers, 00:17:41.538 --> 00:17:45.091 greet us as your fellow human beings, period. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:45.091 --> 00:17:46.407 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:46.407 --> 00:17:57.334 (Applause)