I encourage everyone to watch this video. In this Ted talks video, Ash talks about her experiences as a gay woman and the homophobia she's felt. She beautifully relates the closet experience to everyone's difficult experiences. We all have coming out of the closet stories that involves a hard conversation. She explains that being locked in the gay closet was hard but she had felt safer inside her closet. However, keeping the truth about yourself while locked in a closet was similar to holding an active grenade. By taking part in difficult conversations, you are being real with someone. You are being authentic in the your own truth. By having difficult conversations, you are coming out of the closet about who you are. She explains to a small girl who asked if Ash was a boy or a girl, that she was in fact a girl who enjoyed pajamas to pink dresses. That even though she wore boy clothes and had short hair, she was a girl. The girl took it simply and pleasantly at that. Ash recalls the conversation as being the easiest hard conversation she's ever had.
I chose this piece of media because Ash takes the experiences of a gay person and relates it universally. We don't see this often as the mainstream media does the job of separating group experiences into hierarchies of value. If we were to see more examples of Ash's story of universal experiences then perhaps we would have less discrimination and emphasis on differences.
How does the media prevent or make difficult the universal connections across different group identities? What are some of the things that you've noticed?
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