as a student of adversity I've been
struck over the years by how some people
with major challenges seemed to draw
strength from them and I've heard the
popular wisdom that that has to do with
finding meaning and for a long time I
thought the meaning was out there some
great truth waiting to be found but over
time I've come to feel that the truth is
irrelevant we call it finding meaning
but we might better call it forging
meaning my last book was about how
families manage to deal with various
kinds of challenging or unusual
offspring and one of the mothers I
interviewed who had two children with
multiple severe disabilities said to me
people always give us these little
sayings like God doesn't give you any
more than you can handle but children
like ours are not preordained as a gift
they're a gift because that's what we
have chosen we make those choices all
our lives when I was in second grade
Bobby Finco had a birthday party and
invited everyone in our class but me my
mother assumed there'd been some sort of
error and she called mrs. Finkle who
said that Bobby didn't like me and
didn't want me at his party and that day
my mom took me to the zoo and out for a
hot fudge sundae when I was in seventh
grade one of the kids on my school bus
nicknamed me Percy as a shorthand for my
demeanor and sometimes he and his cohort
would chant that provocation the entire
school bus ride 45 minutes up 45 minutes
back Percy Percy Percy Percy
when I was in eighth grade
our science teacher told us that all
male homosexuals developed fecal
incontinence because of the trauma to
their anal sphincter and I graduated
high school without ever going to the
cafeteria where I would have sat with
the girls had been laughed at for doing
so or sat with the boys and been laughed
at for being a boy who should be sitting
with the girls I survived that childhood
through a mix of avoidance and endurance
but I didn't know then and do know now
is that avoidance and endurance can be
the entryway to forging meaning after
you forged meaning you need to
incorporate that meaning into a new
identity you need to take the traumas
and make them part of who you've come to
be and you need to fold the worst events
of your life into a narrative of triumph
evincing a better self in response to
things that hurt one of the other
mothers I interviewed when I was working
on my book had been raped as an
adolescent and had a child following
that rape which had thrown away her
career plans and damaged all of her
emotional relationships but when I met
her she was 50 and I said to her do you
often think about the man who raped you
and she said I used to think about him
with anger but now only with pity and I
thought she meant pity because he was so
uh neva l've Daz to have done this
terrible thing and I said pity and she
said yes
because he has a beautiful daughter and
two beautiful grandchildren and he
doesn't know that and I do so as it
turns out I'm the lucky one some of our
struggles are things were born to our
gender our sexuality a race or
disability and some are things that
happen to us
being a political prisoner being a rape
victim
being a Katrina survivor identity
involves entering a community to draw
strength from that community and to give
strength there too it involves
substituting and for but not I am here
but I have cancer but rather I have
cancer and I am here but we're ashamed
we can't tell our stories and stories
are the foundation of identity forge
meaning build identity forge meaning and
build identity that became my mantra
forging meaning is about changing
yourself building identity is about
changing the world all of us was
stigmatized identities face this
question daily how much to accommodate
society by constraining ourselves and
how much to break the limits of what
constitutes a valid life forging meaning
and building identity does not make what
was wrong right it only makes what was
wrong precious in January of this year I
went to me and more to interview
political prisoners and I was surprised
to find them less bitter than I had
anticipated most of them had knowingly
committed the offenses that landed them
in prison and they had walked in with
their heads held high and they walked
out with their head still held high many
years later dr. Murphy da a leading
human rights activist who had nearly
died in prison and had spent many years
in solitary confinement told me she was
grateful to her jailers for the time she
had had to think for the wisdom she had
gained for the chance to hone her
meditation skills she had sought meaning
and made her travail into a crucial
identity but if the people I met were
less bitter than I'd anticipated about
being in prison they were also less
thrilled
tonight expected about the reform
process going on in their country
mafia said we Burmese are noted for our
tremendous grace under pressure but we
also have grievance under Glamour she
said and the fact that there have been
these shifts and changes doesn't erase
the continuing problems in our society
that we learn to see so well while we
were in prison and I understood her to
be saying that concessions confer only a
little humanity we're full humanity is
do that crumbs are not the same as a
place at the table which is to say you
can forge meaning and build identity and
still be mad as hell I've never been
raped and I've never been in anything
remotely approaching a Burmese prison
but it's a gay American I've experienced
prejudice and even hatred and I forged
meaning and I'd built identity which is
a move I learned from people who had
experienced far worse predation than
I've ever known in my own adolescence I
went to extreme lengths to try to be
straight I enrolled myself in something
called sexual surrogacy therapy in which
people I was encouraged to call doctors
prescribed what I was encouraged to call
exercises with women I was encouraged to
call surrogates who were not exactly
prostitutes but who are also not exactly
anything else
my particular favorite was a blonde
woman from the deep south who eventually
admitted to me that she was really a
necrophiliac and had taken this job
after she got in trouble down at the
morgue these experiences eventually
allowed me to have some happy physical
relationships with women
for which I'm grateful but I was at war
with myself and I dug terrible wounds
into my own psyche we don't seek the
painful experiences that hue our
identities but we seek our identities in
the wake of painful experiences we
cannot bear a pointless torment but we
can endure great pain if we believe that
it's purposeful eves makes less of an
impression on us than struggle we could
have been ourselves without our delights
but not without the misfortunes that
drive our search for meaning therefore I
take pleasure in infirmities Saint Paul
wrote in 2nd Corinthians 4 when I am
weak then I am strong in 1988 I went to
Moscow to interview artists of the
Soviet Underground and I expected their
work to be dissident and political but
the radicalism in their work actually
lay in reinserting humanity into a
society that was annihilating humanity
itself as in some senses Russian society
is now doing again one of the artists I
met said to me we were in training to be
not artists but angels in 1991 I went
back to see the artists I'd been writing
about and I was with them during the
push that ended the Soviet Union and
they were among the chief organizers of
the resistance to that push and on the
third day of the porch one of them
suggested we walk up to Smolensk aya and
we went there and we arranged ourselves
in front of one of the barricade
and a little while later a column of
tanks rolled up and the soldier on the
front tank said we have unconditional
orders to destroy this barricade if you
get out of the way we don't need to hurt
you but if you won't move we'll have no
choice but to run you down and the
artists eyes we said give us just a
minute give us just a minute to tell you
why we're here and the soldier folded
his arms and the artist launched into a
Jeffersonian panegyric to democracy such
as those of us who live in a
Jeffersonian democracy would be
hard-pressed to present and they went on
and on and the soldier walk and then he
sat there for a full minute after they
were finished and looked at us so
bedraggled in the rain and said what you
have said is true and we must bow to the
will of the people if you'll clear
enough space for us to turn around we'll
go back the way we came and that's what
they did
sometimes forging meaning can give you
the vocabulary you need to fight for
your ultimate freedom Russia awakened me
to the lemonade notion that oppression
breeds the power to oppose it and I
gradually understood that as the
cornerstone of identity
it took identity to rescue me from
sadness the gay rights movement posits a
world in which my barren cesare victory
identity politics always works on two
fronts to give pride to people who have
a given condition or characteristic and
to cause the outside world to treat such
people more gently and more kindly those
are two totally separate enterprises but
progress in each sphere reverberates in
the other identity politics can be
narcissistic people extol the difference
only because it's there's people narrow
the world and function in discrete
groups with our empathy for one another
but properly understood and wisely
practiced identity politics should
expand our idea of what it is to be
human
identity itself should be not a smug
label or a gold-medal but a revolution I
would have had an easier life if I were
straight but I would not be me and I now
like being myself better than the idea
of being someone else someone who to be
honest I have neither the option of
being nor the ability fully to imagine
but if you banished the dragons you
banished the heroes and we become
attached to the heroic strain in our own
lives I've sometimes wondered whether I
could have ceased to hate that part of
myself without gay prides Technicolor
Fiesta of which this speech is one
manifestation are used to think I would
know myself to be mature when I could
simply be gay with that emphasis but the
self-loathing of that period left a void
and celebration needs to fill and
overflow it and even if I repay my
private debt of melancholy there's still
an outer world of homophobia that it
will take decades to address someday
being gay will be a simple fact free of
party hats and blame but not yet a
friend of mine who thought gay pride was
getting very carried away with itself
once suggested that we organize gay
humility week
[Applause]
it's a great idea but it's time has not
yet come and neutrality which seems to
lie halfway between despair and
celebration is actually the endgame in
29 states in the u.s. I could legally be
fired or denied housing for being gay in
Russia the anti propaganda law has led
to people being beaten in the streets 27
African countries have passed laws
against sodomy and in Nigeria gay people
can legally be stoned to death and
lynchings have become common in Saudi
Arabia recently two men who had been
caught in carnal acts were sentenced to
seven thousand lashes each and are now
permanently disabled as a result so who
can forge meaning and build identity gay
rights are not primarily marriage rights
and for the millions who live in
unaccepting places with no resources
dignity remains elusive
I'm lucky to a forge meaning and built
identity but that's still a rare
privilege and gay people deserve more
collectively than the crumbs of justice
and yet every step forward is so sweet
in 2007 six years after he met my
partner and I decided to get married
meeting John had been the discovery of
great happiness and also the elimination
of great unhappiness and sometimes I was
so occupied with the disappearance of
all that pain that I forgot about the
joy which was at first the less
remarkable part of it to me marrying was
a way to declare our love as more a
presence than an absence marriage and
led us to children and that meant new
meanings and new identities ours and
theirs I want my children to be
happy and I love the most aching Lee
when they are sad as a gay father I can
teach them to own what is wrong in their
lives but I believe that if I succeed in
sheltering them from adversity I will
have failed as a parent
a Buddhist scholar I know once explained
to me that Westerners mistakenly think
that nirvana is what arrives when all
your woe is behind you and you have only
bliss to look forward to but he said
that would not be nirvana because your
bliss in the present would always be
shadowed by the joy from the past near
vana he said is what you arrive at when
you have only bliss to look forward to
and find in what looked like sorrows the
seedlings of your joy and I sometimes
wonder whether I could have found such
fulfillment in marriage and children if
they'd come more readily if I'd been
straight in my youth or were young now
in either of which cases this might be
easier perhaps I could perhaps all the
complex imagining I've done could have
been applied to other topics but if
seeking meaning matters more than
finding meaning the question is not
whether I'd be happier for having been
bullied but whether assigning meaning to
those experiences has made me a better
father I tend to find the ecstasy hidden
mean ordinary Joy's because I did not
expect those joys to be ordinary to me I
know many heterosexuals who have equally
happy marriages and families but gay
marriage is so breathtakingly fresh and
gay families so exhilaratingly new and I
found meaning in that surprise in
October it was my fiftieth birthday and
my family organized a party for me and
in the middle of it my son said to my
husband that he wanted to make his
speech and John said George you can't
make a speech you're four
only grandpa and uncle David and I are
going to make speeches tonight but
George insisted and insisted and finally
John took him up to the microphone and
George said very loudly ladies and
gentlemen may I have your attention
please and everyone turned around
startled and George said I'm glad it's
daddy's birthday I'm glad we all get
cake and daddy if you were little I'd be
your friend and I thought thank you I
thought that I was indebted even to
Bobbie Finco because all those earlier
experiences were what had propelled me
to this moment
and I was finally unconditionally
grateful for a life I'd once have done
anything to change the gay activist
Harvey Milk was once asked by younger
gay man what he could do to help the
movement and Harvey Milk said go out and
tell someone there's always somebody who
wants to confiscate our humanity and
there are always stories that restore it
if we live out loud we can trounce the
hatred and expand everyone's lives for
dreaming build identity forge meaning
build identity and then invite the world
to share your joy thank you
thank you