ENGLISH SPEECH WENTWORTH MILLER Survival Mode English Subtitles
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 and 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’s just your typical all-American
boy next door.
It has been natural to see myself as an individual.
It’s been a challenge to imagine that self
as part of something larger.
Like many of you here tonight, I grew up in
what I would call survival mode.
When you’re in survival mode, your focus
is on getting through the day in one piece,
and when you’re in that mode at 5, at 10,
at 15, 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 sounded foreign to me at 5 and 10
and 15, 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 and different
and alone carried over into my 20s and into
my 30s.
When I was 33, I started working on a TV show
that was successful not only here in the States,
but also abroad, which meant over the next
4 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 had 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’d learned to trust over
time, but professionally, publicly I was not.
Asked to choose between being out of integrity
and out of the closet, I chose the former.
I chose to lie, I chose to dissemble, because
when I thought about the possibility of coming
out, about how that might impact me and the
career I’d worked so hard for, I was filled
with fear.
Fear and anger and a stubborn resistance that
had built up over many years.
When I thought about that kid somewhere out
there who might be inspired or moved by me
taking a stand and 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 supposed to put that at risk
to be a role model, to someone I’ve never
met, who I’m not even sure exists.
That didn’t make any sense to me.
That did not resonate… at the 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.
Every day was a test and there were a thousand
ways to fail.
A thousand ways 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, in a variety of ways.
The first time that I tried to kill myself,
I was 15.
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 me if that was a cry
for help, I say no, because I told no one.
You only cry for help if you believe there’s
help to cry for.
And I didn’t.
I wanted out.
I wanted gone.
At 15.
‘I am me’ can be a lonely place, and it
will only get you so far.
By 2011, I’d made the decision to walk away
from acting and many of the things I’d previously
believed so important to me.
And after I’d given up the scripts and the
sets which I’d dreamed of as a child, and
the resulting attention and scrutiny which
I had not dreamed of as a child, the only
thing I was left with was what I had when
I started.
‘I am me,’ and it was not enough.
In 2012, I joined a men’s group called The
Mankind Project, which is a men’s group
for all men, and 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 was via that community that I became
a member and proud supporter of the Human
Rights Campaign, and it was via this community
that I learned more about the persecution
of my LGBT brothers and sisters in Russia.
Several weeks ago, when I was drafting my
letter to the St. 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 if even one person notices this
letter in which I speak my truth, and integrate
my small story into a much larger and more
important one, is worth sending.
I thought, let me be to someone else what
no one was to me.
Let me send a message to that kid, maybe in
America, maybe someplace far overseas, maybe
somewhere deep inside, a kid who’s being
targeted at home or at 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 or adult
is loved, and they are not alone.
I am 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 message,
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
across the country, but around the world,
and then back again.
Just in case.
Just in case we miss someone.
Thank you.