Lana Wachowski's Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award Acceptance Speech Is a Soothing Hand

I want every person, both those who are LGBTQ or their allies and those who are not, to watch director and producer Lana Wachowski's Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award acceptance speech. Her speech proper begins at the 5-minute mark:



I am taking some liberties here and providing two long text quotes from her above acceptance speech.

In high school, I joined the theater department, partially because of my older sister, but mostly because of the storeroom high above the stage amongst the catwalks that was filled with costumes. I fell in love with the storeroom as much for its dust-scented privacy, where I would sit and read, as for the racks of dresses and endless rows of shoes. I remember wearing this beautiful brocaded dress one day with a built-in corset when suddenly I heard the stage manager calling my name. Just before she opened the door, I dove desperately into the shadowed folds between the racked dresses, heart pounding like a mouse, listening to her call my name over and over, praying that somehow I might remain invisible.

As I grew older, an intense, anxious isolation coupled with constant insomnia began to inculcate an inescapable depression. I have never slept much, but, during my sophomore year in high school, while I watched many of my male friends develop facial hair, I kept this strange relentless vigil staring in the mirror for hours, afraid of what one day I might see. Here in the absence of words to defend myself, without examples, without models, I began to believe voices in my head, that I was a freak, that I was broken, that there was something wrong with me, that I will never be lovable.

After school, I go to the nearby Burger King, and I write a suicide note. It ends up being over four pages — I'm a little talkative — but it was addressed to my parents, and I really wanted to convince them that it wasn't their fault, it was just that I didn't belong. I cry a lot as I write this note, but the staff at Burger King has seen it all before, and they seem immune.

I was very used to traveling home quite late because of the theater. I know the train platform will be empty at night, because it always is. I let the B train go by, because I know the A train will be next, and it doesn't stop. When I see the headlight, I take off my backpack, and I put it on the bench. It has the note in front of it. I try not to think of anything but jumping as the train comes. Just as the platform starts to rumble, suddenly I notice someone walking down the ramp. It is a skinny, older man wearing overly large, 1970s, square-style glasses that remind me of the ones my grandma wears. He stares at me the way animals stare at each other. I don't know why he wouldn't look away. All I know is that, because he didn't, I am still here.

And also, her closing:

I am here because Mr. Henderson taught me that there are some things we do for ourselves, but there are some things we do for others. I am here because, when I was young, I wanted very badly to be a writer, I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I couldn't find anyone like me in the world, and it felt like my dreams were foreclosed simply because my gender was less typical than others. If I can be that person for someone else, then the sacrifice of my private civic life may have value.

I know I am also here because of the strength and courage and love that I am blessed to receive from my wife, my family and my friends. And in this way I hope to offer their love in the form of my materiality to a project like this one started by the HRC, so this world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, to other worlds, previously unimaginable.

I grew up invisible and with a broken heart, aware of my difference from perhaps the age of three, and, although I live on the more typical side of my biological sex's expected presentation at the moment, when I watch Lana, I am validated. I am human, I am accepted, and I am worthy. I know this even without her, but her words hold me, nonetheless. They are the soothing hand on the forehead when the night is long.

And this is precisely why we share our stories, why it is so vitally important to do so. When we offer up truth through storytelling, we spur another's imagination into action, opening up "...other worlds previously unimaginable", and this is the most powerful of liberations.

Our True Words Are Powerful Things

Last week, I finally wrote my piece in response to the It Gets Better Project. I sat on the idea of writing it for a long time, unsure of how to talk on this website about my experience, because, while I've written about my gender and sexuality here before, this site has become increasingly more public to friends and family over the last year. In the end, though, I knew that I had to do it, no matter what judgement I might feel from friends, family, and the internet at large, because, although I am happy and comfortable in my own skin now, this was not always the case, and I would have given anything to see myself reflected in the world like this in my teens and twenties.



And so, I wrote about how hard it was while I was hidden and about how much better life is now that I'm on the other side of the closet:

I didn't really start talking about the real truth of who I am until I was in my thirties, and, even now, I don't mention it very often. Coming out, though, writing it down and being open about my identity and experiences, has been nothing short of liberating. I have shifted from someone who felt unworthy and invisible to someone who feels and is worthy and seen.

I am beautiful, and I am loved, and I am here fully in this life in a way that I only dreamed of when I hid what I once thought of as my great sickness but I now know is the gorgeous fact of my personhood and humanity.

As much as I received a lot of positive feedback on that entry, though, time passes quickly on the internet, and it doesn't take long before you feel like your message has been buried and forgotten. I learned today that this is only partially true.

Some of what we write here does get lost under the reams of content we pour into the internet every day, but some of it sticks with people and gets carried further while we're not looking. Some of it keeps going in conversations in middle schools in Iowa, which you find out through an email from a friend:

I was at a girlfriend's house the other night talking with her, another friend, and her 14-year old daughter. The subject of sex came up and then homosexuality and cross dressing. Ultimately, we started talking about the myth of choice and stereotypes.

I brought up your story and the way you have described sexuality and gender as being on two different spectrums. That analogy has always been so powerful for me, and I could tell it made a lot of sense to them.

The next day my [friend] relayed something her daughter had said. She said talking to me really opened her mind up and she went to school and talked about it with her friends.

Middle school kids in small town Iowa are having a better conversation about gender and sexuality this week because you shared your story. Perhaps someone at their lunch table will recognize themselves, or maybe they will remember that conversation later in life when a friend tells them their story. Maybe it will just be an interesting talk they had one day.

Wherever the ripple goes, I wanted you to know it was moving here, too.

Thank you for your courage. I'm so grateful you've been given the gift of communication so that you can share your story with us, with me.

...

Britt Reints

I cried after I read this email, because it confirmed my greatest hope: that what I said changed the way a few people thought about people like me, and that not only did what I wrote changed minds, but it changed the minds of people who likely will never see my original words. You know you've expressed an idea worth sharing when the specific words you put together matter less than the idea they seeded that continues to spread.

I hope those kids' conversations continue. I hope that they take those conversations home with them. What I hope most of all, though, is that there was some kid like me there to hear that they are not alone, to know that their peers might be more receptive to them now, and to understand that it really can get better.

Most importantly, Britt's email confirmed for me that what we do here — when we write out true things on our blogs and record it in videos and share it in photos — matters. What we do here matters not just during that few days when people bother to leave comments but for weeks, months, and years afterwards. We can't always see the offline effects of what we create when it moves out into the world beyond the medium in which we expressed it, but what we do continues on without us in places we do not imagine, shifting the minds and hearts that build our culture as it moves.

Our true words are powerful things.

I'm Speaking My Truth and Spreading the Word, Because It Does Get Better

I hesitated to publish this, because there may be family members reading this weblog now who are not aware of my sexual and gender identity. When I read it out loud to the Palinode, though, I broke down in tears when I got to the part about feeling so proud of these kids speaking their truth at Brigham Young University, and my pride for them coupled with Didactic Pirate's coming out story earlier this last week won't let me keep this to myself. No one should have to hide.

Thanks, Heather, for making me aware of the video at the end of this entry.

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I grew up a very lonely child, because I grew up instinctively knowing I was different and that that difference was not necessarily welcomed by those around me.

I fell in love with girls. I crushed on boys. I felt I was born into the wrong body, but I didn't necessarily want a boy's body. I was a combination of things I had never heard of before. Kids at recess made jokes by giving creepy, overly intimate handshakes and then saying "Lez be friends", because apparently lesbianism was hilarious, but nobody shook my hand like that and said "Lez be friends but also look at boys and maybe dress up like we're intersexed with a male-leaning gender experience."

That last one might not have caught on because kids in grade five in 1982 lacked the vocabulary. Also, it was a little long to be catchy. I'm pretty sure that was it.

So, I kept quiet about it. Secretly, I wrote coming out letters to my parents and rehearsed magnificent speeches under my blankets at night about who I was and why I should still be loved. In my fantasies, I was the Martin Luther King of my kind, leading my protest of one, but I never let my truth be said out loud. I didn't know how to start without a vocabulary that could convince them. If I had no words for what I was, I certainly had none that would help them to understand what I was.

I grew up in a world artificially devoid of anything that deviated from heterosexuality. Throughout elementary school, when people did mention homosexuality, it was done with a sneer at the sexual acts engaged in by faceless men. They were Other. We didn't know them. There was no mention of love. The concept of being gay was reduced to its pornography. It was disgusting, it was animal, it was a degradation of humanity's higher nature.

I eventually came to believe this about my own desires, about who I was becoming as human being, only I was certain that it was much, much worse in my case, because I wasn't just gay. I was GAY. My desire for girls was gay because I had the body of a girl, and my desire for boys was gay, because I was in the wrong kind of body. I concluded that the mere existence of my desire as it stemmed from my experience was an abomination. By the time I was fifteen, I was terrified that I was some kind of sexual monster whose sure end was in pedophilia and beastiality, because isn't this what my kind of spiritual debasement led to?

I tried, as they say, to pray the gay away. I thought surely that a loving God would remove this horrible affliction from my heart. I was a Mennonite kid, but I slunk around the parking lots and grounds of Catholic churches, attempting to screw up the courage to enter a confession box. I had sins I could speak to no one, and I felt bereft of God's presence. I needed an intermediary. I wanted redemption. I needed to know that I was not condemned.

When my deviance didn't disappear, I weighed the possibility of suicide, sure that it was the only option for someone so soul-deep sick. I felt as though God had denied me as his child, and I wrote the note that would explain my death as a kind of gift to those whom I was sure my deviance was hurting.

People knew that I was sad then, but no one knew the depth of it or why it was there, because I had no voice to share with them who I was. When I look back on that time now, I feel so very lucky that I stuck it out and that I can be here living this beautiful life I get to have on the other side of that silence.

I didn't really start talking about the real truth of who I am until I was in my thirties, and, even now, I don't mention it very often. Coming out, though, writing it down and being open about my identity and experiences, has been nothing short of liberating. I have shifted from someone who felt unworthy and invisible to someone who feels and is worthy and seen.

I am beautiful, and I am loved, and I am here fully in this life in a way that I only dreamed of when I hid what I once thought of as my great sickness but I now know is the gorgeous fact of my personhood and humanity.

When I watch younger people in their teens and twenties speak out about their identities as queer and transgendered people, especially out of an environment that can make them feel less than loved like the students at Brigham Young University have in the video below, I feel so much pride in them, and I am nothing short of down-deep-in-my-soul grateful that we have come to a place in our culture where we now have the vocabulary and the means to speak out, share our stories, and find our tribes.

If you are gay or trans or some other variant of the vast spectrum that makes up humanity who has felt silenced, I want you to watch the following video and know that you are, really and truly, by thousands if not millions of people, believed and honoured and loved.



Speak your truth and spread the word, because it does get better.