National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Deck Party and Awards
National Service Award Recipient: Ilene Chaiken
Crown and Anchor Inn
Provincetown, MA
August 22, 2004

Ilene Chaiken's acceptance speech, transcribed by Jacky:

Napoleon is supposed to have said, “History was written by the victors,” and for centuries that has been the conventional wisdom. But that strikes me as passive. I put to you, that as activists, we’re going to make ourselves victorious by writing our own history.

In a country and a culture so dominated by the manipulation of words and images, telling our stories, the stories of people who traditionally have been marginalized, stories that haven’t historically been told, we’re committing a radical act. I consider myself incredibly privileged to be the one getting to do it and to take part in a project that has taken a part in a much larger conversation, a conversation that, ultimately and inevitably, is altering our cultural landscape.

I feel privileged to have been handed the opportunity to speak about our many and diverse lives. To begin, and it’s just a beginning, to tell our stories. And we tell them for ourselves because we need to see ourselves reflected, because we need to be visible and to be seen as fundamentally human. We tell them for those who are isolated and haven’t yet found community to let them know that we’re here and they are not alone. We tell them so that people who fear us, because of not knowing us, can come to see that we’re as like them as we are different from them. We tell our stories so they can be enriched and enlightened and entertained along with us.

I am really honored to be standing here today before all of you, honored to be honored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. You do such extraordinary work. If it weren’t for you, if it weren’t for NGLTF, and all of you and the millions of people you represent, people who have lived on the front lines and have risked everything, to visibly change the landscape of our society, the L word would just be an idea that would have never seen the light of television.

I thank all of you, all of you who have kept your voices loud and strong, in the face of ignorance and disease and violence and an administration that archaically refuses to grant us our civil rights. On behalf of my colleagues at Showtime and all of my good friends both behind and in front of the cameras who work on the L word, we are grateful and honored to be a part of this movement. We all feel that we are a part of something significant, that we all believe fervently, that if you keep on doing what you’ve been doing and we get to keep on doing what we’re doing, thanks to you. That we all will make a difference, and we will all soon, those of us who have been doing it for years and those of us who are just willing to do it for the cause, we all will soon lick Bush.

--end--

"We tell (our stories) for those who are isolated and haven’t yet found community to let them know that we’re here and they are not alone," Ilene Chaiken.

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