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[This talk contains mature content]

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My mother called this summer
to stage an intervention.

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

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which wasn't even out yet,

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and she was concerned.

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It wasn't the sex.

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(Laughter)

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It was the language that disturbed her.

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For example:

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"I have been so many things

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along my curious journey:

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a poor boy, a nigger,

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a Yale man, a Harvard man,

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a faggot, a Christian,

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a crack baby, alleged,

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the spawn of Satan, the Second Coming,

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Casey."

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That's just page six.

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(Laughter)

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So you may understand my mother's worry.

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But she wanted only to make
one small change.

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So she called, and she began,

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"Hey, you are a man.

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

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and let me tell you the difference.

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You are prominent. You are intelligent.

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You dress well. You know how to speak.

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People like you.

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

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You're not a vagabond on the street.

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You are an upstanding person

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who just happens to be gay.

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Don't put yourself over there

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when you are over here."

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She thought she'd done me a favor,

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and in a way, she had.

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

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and in my work as a writer,

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which is to send one simple message:

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

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I learned this the hard way.

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

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but on the wrong side of a whole river,

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the Trinity, down in Oak Cliff, Texas.

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I was raised there
in part by my grandmother

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who worked as a domestic,

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and by my sister,

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who adopted me
a few years after our mother,

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who struggled with mental illness,

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disappeared.

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And it was that disappearance,

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

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that shaped the person I became,

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the person I later had to unbecome.

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

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

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beautifully strange,

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

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and a 1980s Whitney Houston.

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(Laughter)

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I'm not saying she was perfect,

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just that I sure benefited
from her imperfections.

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

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a useful mistake.

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

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I turned to some magic of my own.

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It struck me, as from above,

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that I could conjure up my mother
just by walking perfectly

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from my elementary school
at the top of a steep hill

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all the way down
to my grandmother's house,

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

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

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I couldn't skip a square,

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

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that separated our lawn from our driveway.

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And I bullshit you not, it worked --

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just once though.

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

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I found that this approach had other uses.

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I found that everyone else
in charge around me

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loved nothing more than perfection,

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obedience, submission.

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

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So I took a bargain

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

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on a sign that read,

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"He who adapts can live tolerably."

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It was a bargain that helped ensure

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I had a place to stay and food to eat;

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

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a bargain that paid off
big time, it seemed,

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

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for Yale's football team.

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

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The Yale man said -- everybody said --

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

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the best thing that could happen
to the whole community.

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

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I was not so sure.

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Yale seemed another world entire:

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a cold, foreign, hostile place.

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On the first day of my recruiting visit,

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I texted my sister
an excuse for not going.

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"These people are so weird."

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

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(Laughter)

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I took the ticket

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and worked damn hard to fit right in.

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

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

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I figured, this was just one
of the small prices

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that must be paid to make it.

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I paid them all, or tried,

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and sure enough
they seemed to pay me back:

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made me a leader
on the varsity football team;

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got me into a not-so-secret society

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

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Things were going so well
that I figured naturally

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I should be President
of the United States.

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(Laughter)

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But since I was only 24

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and since even presidents
have to start somewhere,

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I settled instead on a run for Congress.

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

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the election during which
a serious, moderate senator stressed,

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

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is that Barack Obama is just like us."

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They sent that message so well

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that their campaign became
the gold standard of modern politics,

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if not modern life,
which also seems to demand

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

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

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And this would be my message, too.

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

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

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"Is there anything I need to know?"

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I held the phone and finally said,

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

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Silence.

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"Hmm. I see," he nearly whispered,

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

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(Laughter)

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

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

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I mean, you are in Texas.

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But it's not impossible, not impossible.

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But Casey, let me ask you something:

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

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And let's be real, OK?

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

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I just want to know:

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Are you really ready for this?"

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I wasn't.

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And I could not understand --

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could hardly breathe

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or think, or say a word.

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

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would have leapt
at the chance to be harmed,

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to sacrifice everything,
even life, for a cause.

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There was something shocking, though --

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

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

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

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All that he -- all that I --

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

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I was prominent for a 24-year-old:

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

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

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nor can it save you.

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You may have already learned this lesson,

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or you will, regardless of your sexuality.

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The queer receives
a concentrated dose, no doubt,

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

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

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

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So while coming out
to the world can be hard,

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

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

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That surely was the case for me.

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I had my private revelation
that night at 24,

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but mostly went on with my life.

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

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

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(Laughter)

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I had achieved, by my late 20s,

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about everything
a kid is supposed to achieve.

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But I was real cracked up:

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

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and awful sad either way.

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I had never thought of being a writer,

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

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But the book business
is about the only industry

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

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(Laughter)

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So I decided to give it a try,

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to trace those cracks with words.

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

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which alarmed some people at first.

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A respected writer called
to stage his own intervention

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after reading a few early chapters,

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and he began, much like my mother,

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"Hey, listen.

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You've been hired
to write an autobiography.

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It's a straightforward exercise.

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It's got a beginning, middle and end,

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and is grounded in the facts of your life.

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

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

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Go buy some of those books
and learn from them.

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You're going in the wrong direction."

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But I no longer believed
what we are taught --

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that the right direction
is the safe direction.

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I no longer believed what we are taught --

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

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

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"I'm not on the outside looking in.

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I'm not on the inside looking out.

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

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(Laughter)

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That was the place

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from which I hoped to work,

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

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trying to help us all
refuse the awful bargains

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we've been taught to take.

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We're taught to turn ourselves

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and our work into little nuggets
that are easily digestible;

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

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

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

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and the right parties might invite us,

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

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and close his pearly gates behind us,

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so we can bow down to Him
forever and ever.

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These are the rewards, they say,

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for our obedience:

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to be a well-liked holy nugget,

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to be dead.

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

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To the world and to my mother.

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Well, to tell you the truth,

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

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(Laughter)

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

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I cannot accept her bargain either.

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Nor should you.

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

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to see ourselves as safe,

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to keep ourselves over here.

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We speak well, we dress decent,

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

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

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Jesus of Nazareth said it
first to his disciples:

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"Remember Lot's wife."

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

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was a man who set
his family down in Sodom,

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

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

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

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and get out of Dodge.

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Lot heard the angel's warning, but delayed.

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

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

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and hurried them out of Sodom.

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And the angels shout,

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

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

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

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But Lot and his folks are running,

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fleeing all that destruction,

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kicking up dust while the Lord
rains down death,

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

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God turns her into a pillar of salt.

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"Remember Lot's wife," Jesus says.

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But I've got a question:

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Why does she look back?

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

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wanted one last glimpse of a city on fire?

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

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were far enough from danger
to breathe a little easy?

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

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if I'd been in her shoes.

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

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

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all alone to burn alive,

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even for righteousness's sake?

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Isn't that possible?

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

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may not be a cautionary tale after all.

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It may be the bravest act
in all the Bible,

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

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the crucifixion.

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

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Jesus gave his life to save everybody:

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billions and billions of strangers
for all time to come.

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It's a nice thing to do.

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It made him famous, that's for sure.

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(Laughter)

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But Lot's wife was killed,

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turned into a pillar of salt,

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

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the wicked men of Sodom,

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and nobody even wrote
the woman's name down.

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

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That's the kind of courage we need today.

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The courage to put ourselves over there.

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

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

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The courage to stand
with other vagabonds in the street,

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with all the wretched of the earth,

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to form an army of the least of these,

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

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we can build a better world.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)