Wentworth Miller西雅图人权战线HRC演讲_miller演讲

Wentworth Miller西雅图人权战线HRC演讲由刀豆文库小编整理，希望给你工作、学习、生活带来方便，猜你可能喜欢“miller演讲”。

Thank you!

First and foremost, I wanna personally thank the human rights campaign for the incredible work that they’ve done and the work they continue to do.Not only here in Washington State but acro the country and around the world, as we all know, this work is critical.It’s life-changing.It’s life-saving.It is my great honor and privilege to be here tonight, to count myself a member of this community.It is also something of a surprise.I’ve had a complicated relationship with that word “community”.I’ve been slow to embrace it.I’ve been hesitant.I’ve been doubtful.For many years, I could not or would not accept that there was anything in that word for someone like me, like connection, support, strength, warmth.And there are reasons for that.I wasn’t born in this country.I didn’t grow up in any one particular religion.I have a mixed race background.And I’m gay.Really, it just your typical all American boy next door.It’s been natural to see myself as an individual.It’s been challenge to imagine myself as part of something larger.Like many of you here tonight, I grow up in what I would call “survival mode”.When you are in survival mode, you focus is on getting through the day in one piece.When you are in that mode at five, at ten, at fifteen, there isn’t a lot of space for words like community, for words like us and we.There’s only space for I and me.In fact, words like us and we not only sound foreign to me at five, and ten, and fifteen, they sounded like a lie.Because if us and we really existed, if there was really someone out there watching, and listening and caring, then I would have been rescued by now.That feeling of being singular, different and alone carried over my twentieth, and then to my thirtieth.When I was thirty-three, I started working on a TV show that was succeful not only here in the states but also abroad, which meant over the next four years, I was traveling to Asia, to the middle east, to Europe and everywhere in between.And in that time, I gave thousands of interviews.I have multiple opportunities to speak my truth which is that I was gay.But I chose not to.I was out privately to family and friends, to the people I learnt to trust over time, but profeionally, publicly I was not.As to choose between being out of integrity and out of the closet, I chose the former, I chose to lie, I chose to diemble.Because when I thought about the poibility of coming out, about how that might impact me and the career that I worked so hard for, I was filled with fear, fear and anger, and the stubborn resistance that have built up over many years.When I thought about that kids somewhere out there who might be inspired or moved by me taking a stand, speaking my truth, my mental response was consistently “no, thank you”.I thought I’ve spent over a decade building this career, alone, by myself.And from a certain point of view, it’s all I have.But now I’m suppose to put that at risk, to be a role model to someone I’ve never met, who I’m not even sure exists.It didn’t make any sense to me.I did not resignate at that time.Also like many of you here tonight, growing up I was a target.Speaking the right way, standing the right way, holding your wrist the right way.Everyday was a test, there was a thousand ways to fail, a thousand way to betray yourself, to not live up to someone else’s standard of what was acceptable, of what was normal.And when you failed the test, which was guaranteed, there was a price to pay, emotional, psychological, physical.And like many of you, I paid that price, more than once and in a variety of ways.The first time I tried to kill myself, I was fifteen.I waited until my family went away for the weekend and I was alone in the house and I swallowed a bottle of pills.I don’t remember what happened over the next couple of days, but I’m pretty sure come Monday morning, I was on the bus back to school, pretending everything was fine.And when someone asked if that was a cry for help, I say no.Because I told no one.You only cry for help if you believe there is help to cry for.And I didn’t, I want it out, I want it gone, at fifteen.I and me can be a lonely place and it’ll only get you so far.By 2011, I made the decision to walk away from acting and many of the things I previously believed so important, to me.And after giving up the scripts and sets which I was dreamt I was a child, and the resulting attention and scrutiny which I had not dreamt of as a child.The only thing I have left with was what I have when I started.I and me.And it was not enough.In 2012, I joined a man’s group called mankind project, which is a man’s group for all man.I was introduced to the still foreign and still potentially threatening concepts of “us and we”, to the idea of brotherhood, sisterhood and community.And it is via that community that I became a member and proud supporter of the human rights campaign.And it was via this community that I learnt more about the persecution of my LGBT brothers and sisters in Ruia.Several weeks ago, when I was drafting my letter to Saint Petersburg International Film Festival declining their invitation to attend, a small nagging voice in my head insisted that no one would notice, that no one was watching, or listening, or caring.But this time, finally, I knew that voice was wrong.I thought even one person notice this, this letter in which I speak my truth and integrate my small story into a much larger and more important one.It’s worth sending.I thought let me be to someone else what no one was to me.Let me send the meage to that kid, maybe in America, maybe someplace far overseas, maybe somewhere deep inside, a kid who’s been targeted at home or school or in the streets, that someone is watching and listening and caring, that there is an “us”, that there is a “we”, and that kid or teenager of adult is loved.And they are not alone.I’m deeply grateful to the human rights campaign for giving me and others like me the opportunity and the platform and the imperative to tell my story, to continue sending that meage because it needs to be sent, over and over again, until it’s been heard and received and embraced.Not just here in Washington State, not just acro the country but around the world and then back again.Just in case, just in case we mied someone.Thank you!