Time transcripts of getting

[00:00:00.00]	Ok so I'm maybe 15, maybe 16 at the time of the story

[00:00:08.55]	and I'm living out in Glendale Heights, Illinois, 

[00:00:12.80]	and Crane's Chicago Business once described it as 

[00:00:14.90]	a hardscrabble factory town, but it wasn't. 

[00:00:19.10]	It was a bedroom community, kinda working class I guess, yeah. 

[00:00:26.00]	Certainly my parents were, certainly I am,

[00:00:28.16]	I consider myself that way anyway.

[00:00:32.20]	And I'm walking down the street, all of a sudden this car goes screeching past me.

[00:00:39.70]	And then as in lots of small towns I guess, you kind of drive around.

[00:00:48.65]	You drive around a lot, go back and forth here and there.

[00:00:54.10]	anyway, there were maybe 8, 9, maybe 10 kids, 

[00:00:58.90]	crammed, all guys, into this car. 

[00:01:03.00]	It made me kind of think of one of those cars in the circus with all the clowns. 

[00:01:07.65]	Well I laughed, and when I laughed, 

[00:01:12.62]	they got kind of upset on one of their passes. 

[00:01:15.20]	And so they zoomed around again just so they could yell: 

[00:01:18.50]	"Faggot! Fag!" "Queer!" 

[00:01:22.40]	Now, at the time I hadn't really dealt with the fact that I was gay,

[00:01:28.85]	I kinda sorta was wondering it, and I knew I was kinda intrigued, and interested in men. 

[00:01:34.94]	But I didn't really know what to do about it, or even if I wanted to do anything about it. 

[00:01:42.85]	So, so I was kind of appalled, like, "How did they know?"

[00:01:49.14]	"How do they know? I haven't said anything about this to anybody? How do they know?"

[00:01:53.19]	But then the other thing is that I,

[00:01:57.24]	kinda was feeling pretty liberated.

[00:02:01.30]	Because I had been worried, this is 1975,

[00:02:05.37]	there wasn't any Will and Grace, you know. 

[00:02:07.40]	There weren't a whole lot of media role models for young gay guys, 

[00:02:12.10]	and I didn't know anybody who was gay, and I was worried that I was the only one. 

[00:02:16.66]	And the minute that they called me those names,

[00:02:23.10]	I started to think "Oh my God, I'm not the only one."

[00:02:29.80]	"There are people out here, there are people like me." 

[00:02:32.84]	And that was totally cool, that was in fact liberating. 

[00:02:40.30]	And so I kinda started trying to figure out where I could run into guys, 

[00:02:44.16]	and I kinda figured out where I could run into guys. 

[00:02:47.40]	And one thing led to another and it was all pretty fun. 

[00:02:54.36]	Well years later, years and years later.

[00:02:58.48]	I think it was maybe even in one of my courses, 

[00:03:00.99]	at the University of North Chicago, where I did my MA and my PHD.

[00:03:07.99]	So maybe it was Bill Cavino, or maybe it was David (...). 

[00:03:10.87]	And anyway we got onto the subject of naming and what people are called

[00:03:15.99]	and the implications for naming, as an act of rhetoric.

[00:03:23.18]	And I thought back to that story, at that moment, 

[00:03:26.20]	and I connected to that story right then.

[00:03:31.23]	And I realized that that was the first act that I consider myself as a Rhetorician, 

[00:03:40.44]	because it's the first time that I thought of that language in that way. 

[00:03:46.10]	Not as something solid, where this word means that word, 

[00:03:50.15]	but I had actually thought about what the language means and how it operates.

[00:03:55.66]	And what it's implications were. And if there were names for these things, 

[00:03:59.50]	then there must be things connected to these things, to these concepts.

[00:04:05.55]	And so that's it, the more I... The older I get, you know,

[00:04:11.61]	the more I think that it's naming, and language that makes us who we are. 

[00:04:18.22]	I mean, you know, there's an old Biblical story, 

[00:04:22.70]	that one of Adam's gifts and tasks and duties, 

[00:04:27.08]	was to name everything that hadn't yet had a name. 

[00:04:31.60]	It came straight out of God's mind into being, 

[00:04:34.15]	and now it needed to be called something, and that was Adam's job.

[00:04:39.96]	So you know, we've been called The Human, one of the definitions

[00:04:44.08]	is the Man who Laughs, another is the Man who Plays,

[00:04:47.40]	another is Homosapiens, The Wise Ones, all those names.

[00:04:52.31]	Some sexist, some not. For me it's those who name. 

[00:04:57.70]	That's really what we do. And that's what we do as artists,

[00:05:04.51]	that's what we do in our lives, with metaphor.

[00:05:08.55]	So, so I think we are the ones who name.

[00:05:12.99]	Thanks.

[00:05:16.92]