Transcriber: Mallelis Quiroz Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
Hello and good afternoon, everybody.
It is wonderful to be here
to talk about diversity and inclusion in this afternoon.
My name is Panu Mäenpää,
and I work during the daytime as a chief communications officer.
And all nights and mornings and weekends,
I work as the chairperson of Helsinki Gay Pride Community,
the largest LGBTIQ organization in Finland.
But as full time, I am a gay homosexual.
I’m a card-carrying, flaming, flag-waving homosexual
and I’m very happy about it.
But I stand here before you as a human being,
talking to my fellow human beings.
I will try to predict
how the future will look like with diversity and inclusion,
but before I can do that,
we need to look back at history in order to understand the future.
I was born in 1975,
which was four years later
than homosexuality was decriminalized in Finland,
but it was only six years after my birth
that it ceased to be a mental illness.
So if you believe the great philosopher Lady Gaga
and think that I was born this way,
I spent the first six years being a mental case.
Here is a picture of me in the tender age of 15, in 1990,
in the arms of my girlfriend.
Yes, a girlfriend.
You’ve got to try it before you knock it, right?
No.
In 1990, when I was 15,
there were no people to look up to
who said that they were gay or were any different.
It was a monotonous culture of people being quite the same, on the surface.
So me, at 15,
I thought that I would never, ever have a happy gay life in front of me,
but I tried to change myself to be something that I was not.
And it was a really long journey.
In 1999, when I was 24,
the law prohibiting promoting homosexuality
was struck off from the Finnish law.
I was 24.
That is the same law that is now enforced in our neighboring country, Russia.
Think about that.
It took me many years to become the human being I am,
but, I mean, fortunately, there were many who fought before me.
It was not until 2013,
as you can see in this picture,
when we got a citizens’ initiative
trying to get us all the right to equal marriage.
It took many, many years of work and many, many people fighting for it,
and it was wonderful.
In 2013,
I was granted the ability to marry a person that I love,
and I am now engaged,
getting ready to be married in September.
So thank you.
Thank you for that equal right also for me.
And I thought that everything would now get better,
but only two years later,
you can see this picture of me sitting on a couch
on a national morning television show,
talking with this man who was the chairman of a “true marriage” NGO,
who was trying to tell me that, of course,
I cannot have the same rights as he has as a heterosexual man
because there is something wrong with me,
and even though I am allowed to pay the same taxes as everybody else,
I should not be granted the same rights as everybody else.
And this was in 2015,
only six years ago, my friends -
not that long ago.
So what will the future then look like?
How can we predict what will happen diversity or inclusion-wise in the future?
These examples, I wanted to show you that it’s really, really fickle,
what will happen.
At the moment, I’m living a wonderful life here in Helsinki, Finland,
and things are really good for me.
It is not really good for everybody, globally.
So what should we do?
What sould we do
in order for diversity and inclusion to flourish
in the society that we live in?
There are four points that I want to make for all of you.
Number one:
diversity doesn’t have to be promoted
because diversity has always been
and will always be,
because we, as human beings, are not alike.
There is no other Panu Mäenpää out there.
I am the only one.
The people in here, in this studio, are different from one another.
All of you behind the camera are different.
So doversity has always been and it will always be,
and that is something that we need to accept.
We do not want to spend all of our time
trying to conform everybody to the same box
because that is a waste of time,
and time, as we all know, is very precious.
My second point is that we need to foster the culture of empathy.
We need to understand
that we, as human beings, are tribal animals.
For us, it is normal and ordinary to go forth in packs,
to get along with everybody,
because, as a crowd, we have more force.
And we need to understand
that we all feel the need to love,
we all feel the need to be loved.
We want to be recognized.
We want to get our voices heard,
and we want to be seen.
And this is something that we need to understand.
This unites us all.
We are no different from one another.
Thirdly, we need to understand
that we are not the guardians of history.
We are the makers of history.
And this means that we do not have to carry any traditions,
or any laws,
or any mindsets,
for generations and generations to come.
We can make a change,
every one of us.
We can shape society to a form
that is the most wonderful for everybody.
But I need you all to come along and do that with me.
And fourthly,
we need to understand
that the biggest threat to diversity and inclusion happening is fear,
and fear is normal.
Fear is something that we all think about and feel.
And we fear the unknown,
and it is easy to fear the unknown when we don’t have any experience.
I stand before you as a gay man
and I want you to understand
that I am as unremarkable and ordinary as you all are.
I go to the grocery store.
I stand behind you in the queue.
I play the lottery every Saturday in order to win.
I have a mortgage.
I get up every day, put on my trousers, and go to work.
Just like you.
You need to understand that I am you.
There is no gay love.
There is no heterosexual love.
There is no transgender love.
There is just love,
and we all need to experience that.
There are no gay rights.
There are no heterosexual rights.
There are no transgender rights.
There are just human rights,
because we are all human.
I’m a great believer
in Tennessee Williams’s, the American playwright words,
and I actually have them tattooed on my arm.
It says, “Kindness of strangers,”
on this arm that I use to shake everybody’s hands.
And it’s there to remind me
that all we can do is rely on the kindness of strangers,
kindness that can be found in every person.
So the majority needs to rely on the kindness of the minority,
and the minority needs to rely on the kindness of the majority.
I am sure there is room for everybody on this planet.
So I stand here before you as the chief communications officer,
the chairperson of Helsinki Pride,
a flaming, card-carrying, flag-waving homosexual.
But firstly and foremostly,
I stand before you as a fellow human being,
ready to rely on you.
Please also realy on me.
Thank you.