Embrace your raw, strange magic

The way we're taught to live has got to change, says author Casey Gerald. Too often, we hide parts of ourselves in order to fit in, win praise, be accepted. But at what cost? In this inspiring talk, Gerald shares the personal sacrifices he made to attain success in the upper echelons of American society -- and shows why it's time for us to have the courage to live in the raw, strange magic of ourselves.

[This talk contains mature content]

My mother called this summer
to stage an intervention.

She'd come across
a few snippets of my memoir,

which wasn't even out yet,

and she was concerned.

It wasn't the sex.

(Laughter)

It was the language that disturbed her.

For example:

"I have been so many things

along my curious journey:

a poor boy, a nigger,

a Yale man, a Harvard man,

a faggot, a Christian,

a crack baby, alleged,

the spawn of Satan, the Second Coming,

Casey."

That's just page six.

(Laughter)

So you may understand my mother's worry.

But she wanted only to make
one small change.

So she called, and she began,

"Hey, you are a man.

You're not a faggot, you're not a punk,

and let me tell you the difference.

You are prominent. You are intelligent.

You dress well. You know how to speak.

People like you.

You don't walk around
doing your hand like a punk.

You're not a vagabond on the street.

You are an upstanding person

who just happens to be gay.

Don't put yourself over there

when you are over here."

She thought she'd done me a favor,

and in a way, she had.

Her call clarified
what I am trying to do with my life

and in my work as a writer,

which is to send one simple message:

the way we're taught to live
has got to change.

I learned this the hard way.

I was born not on
the wrong side of the tracks,

but on the wrong side of a whole river,

the Trinity, down in Oak Cliff, Texas.

I was raised there
in part by my grandmother

who worked as a domestic,

and by my sister,

who adopted me
a few years after our mother,

who struggled with mental illness,

disappeared.

And it was that disappearance,

that began when I was 13
and lasted for five years,

that shaped the person I became,

the person I later had to unbecome.

Before she left, my mother
had been my human hiding place.

She was the only other person
who seemed as strange as me,

beautifully strange,

some mix of Blanche DuBois
from "A Streetcar Named Desire"

and a 1980s Whitney Houston.

(Laughter)

I'm not saying she was perfect,

just that I sure benefited
from her imperfections.

And maybe that's what magic is, after all:

a useful mistake.

So when she began to disappear
for days at a time,

I turned to some magic of my own.

It struck me, as from above,

that I could conjure up my mother
just by walking perfectly

from my elementary school
at the top of a steep hill

all the way down
to my grandmother's house,

placing one foot, and one foot only,
in each sidewalk square.

I couldn't let any part of any foot
touch the line between the square,

I couldn't skip a square,

all the way to the last square
at the last blade of grass

that separated our lawn from our driveway.

And I bullshit you not, it worked --

just once though.

But if my perfect walk
could not bring my mother back,

I found that this approach had other uses.

I found that everyone else
in charge around me

loved nothing more than perfection,

obedience, submission.

Or at least if I submitted,
they wouldn't bother me too much.

So I took a bargain

that I'd later see in a prison,
a Stasi prison in Berlin,

on a sign that read,

"He who adapts can live tolerably."

It was a bargain that helped ensure

I had a place to stay and food to eat;

a bargain that won me praise
of teachers and kin, strangers;

a bargain that paid off
big time, it seemed,

when one day at 17, a man from Yale
showed up at my high school to recruit me

for Yale's football team.

It felt as out of the blue to me then
as it may to you now.

The Yale man said -- everybody said --

that this was the best thing
that could ever happen to me,

the best thing that could happen
to the whole community.

"Take this ticket, boy," they told me.

I was not so sure.

Yale seemed another world entire:

a cold, foreign, hostile place.

On the first day of my recruiting visit,

I texted my sister
an excuse for not going.

"These people are so weird."

She replied, "You'll fit right in."

(Laughter)

I took the ticket

and worked damn hard to fit right in.

When my freshman advisor warned me
not to wear my fitted hats on campus ...

"You're at Yale now. You don't have to
do that anymore," she said.

I figured, this was just one
of the small prices

that must be paid to make it.

I paid them all, or tried,

and sure enough
they seemed to pay me back:

made me a leader
on the varsity football team;

got me into a not-so-secret society

and a job on Wall Street,
and later in Washington.

Things were going so well
that I figured naturally

I should be President
of the United States.

(Laughter)

But since I was only 24

and since even presidents
have to start somewhere,

I settled instead on a run for Congress.

Now, this was in the afterglow
of that great 2008 election:

the election during which
a serious, moderate senator stressed,

"The message you've got to send
more than any other message

is that Barack Obama is just like us."

They sent that message so well

that their campaign became
the gold standard of modern politics,

if not modern life,
which also seems to demand

that we each do whatever it takes
to be able to say at the end of our days

with peace and satisfaction,
"I was just like everybody else."

And this would be my message, too.

So one night, I made one final call
to my prospective campaign manager.

We'd do the things it'd take to win,
but first he had one question:

"Is there anything I need to know?"

I held the phone and finally said,

"Well, you should probably know I'm gay."

Silence.

"Hmm. I see," he nearly whispered,

as if he'd found a shiny penny
or a dead baby bird.

(Laughter)

"I'm glad you told me," he continued.

"You definitely didn't make
my job any easier.

I mean, you are in Texas.

But it's not impossible, not impossible.

But Casey, let me ask you something:

How are you going to feel when somebody,
say, at a rally, calls you a faggot?

And let's be real, OK?

You do understand that somebody
might want to physically harm you.

I just want to know:

Are you really ready for this?"

I wasn't.

And I could not understand --

could hardly breathe

or think, or say a word.

But to be clear:
the boy that I was at that time

would have leapt
at the chance to be harmed,

to sacrifice everything,
even life, for a cause.

There was something shocking, though --

not that there should have been,
but there was --

in the notion that he might be harmed
for nothing more than being himself,

which he had not even tried
to do in the first place.

All that he -- all that I --

had tried to do and be
was what I thought was asked of me.

I was prominent for a 24-year-old:

intelligent, I spoke well, dressed decent;
I was an upstanding citizen.

But the bargain I had accepted
could not save me after all,

nor can it save you.

You may have already learned this lesson,

or you will, regardless of your sexuality.

The queer receives
a concentrated dose, no doubt,

but repression is a bitter pill
that's offered to us all.

We're taught to hide so many parts
of who we are and what we've been through:

our love, our pain, for some, our faith.

So while coming out
to the world can be hard,

coming in to all the raw, strange magic
of ourselves can be much harder.

As Miles Davis said, "It takes a long time
to sound like yourself."

That surely was the case for me.

I had my private revelation
that night at 24,

but mostly went on with my life.

I went on to Harvard Business School,
started a successful nonprofit,

wound up on the cover of a magazine,
on the stage at TED.

(Laughter)

I had achieved, by my late 20s,

about everything
a kid is supposed to achieve.

But I was real cracked up:

not exactly having a nervous breakdown,
but not too far off,

and awful sad either way.

I had never thought of being a writer,

didn't even read, in earnest,
until I was nearly 23.

But the book business
is about the only industry

that will pay you to investigate
your own problems, so --

(Laughter)

So I decided to give it a try,

to trace those cracks with words.

Now, what came out on the page was
about as strange as I felt at that time,

which alarmed some people at first.

A respected writer called
to stage his own intervention

after reading a few early chapters,

and he began, much like my mother,

"Hey, listen.

You've been hired
to write an autobiography.

It's a straightforward exercise.

It's got a beginning, middle and end,

and is grounded in the facts of your life.

And by the way, there's a great tradition
of autobiography in this country,

led by people on the margins of society
who write to assert their existence.

Go buy some of those books
and learn from them.

You're going in the wrong direction."

But I no longer believed
what we are taught --

that the right direction
is the safe direction.

I no longer believed what we are taught --

that queer lives or black lives
or poor lives are marginal lives.

I believed what Kendrick Lamar
says on "Section.80.":

"I'm not on the outside looking in.

I'm not on the inside looking out.

I'm in the dead fucking center
looking around."

(Laughter)

That was the place

from which I hoped to work,

headed in the only direction worth going,
the direction of myself,

trying to help us all
refuse the awful bargains

we've been taught to take.

We're taught to turn ourselves

and our work into little nuggets
that are easily digestible;

taught to mutilate ourselves
so that we make sense to others,

to be a stranger to ourselves
so the right people might befriend us

and the right schools might accept us,
and the right jobs might hire us,

and the right parties might invite us,

and, someday, the right God
might invite us to the right heaven

and close his pearly gates behind us,

so we can bow down to Him
forever and ever.

These are the rewards, they say,

for our obedience:

to be a well-liked holy nugget,

to be dead.

And I say in return, "No, thank you."

To the world and to my mother.

Well, to tell you the truth,

all I said was, "OK, Mom,
I'll talk to you later."

(Laughter)

But in my mind, I said, "No, thank you."

I cannot accept her bargain either.

Nor should you.

It would be easy
for many of us in rooms like this

to see ourselves as safe,

to keep ourselves over here.

We speak well, we dress decent,

we're intelligent, people like us,
or act like they do.

But instead, I say that we
should remember Lot's wife.

Jesus of Nazareth said it
first to his disciples:

"Remember Lot's wife."

Lot, in case you haven't
read the Bible recently,

was a man who set
his family down in Sodom,

in the midst of a wicked society
that God decided he had to destroy.

But God, being cruel,
yet still a sap in part,

rushed two angels out to Sodom
to warn Lot to gather up his folks

and get out of Dodge.

Lot heard the angel's warning, but delayed.

They didn't have all day to wait,
so they grabbed Lot's hands

and his two daughters' hands,
and his wife's hands,

and hurried them out of Sodom.

And the angels shout,

"Escape to the mountain.
Whatever you do, don't look back,"

just as God starts raining down fire
on Sodom and Gomorrah.

I can't figure out how Gomorrah
got dragged into this.

But Lot and his folks are running,

fleeing all that destruction,

kicking up dust while the Lord
rains down death,

and then, for some reason,
Lot's wife looks back.

God turns her into a pillar of salt.

"Remember Lot's wife," Jesus says.

But I've got a question:

Why does she look back?

Does she look back because
she didn't want to miss the mayhem,

wanted one last glimpse of a city on fire?

Does she look back because she wanted
to be sure that her people

were far enough from danger
to breathe a little easy?

I'm so nosy and selfish sometimes,
those likely would have been my reasons

if I'd been in her shoes.

But what if something else was going on
with this woman, Lot's wife?

What if she could not bear the thought
of leaving those people

all alone to burn alive,

even for righteousness's sake?

Isn't that possible?

If it is, then this backward glance
of a disobedient woman

may not be a cautionary tale after all.

It may be the bravest act
in all the Bible,

even braver than the act
that holds the whole Book together,

the crucifixion.

We are told that up on Calvary,
on an old rugged cross,

Jesus gave his life to save everybody:

billions and billions of strangers
for all time to come.

It's a nice thing to do.

It made him famous, that's for sure.

(Laughter)

But Lot's wife was killed,

turned into a pillar of salt,

all because she could not
turn her back on her friends,

the wicked men of Sodom,

and nobody even wrote
the woman's name down.

Oh, to have the courage of Lot's wife.

That's the kind of courage we need today.

The courage to put ourselves over there.

The courage that says that either
all of us have to be faggots,

or none of us can be faggots,
for any of us to be free.

The courage to stand
with other vagabonds in the street,

with all the wretched of the earth,

to form an army of the least of these,

with the faith that from
the naked crust of all we are,

we can build a better world.

Thank you.

(Applause)