Scott Freed shares his secrets, names his weapon and talks the truth

When Scott Freed saw that his crowd did not exceed 40 students, he chose to speak with no… When Scott Freed saw that his crowd did not exceed 40 students, he chose to speak with no microphone and no podium. He moved the students into a semi-circle in front of him, had the lights dimmed, and described his coming out, his HIV infection and his evolving sense of self-acceptance.

In celebration of today’s World AIDS Day, Pitt’s Hillel Diversity Committee and Rainbow Alliance sponsored a speech given Monday evening by Scott Freed, a traveling author and “motivational speaker,” in the Graduate School of Public Health auditorium.

“‘Motivational Speaker’ — that’s what it says on [my] business card, [but] I’m just a guy that talks truth,” Freed said.

Sara Fatell, the political action chair of the Rainbow Alliance, asked Freed to fly from his home in New York to speak about “AIDS, health and the secret life of college students.”

“I feel like he’s an influential speaker, and he gets the point across,” Fatell said. “He makes it personal, so everyone can relate.”

Freed read passages from his new collection of stories, in which he reveals the difficult roads adolescents travel in finding love, truth and their identities. The recurring theme he emphasized throughout the night defined the title of his book, “My Invisible Kingdom.”

“I talk about secrets; I talk about coming out — not about the closet,” Freed said, adding that instead, he talks about “an invisible kingdom where we go when we feel the world doesn’t understand us.”

Every single one of us lives in an invisible kingdom — the place where you’ll hide when you feel dismissed, ignored and forgotten. We all live in many different worlds,” Freed said. “We live lives of contradictions.

“What is your weapon?” Freed asked, adding that every person has a weapon he uses to deal with his problems and his contradictions. Some, he said, use self-destructive means to escape, such as bulimia, drug abuse or self-mutilation: all tools to “measure the pain, to know that [we] have a right to live.”

“Who are you? Who is underneath that shtick?” he asked. “What is your strategy for survival? What is your weapon? Is it an eating disorder, drugs?

“My weapon was unsafe sex,” he added.

Freed described how he contracted HIV in the early ’80s: a time in which few recognized the importance of AIDS awareness, and the time when he was coming to realize that he preferred homosexuality, after much self-doubt and inner turmoil. He said that once he had coped with his disease, he accepted himself further, trying to live a life free of the constant unease he lived with during his adolescent years.

“There is nothing wrong with you, when you think you are crazy. It’s probably the company you keep,” Freed said, enumerating the notable things he has learned since his infection.

“Accountability: Being accountable means being able to speak your truth to someone else, [to] tell your story to someone else who will listen. Stillness: We must learn to wrap ourselves in a cloak of stillness. When you want to do something dangerous, simply don’t.”

All people have contradictions and try to answer the question of who they are, Freed said. And not knowing the answer to that question makes each person unique, he added, describing the human feelings of confusion and contradiction as “sacred.”

“You are not the only one feeling alone. You are not crazy,” he said.

Dealing with those contradictions, he said, requires people to focus on self-acceptance and not self-improvement; to focus on realizing that all people have something to offer the world, and to focus on who each person truly is.