In 2015,
at the age of 23,
I had what I consider still today
to be one of the single most profoundly intense
and equally terrifying experiences of my life.
I’d returned to Belfast
after having been in work in London for a few days,
and I decided that the next morning I’d make the journey back home.
So I got up,
I made the way to the train station
and I got on a train in Belfast and got off in Ballymoney.
And no, being in Ballymoney is neither the terrifying
nor the intense part of the story.
(Laughter)
But my brother was waiting for me,
and I got in the car and we made the drive back to the family home,
where my mom and dad were surprised to see me.
I hadn’t told them that I would be there.
And the moment that followed probably only lasted for a few minutes,
but at the time, it felt like hours were passing.
And in that moment, I told my parents something that had been consuming me.
In that moment, I told my parents that I was gay.
Now,
I was met by a response of nothing but unconditional love and acceptance.
And to this day,
it was the greatest sense of relief I’ve ever experienced.
It felt like a physical weight being lifted from my shoulders.
And I remain conscious of two things:
the first, that not everyone is as lucky as I am
from the response that they get from their loved ones when they come out,
and the second, that up until that point, and even in moments since,
I’ve led an existence of variations of me.
And it’s funny,
because despite knowing, really knowing, in my head and in my heart,
that my family loved me
and that of course they'd accept me for who I am,
it was the world around me
that had told me to expect a very different response.
LGBT people are conditioned to expect the worst,
while holding on to a little bit of hope for the best.
When we think about the experiences of LGBT people -
I now work for Europe’s largest LGBT rights organization.
I often joke that that allows me to say that I’m a professional homosexual now.
(Laughter)
That doesn’t mean there are amateurs; it just means I’m better at it.
(Laughter)
But the reality is that in every new interaction,
with every new job or every new boss,
with every new colleague, in every new social situation,
or in every new introduction to a friend of a friend,
LGBT people make decisions.
We make conscious, pragmatic decisions about who knows what.
We make split-second assessments about what we disclose.
And I’m not talking about anything particularly intricate.
I’m talking about things that are everyday interactions for other people.
If I get into a taxi and the driver asks, “What are you getting up to this weekend?”
do I say, "I’m going for dinner with my boyfriend"?
If I do, do I say “boyfriend” or “partner”?
If I say “partner,” is that as obvious as saying “boyfriend”?
So if I choose not to say anything at all, what do I have to make up instead?
You might be surprised
by how often we go through these things in our head and in our life
because the world around us has told us to expect the worst.
But when I came out,
that sense of relief
was one of the single most empowering feelings I’ve ever experienced.
And so, I want you to imagine
if the choices we face on a daily basis range from being entirely open and honest,
and the vulnerability that comes with that
to offering a redacted or edited version of ourselves,
to withholding our truth entirely,
are any of those things more or less authentic than each other?
Probably.
But I want you to imagine
what it must be like to be faced with those choices every single day
for an individual.
I want you to imagine what it must feel like
to be faced with those choices every day of every week
of every month of every year
for an entire community of people.
Earlier this year,
the UK government published the findings of the first-ever national LGBT survey.
Spoiler alert: it was pretty grim reading.
Around a quarter of all LGBT people
have accessed some kind of mental health support service
over the course of the last year.
Forty percent have experienced an incident
of something like either verbal harassment or physical violence
in that same period.
Over two-thirds have said
that they have avoided holding the hand of their same-sex partner
for fear of the response that they will receive.
That is still our lived reality today.
But what can you do
other than continuing to be decent human beings?
Well, I want to tell you another story,
and it might seem a bit odd, but there’s a point to it, I promise.
I want to take you back to November 3, 2008,
the night before the US presidential election.
The then soon-to-be president,
Barack Obama,
was addressing his final rally
before votes would be cast the following morning.
And with the crowd gathered in front of him in Virginia,
he recounted a story of an experience he’d had
at a much earlier stage of his campaign.
He talked about getting in his car with his staff really early one morning,
in the pouring rain,
to make a trip to an isolated part of South Carolina.
He was in a bad mood.
They arrived.
It was an hour and a half away from anywhere else.
And when they arrived at the venue and opened the doors,
lo and behold,
there was about 20 people there to greet him,
a small crowd.
But Obama is a professional.
He smiled, he shook hands, he made his way around the room,
and as he was doing that, he heard a voice from behind him.
“Fired-up!” the voice said.
“Ready to go!” it continued.
And Obama turned around, confused, of course,
and saw that the origin of this voice was a small, slightly older lady
wearing what he called a big church hat.
And Obama looked at her, and she looked at him,
and she smiled and continued.
“Fired-up!” she said to the room.
“Ready to go!” she continued.
And to his surprise, the room responded to her.
At this point, he looked at his staff and the staff looked at him,
and they all shrugged their shoulders as they had no idea what was going on.
But as this continued -
“Fired-up!” the crowd responded,
“Ready to go!” they responded again -
Obama admitted he was starting to feel fired-up.
By the end, as this went on for a few minutes,
his mood had gone and he felt ready to go.
And the point of that story, for anyone who follows US politics,
you’ll know that that had an influence in how Obama engaged with his crowds,
with his rallies,
and he learned lessons to keep in his toolbox for further campaigns.
But there’s another point to that story,
because at that rally, the night before the election,
he told the crowd in Virginia that that woman taught him something.
That little woman with the big church hat
taught him that there’s power in one voice,
that if one voice can change a room, then one voice can also change a city.
And he said if one voice could change a city,
it could also change a state;
and if one voice can change a state,
it can also change a nation.
And Obama believed that if one voice could change a nation,
then one voice could also change the world.
And so, I want you to think about authenticity,
and I want you to think about the scale of the challenges that we face today,
both locally but also as a global community.
And I want you to imagine:
imagine a world where people aren’t conditioned
to expect the worst.
Imagine a world where people don’t need to be given permission to be themselves.
We’re not there yet.
Arguably, we’re quite far from being there.
But what if the voices that we’re not currently hearing
are the ones that could help us to deal with the challenges that we face today?
What if the voices that we’re not currently hearing
are of the people who we are most impacted by the challenges that we face today?
Because then we all have a responsibility.
We all have a responsibility to elevate those voices.
And it’s fitting that we’re here today,
in this building, in Stormont,
in the home of power-sharing,
because that is exactly what I want to ask of you today.
When you leave, when you return to your life,
I want you to take stock of the power that you hold.
I want you to reflect upon the spaces that you occupy,
where you have power and authority and influence.
And in those spaces, I want you to make space.
I want you to elevate the voices of the people that we hear from the least.
Because here’s my hope:
that if we believe that one voice can change a room,
imagine the possibility of that one voice that can also change the world.
Thank you.
(Applause)