Transcriber: Angel Vail Reviewer: Denise RQ
Thank you.
Today's theme is about different views.
And not only different views we've been offering each other, different directions.
Whether it's technology and culture,
but there's one question we're always asking in our society:
Where is it going next?
When is this recession going to end?
Who's the next Prime Minister going to be?
But as an LGBT activist, and specifically an LGBT youth activist
my question is, what does the future hold for LGBT youth?
What issues will people who are born tomorrow or today or yesterday
want to campaign on when they're 14 and say,
"Mom, I'm a lesbian, and I want to go out and change the world,"
because there's something that's making an obstacle for her.
So today, I want to share with you three central concepts
which I bring to activism.
They're actually not innovative, and they're not new,
but they're future-looking.
And the idea is to think ahead to our future.
Where do we want to go, and who is in charge of that process?
And these three views are empowerment, achievement, and understanding.
Empowerment isn't a new thing in activism.
If you look at civil rights, if you look at Martin Luther King,
empowerment is about seeing a person in crisis,
taking them from crisis to support, and then empowering them to say,
"I can see you're sitting down, and then you have to stand up,
and then you have to make others stand up.
To take your strengths, and your willpower and share it with other people."
And my question is,
how can we get youth more involved in this?
How can get youth to lead on these activities?
Brighton & Hove is often said to have a very large LGBT population.
And we need to focus on the youth of that population.
Because it's hard to be a young person for anybody,
let alone being an LGBT young person.
And one of the examples I wanted to share with you
is in one of the local schools in Brighton & Hove
which I regularly do workshops in.
And they have a student-led equality council.
So under the equality act, they have to show due regard
to 9 protected characteristics that they've reflected in their practice.
And in this, they took the opportunity,
not for a top-down approach, but to let students lead the way.
And on their equality forum, they went to the senior leadership team,
and they said, "Look, you've got these great posters around schools.
Posters that are saying, 'Go to this service if you're BME',
or 'Go to this service if you're LGBT',
but they're in completely the wrong places."
And it didn't appeal to the senior leadership team that actually,
the young people who go to that school and navigate it on a daily basis
were actually the smartest people to tell them where to put these signs.
Not to put it in the hallway but actually to put it in their form rooms
which for them is a safe space which they go to every single day.
Now young people have skills which they can bring to activism
and for that we need to give them opportunities to develop,
just like any other young person.
Their concerns might be,
"When I go to my work placement in year 10,
will I have to be closeted, or will I have to be out?"
And in America, a 16-year-old called Jacob Rudolph,
came out to his entire school on video.
His dad was in the audience filming it, and it went straight up to YouTube
and now has about over 500,000 hits.
And he's not only come out to his entire class
but he also went to the New Jersey Senate
to speak out against banning reparative therapy;
therapy which tells LGBT young people that they are broken,
that something in their brain is not right and that is what's causing their identity.
And for a young person to speak out, like Ruben did earlier today,
it takes tremendous courage.
And that courage comes from empowerment.
From not making young people dependent on support services,
but taking them through that process and then saying to them,
"This is the height you can reach after that process."
Even in the UK, in Manchester, there is a young trans-man called Alfie Austin,
who's working with an organization called Fixers
to eradicate transphobia from music videos.
Empowerment is happening all around us.
Many of you have moments when you feel empowered.
When you've heard stories that make you want to change the world.
And we need to make young people want to change the world.
And many of them do, but it's about giving them those opportunities.
And to reflect on that in personal practice,
the second ideal is achievement.
From a very young age, we are taught that our achievements are standardized,
that what I get on a test can be compared to Mary or Charles.
But achievement for LGBT young people is a very different thing.
And it's a very personal thing.
For me, achievement is why I do activism.
It's not to make a long list of everything I've done.
It's to make a long list of how far I've come from when I was 13
and told my first friend that I was gay.
Achievement for me is recognizing that on Christmas Day after I came out
about 2 years later, my dad actually went out and bought a copy of Gay Times,
which for him was a monumental step.
And that not only empowered me
but I look back on that every single day, and say, "That's an achievement."
When I go into schools and do workshops on LGBT issues,
and homo-, bi-, and transphobia,
it keeps those experiences fresh, and it keeps in my mind
the lengths that people go to to keep their spaces inclusive
and to make them representative for LGBT people.
But achievement can also be legal equality.
Right now we're discussing same-sex marriage in Parliament.
And I ask, if this passes, and this is an achievement for us,
where are young people's voices in there?
When I was thinking about this presentation on Sunday,
I actually had a lot of slides that I was going to show you.
And on one of them,
I wanted to put about the discussions for same-sex marriage,
and I didn't actually think it would be proper
to put some of the arguments the opposition used,
because, in all honesty, they're not appropriate, and they're not kind.
But the positive arguments - leaders of our communities,
people like Ellen DeGeneres, Peter Tatchell, and Paris Lees;
this is who young people can aspire to be,
and this is who we should ask them to aspire to be.
We want young people to take control of their own voices,
and through opportunities, develop themselves and say,
"I can do this.
"This is my achievement. and I can change the world around me."
Again, we're not asking for young people to go out
and challenge dictators on their human rights record.
But at the grassroots, in Brighton & Hove,
young people can lead in their schools like this equality forum.
They can challenge their peers in constructive and compassionate ways
at their level, and say,
"Actually, saying, 'That's so gay' is offensive.
And in all honesty, you can just use a different word."
But looking to the future,
what are the achievements that we want to achieve next?
Where do we go after marriage equality?
I remember when I came out in 2005,
I didn't have a lot of achievements.
I'd achieved that I'd just come out, but then I was looking to my future.
And it was when the civil partnership law had just come through in 2004,
and I had this strange thought of,
is the achievement in my life going to be that I'm civilly partnered to someone?
And it was a strange concept that I could never get my head around.
And now eventually, I can say that one of my achievements will be
that I can get married to someone.
And what we need for young people,
when they're thinking about their achievements,
is to look forward and actually say, "I know what my rights are.
I know where I want my life to go, and I know how I'm going to get there.
I know that I can get married,
because people before me have campaigned for it,
and I can reach that goal."
And the third one is understanding.
Understanding is something that we maybe have all learned a bit more about today.
That we've seen different views of the world and different ways of speaking.
I know Ruben personally from my work
and to come up here and offer
understanding, and awareness, and knowledge,
it's a powerful thing, but it's even more powerful when it comes from young people.
And when we go into schools and youth projects,
you can put a video on for an hour
and tell people to sit down and take it in,
but I can guarantee you they probably weren't,
and will switch off after about 15 minutes.
But if you put a young person up there, someone who has life experience,
someone who has been through that process
of trying to go from crisis to support, and then to empower other people,
It not only continuously benefits them, it benefits everyone around us.
And we could all use a bit more understanding,
and like Ruben said, all you have to do is ask.
But the opportunities we offer for young people
isn't to ask their teacher, "What word can I use?"
"What does the word lesbian mean?"
We can come into schools, and we can empower students
to ask those questions themselves,
and go seek out the knowledge that they want.
And these are all ideals.
And these aren't even specific ideals to the LGBT movement.
This could have been the exact same argument
as the Civil Rights Movement with Martin Luther King.
But what we need to ask are hard questions
as to where we go after this,
and who is going to lead that charge.
And is the charge because young people are curious.
They're innovative; they think outside of the box.
When I was in a year nine class in Hove,
I asked them at the end of it if they had any questions.
And a girl whose in year nine, who looked very shy to me,
actually stuck her hand up and said,
"Just to let you know, my dad's straight, and he's married to my mum,
and I was walking with him through Brighton,
and he was wearing a cardigan,
and some people on a bench though it appropriate
to judge from the fact that he was wearing a cardigan that he was gay,
so they heckled him and said, "Oh, that person's gay."
And she turned around, and said,
"My dad's not gay, and a person isn't gay just because they wear a cardigan."
And in our language, someone in year nine has picked up
on how clothes impact our gender performance.
How people perceive our gender and sexuality.
Young people have the understanding.
Knowledge should always be age-appropriate,
but we shouldn't keep knowledge from young people.
In primary schools, we teach about diverse families.
You know, families with maybe with one mum;
families with maybe two mums.
So we shouldn't hide knowledge away from young people.
We should share it with them.
Because at the end of the day,
they are the caretakers of knowledge for the next generation,
and the generation after them.
So I can stand up to you now,
and I'm 21, so according to funding,
I will age out of the young person bracket in four years.
But we need to be looking, even today,
to someone who's 13,
someone else in the project who can stand next to me
and is about six years younger,
and can say exactly the same thing and have double the impact.
Our society's continuously moving forward.
And if we want people to be future leaders,
and innovators, and spokespeople,
we need to look to those people who are the diamonds in the rough.
People who have overcome adversity and obstacles in their lives.
Children who can recognize the achievements they've gone through,
the achievements their parents have gone to
and to accepting who they are and making a diverse space.
Recognizing that they can take that positive experience
and empower others, share their knowledge
share their enjoyment of life,
and then they can share their understanding.
We all speak in different languages, and we all have different terms,
but young people think outside that box.
And in 2013, when the times are always changing,
and we don't know where our society is turning next,
we should always be looking for
those people who can think outside the box,
and the people that we should be encouraging to think outside that box.
So the one thought I can leave you with for today, for your different view,
is think, not about LGBT issues,
not about civil rights issues but think about activism.
Who out there can change the world?
Who out there should be changing the world?
And the answer that I would give you,
which isn't maybe the best answer, it may not be the correct answer,
but it's what I believe, and it's my ideal,
is that young people will lead into the future
and innovate the society around us.
Thank you.
(Applause)