Embrace your raw, strange magic

[This talk contains mature content]

My mother called 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 un-become.

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 by 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 that
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 entirely,

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,

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

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."

This would be my message, too.