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[This talk contains mature content]
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My mother called to stage an intervention.
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She'd come across a few snippets
of my memoir, 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,
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 un-become.
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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 by 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 that
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 entirely,
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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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she said, "You're at Yale now.
You don't have to do that anymore."
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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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This would be my message, too.
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So one night, I made on 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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"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 gonna 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, "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 non-profit,
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wound up on the cover of a magazine,
on the stage at TED.
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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,
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so (Laughter)
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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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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 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, 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 hear the angel's warning, but delayed.
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They didn't have all day to wait,
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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,
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 figured 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 to 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 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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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 to 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)