Gay ted

12 LGBTQI TED Talks that will fill you with Pride

These 12 TED talks celebrate the brave, the curious, the adventurous, the change makers, the everyday lives and the stories of LGBTI people all over the globe.

What group?

And had these people ever even consciously met a victim of their discrimination?

Did they know who they were voting against and what the impact was?

And then it occurred to me,

perhaps if they could look into the eyes

of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship

it might make it harder for them to do.

It might give them pause.

Obviously I couldn't get 20 million people to the same dinner party,

so I figured out a way where I could introduce them to each other photographically

without any artifice, without any lighting,

or without any manipulation of any kind on my part.

Because in a photograph you can examine a lion's whiskers

without the fear of him ripping your face off.

For me, photography is not just about exposing film,

it's about exposing the viewer

to something new, a place they haven't gone before,

but most importantly, to people that they might be afraid of.

Life magazine introduced generations of people

to distant, far-off cultures they never knew existed through pictures.

So I decided to make a series of very simple portraits,

And I basically decided to photograph anyone in this country

that was not 100 percent straight,

which, if you don't know, is a limitless number of people.

So this was a very large undertaking,

and to do it we needed some help.

So I ran out in the freezing cold,

and I photographed every single person that I knew that I could get to

in February of about two years ago.

And I took those photographs, and I went to the HRC and I asked them for some help.

And they funded two weeks of shooting in New York.

Video: I'm iO Tillett Wright, and I'm an artist born and raised in New York City.

Self Evident Truths is a photographic record of LGBTQ America today.

My aim is to take a simple portrait

of anyone who's anything other than 100 percent straight

or feels like they fall in the LGBTQ spectrum in any way.

My goal is to show the humanity that exists in every one of us

through the simplicity of a face.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."

It's written in the Declaration of Independence.

We are failing as a nation

to uphold the morals upon which we were founded.

There is no equality in the United States.

["What does equality mean to you?"]

["Marriage"] ["Freedom"] ["Civil rights"]

["Treat every person as you'd treat yourself"]

It's when you don't have to think about it, simple as that.

The fight for equal rights is not just about gay marriage.

Today in 29 states, more than half of this country,

you can legally be fired just for your sexuality.

["Who is responsible for equality?"]

I've heard hundreds of people give the same answer:

"We are all responsible for equality."

So far we've shot 300 faces in New York City.

And we wouldn't have been able to do any of it

without the generous support of the Human Rights Campaign.

I want to take the project across the country.

I want to visit 25 American cities, and I want to shoot 4,000 or 5,000 people.

This is my contribution to the civil rights fight of my generation.

I challenge you to look into the faces of these people

and tell them that they deserve less than any other human being.

["Self evident truths"]

["4,000 faces across America"]

iO Tillett Wright: Absolutely nothing could have prepared us for what happened after that.

Almost 85,000 people watched that video,

and then they started emailing us from all over the country,

asking us to come to their towns and help them to show their faces.

And a lot more people wanted to show their faces than I had anticipated.

So I changed my immediate goal to 10,000 faces.

That video was made in the spring of 2011,

and as of today I have traveled to almost 20 cities

and photographed almost 2,000 people.

I know that this is a talk,

but I'd like to have a minute of just quiet

and have you just look at these faces

because there is nothing that I can say that will add to them.

Because if a picture is worth a thousand words,

then a picture of a face needs a whole new vocabulary.

So after traveling and talking to people

in places like Oklahoma or small-town Texas,

we found evidence that the initial premise was dead on.

Visibility really is key.

Familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy.

Once an issue pops up in your own backyard or amongst your own family,

you're far more likely to explore sympathy for it

or explore a new perspective on it.

Of course, in my travels I met people

who legally divorced their children for being other than straight,

but I also met people who were Southern Baptists

who switched churches because their child was a lesbian.

Sparking empathy had become the backbone of Self Evident Truths.

But here's what I was starting to learn that was really interesting:

Self Evident Truths doesn't erase the differences between us.

In fact, on the contrary, it highlights them.

It presents, not just the complexities

found in a procession of different human beings,

but the complexities found within each individual person.

It wasn't that we had too many boxes, it was that we had too few.

At some point I realized that my mission to photograph "gays" was inherently flawed,

because there were a million different shades of gay.

Here I was trying to help,

and I had perpetuated the very thing I had spent my life trying to avoid --

At some point I added a question to the release form

that asked people to quantify themselves

on a scale of one to 100 percent gay.

And I watched so many existential crises unfold in front of me.

People didn't know what to do

because they had never been presented with the option before.

Can you quantify your openness?

Once they got over the shock, though,

by and large people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent

or the 3 to 20 percent marks.

Of course, there were lots of people who opted for a 100 percent one or the other,

but I found that a much larger proportion of people

identified as something that was much more nuanced.

I found that most people fall on a spectrum of what I have come to refer to as "Grey."

Let me be clear though -- and this is very important --

in no way am I saying that preference doesn't exist.

And I am not even going to address the issue of choice versus biological imperative,

because if any of you happen to be of the belief

that sexual orientation is a choice,

I invite you to go out and try to be grey.

I'll take your picture just for trying.

What I am saying though is that human beings are not one-dimensional.

The most important thing to take from the percentage system is this:

If you have gay people over here

and you have straight people over here,

and while we recognize that most people identify

as somewhere closer to one binary or another,

there is this vast spectrum of people that exist in between.

And the reality that this presents is a complicated one.

Because, for example, if you pass a law

that allows a boss to fire an employee for homosexual behavior,

where exactly do you draw the line?

Is it over here, by the people who have had one or two heterosexual experiences so far?

by the people who have only had one or two homosexual experiences thus far?

Where exactly does one become a second-class citizen?

Another interesting thing that I learned from my project and my travels

is just what a poor binding agent sexual orientation is.

After traveling so much and meeting so many people,

let me tell you, there are just as many jerks and sweethearts

and Democrats and Republicans and jocks and queens

and every other polarization you can possibly think of

within the LGBT community

as there are within the human race.

Aside from the fact that we play with one legal hand tied behind our backs,

and once you get past the shared narrative of prejudice and struggle,

just being other than straight

doesn't necessarily mean that we have anything in common.

So in the endless proliferation of faces that Self Evident Truths is always becoming,

as it hopefully appears across more and more platforms,

bus shelters, billboards, Facebook pages, screen savers,

perhaps in watching this procession of humanity,

something interesting and useful will begin to happen.

Hopefully these categories, these binaries,

these over-simplified boxes

will begin to become useless and they'll begin to fall away.

Because really, they describe nothing that we see

and no one that we know and nothing that we are.

What we see are human beings in all their multiplicity.

And seeing them makes it harder to deny their humanity.

At the very least I hope it makes it harder to deny their human rights.

that you would choose to deny the right to housing,

the right to adopt children, the right to marriage,

the freedom to shop here, live here, buy here?

Am I the one that you choose to disown

as your child or your brother or your sister or your mother or your father,

your neighbor, your cousin, your uncle, the president,

your police woman or the fireman?

Because I already am all of those things.

We already are all of those things, and we always have been.

So please don't greet us as strangers,

greet us as your fellow human beings, period.