Joe Gerstandt | keynote speaker, freedom fighter, freak-flag flier

I have a story to tell.

I like to think of 1986 as the cultural peak of the glorious, bizarre, and not-quite-right 1980’s.  It was the year that I had a perm, wore pin-striped jeans tucked into untied high-tops and danced poorly to bad music.  It was also the year that I graduated from high school. 

My senior year was pretty easy and mostly enjoyable, but there were some specific class requirements for seniors, and one of them was speech.  I took speech with about half my senior class and I actually enjoyed public speaking so speech class was pretty fun for me.  During the course of the semester, we had to prepare and deliver a number of speeches of different format and length. 

Of the half-dozen or so speeches that I gave that year I can only remember one in any detail.

The speech that I remember was my final speech, and it was a doozy.   

Everyone liked the speech and I got an A on it.  I was very happy with my performance. I had not just delivered a speech, I had preached a sermon.  I had dropped knowledge.  I had been on fire.  It was awesome.

More about the speech later…first, a little bit about who I was in 1986 and after.

I grew up on a family farm and attended a small high school in a small town.  It was a little sheltered, fairly quiet and a lot homogenous.  I was president of our senior class and captain of the football and track team my senior year.  I went steady with a cheerleader and had good friends.  I am not making any of this up.

In 1986 I turned 18 years old and the brutal truth is that at 18 years of age, I knew almost nothing about who I was or what I was here for.  I also did not know much about the world or about “others.”  At 18 years of age, I had not, to my knowledge, interacted with anyone that was Jewish or Buddhist or vegetarian.  I had had no real  interaction with anyone that was African American, Hispanic, Latino, Native American, Asian American, an immigrant or that spoke another language.  I did not know anyone that was Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual or Transgender.  I had not had any real interaction with these groups of people…but I had a body of knowledge about them.  I knew “what” they were and what they were like.  Of course much of what I knew about these various groups was based on stereotypical ideas and images that came to me from my teachers, neighbors, school, church, parents, friends, family and of course the media.

I do not know if I was aware of that fact or not, but I was perfectly comfortable with what I knew.  I think that what I thought I “knew” about others actually was very valuable to me at the time.  I really did not know much about myself yet…I did not have a good idea of what I was here for or what I stood for, but I could certainly show people what I was not.

I was proudly and blatantly homophobic.  That was part of how I showed how “normal” I was.  And the people around me liked it.  I was also blatantly sexist and though I probably would have adamantly denied being racist, I clung tightly to a lot of stereotypical and racist ideas and beliefs, as well as stereotypical beliefs about a variety of ethinic and cultural groups.

I went out into “the world” not knowing much about the world or about myself…and not knowing much about how much I didn’t know.

After high-school I briefly attended a community college, served four years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps, attended and graduated from Iowa State University and then spent six years in sales and sales management.  Then, for a variety of reasons, I made a life-changing career change, and went to work for Nebraska AIDS Project as Director of Education and Prevention Programs. 

At that time, I considered myself to be very open-minded (not so much), self-aware (I was not), and motivated by all the right things (not entirely true), but I still felt a great burden as I began this job that I was very excited about and grateful for.

The burden that I felt was the memory of the final speech that I had given.

That speech that I had given as a senior in high school had a pretty strong message.  It was my argument that AIDS was God’s punishment to the human race for us tolerating homosexuality.  I told you that it was a doozy.  If you are reading this post, you probably know that my feelings have changed substantially regarding these issues, but this is where I was in 1986.  And now I had taken a job where I was interacting everyday with people that I had been judging and attacking in that speech. 

I had not thought of that speech for almost 20 years, yet when I was about to begin my work for Nebraska AIDS Project, I could think of little else.  I knew that the speech was no longer representative of how I felt, but I was a little bit shocked when I reflected on how big the divide was between what I believed as a young adult and what I now believed a decade and a half later.  My earlier beliefs were replusive to me, and at first I kept the memory of this speech to myself, but eventually I had to start sharing it.  And this is where I would get some real clarity on who I was and what I was here for.

I threw myself into my work and I unexpectedly bumped into my own privilege (which allowed me to learn a great deal about privilege) with alarming regularity in that job.  I also unexpectedly bumped into my calling.  I participated in a long-term survivor support group for people living with AIDS, and I volunteered to drive women living with HIV or AIDS to their support group, I listened a lot, I asked a lot of questions and got humble and got honest about a lot of things.  I did street outreach and talked to people living on the streets and involved in prostitution and drugs and whatever else there was to be involved in…straight, gay, transgender…and at risk.  And I started to put the lesson learned from this speech and my evolving perspective to work in my life and in the work that I do.

I am grateful for the unfading memory of my senior speech, because it helps keep me grounded in this work that I do.  When I get frustrated…when I want to write someone off as biased, close-minded, bigoted, sexist, heterosexist, racist, etc…I have to remember where I have come from.  I have to remember what I have said and thought…even if I do not like to admit it or even think about it.  I have to remember that I said and thought those things, even though I would have been considered by most to be a “good kid.”  I have to remember that a whole lot of “good people” around me liked my speech…nobody challenged any part of what I said in my speech.  And that is how it works.

That is how ingnorance and fear and bias spread.

I have to remember how things can look when you have absolute certainty about what “you know.”  I have to remember how it feels when you are driven to claim your identity by showing loudly and proudly what you are not, when you feel you can only lift yourself up by putting others down…by being in judgement. 

I have to remember that people can and do change, but that it can take a lot of time, a lot of seeds and a lot of opportunities.  I have to remember that despite the nature of my work and my heartfelt belief in it, I am capable (as are all human beings) of tremendous hatred, fear, contempt and disrespect.

I gave several speeches during senior speech class, yet I only remember one of them.  That memory is a gift, because in the grand scheme of things, that speech was less about me making an argument than it was about the universe teaching me something that has proven to be of great value to me.

I have done wrong.  I have been hypocrite, judger, liar.  I must hold on to those experiences.  I must hold on to them to be whole, to be honest and to be in relationship with reality.  I must hold on to them to remember that we all have work to do and we always will.  I am a work in progress.  Hopefully, I will continue to be a work in progress.

If I had not remembered that speech or not been able to be honest about it, I might have along the way convinced myself that I am a “good person” (static), rather than a person on a journey (dynamic) trying to do better.  When I start to see myself as a good person (static), I am less likely to keep working on myself.  A great loss, because that is the place where I can have the greatest impact.

Be good to each other…and to yourself.