Logan Rozos
Acceptance Speech
Parity Awards
November 21, 2019

Let me first of all say thank you to the Parity organization for this incredible award. It is an honor to be recognized alongside such esteemed and important members of my community, who have brought forth so many great works into this world. Thank you to Gillian Williams, my friend, mentor, and role model, for that beautiful introduction. And thank you to my family and friends for being here to celebrate with me.

It is profoundly humbling and also profoundly bonkers to me that I’m being honored today among such incredibly accomplished people. I am an extraordinarily lucky person in that I happen to be good enough at lying to be a politician, but Catholic-guilt-y enough to opt for acting instead. This has afforded me a platform, however small, to be an advocate for mental health and for LGBT people. This award, and the faith in me that it represents, means the world to me and strengthens my resolve to continue to speak out.

I am gay. I am trans. I am a Christian. Despite the fact that we are so often made to feel unwelcome in religious spaces, I do not see my identities as contradictory.

This was not always the case. For a long time, I felt obligated to parse and deconstruct the so-called “clobber verses” that supposedly denounce same-sex relations. I felt the need to rationalize to myself and to my (usually online) interlocutors that transness is not a rejection of God’s plan, but a firm willingness to see it to fruition. I dragged the depths of my faith for mirrors in which to see myself. There are certainly examples of what we would call queerness in the Bible and in the history of Christianity, and there are certainly misunderstandings and mistranslations of Bible verses, occasionally willful, always shaped by their historical circumstances. But, ultimately, none of that matters, because I was never arguing out of an intellectual interest in theology or history. I was arguing whether or not God loves me. This is, of course, ridiculous. God loves everyone. It’s sort of his thing. So rather than continue to fight against these myths, I want to speak about what I feel God calls on us to do.

If y’all don’t mind, I’d like to read a series of quotes from different sources, both to try and encapsulate the more or less syncretic conception I have of God, and to show that we millennials do occasionally read books.

“See Christ, then you are a Christian; all else is talk.”
--Swami Vivekananda, Hindu monk and interfaith activist

“God must be a pretty big fan of today, because you keep waking up to it.”
--Jamie Tworkowski, Myspace celebrity

“To be spiritual is to be amazed."
--Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

“The world is abundant”
--Sufjan Stevens, indie folk musician

"I said to the almond tree, ‘Sister, speak to me of God.’ And the almond tree blossomed."
― Nikos Kazantzakis, author

It is, if I may speak bluntly, a really freaking scary time to be alive. Enough ink has been spilled on the topics of our poisoned political climate and the global creep of fascism that I am sure we are all sufficiently terrified. I have faith in our ability as a species to adapt and to weather these storms.However, in my opinion, the most troubling trend right now is the permissive attitude toward cruelty. More and more it seems that the humiliation and suffering of the ‘other’ or of the politically expedient scapegoat is not incidental, but the very purpose of the political project.

As LGBT people, along with those of marginalized faiths, the victims of racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia, and the ill and disabled, know the pain of exclusion and discrimination firsthand. And what is asked of us is simple: to stand in solidarity and to lessen the suffering of our brothers. This work is daunting, and we may not know where to begin. So I’d like to tell two stories that inspire me.

I once heard someone say that they were taught that Jesus Christ did not physically multiply the loaves and fishes, as the Bible never says that explicitly. Rather, they were taught that His words inspired the multitudes to give up what they could of their own food to feed others. The lesson in this being that the real gift God brought to this Earth, His greatest miracle, was to inspire the human heart to selflessness. I don’t know how much I believe this particular interpretation, but I believe that it pleases God more to see a simple act of giving than the grandest gestures performed in His name.

Another story from my faith that I think aptly represents the spirit we ought to adopt comes from a

beloved holy man and a figure I like to think of as my personal spiritual homeboy, Saint Francis of Assisi. One of Francis’ acolytes, afflicted with a stutter, was afraid of preaching to the people. In order to cure him of this fear, Francis ordered him to strip to the waist and address a crowd. I think Francis may have gotten the old imagine-the-audience-naked trick a bit backwards. But either way, he thought this exposure would force the brother to get over his fear. Upon realizing that he had probably sent him forth to pain and humiliation, Francis panicked. He rushed to the brother’s side, covered him, and he himself stripped to his underclothes, taking his pupil’s anguish as his own.

It is no one person’s obligation to end the great sufferings in this world. Rather, if we embrace our interconnectedness, help our neighbor, and ease their suffering, we can all together be a part of the solution. Someone very dear to me once told me that as an artist, it can be easy to believe our work is trivial. But, while we may not be the ones to cure cancer, we might make the favorite tv show of the person who does, and in this way we contribute to their works. I like to think all good works we bring forth into this world reverberate through the fate of our species, far further through space and time than we can imagine.

My sister, for example, though she will likely be very embarrassed at my saying this, works tirelessly (like literally, she never seems tired, I have no idea how she does it) for the summer camp she founded. There, she will teach young women and trans youth music, art, and the principle of joy as a revolutionary force. While I do nothing quite so important as that, by being the best brother to her I can be, and by making her smile, I like to think I contribute to her ability to change people’s lives, and in turn contribute those people and their ability to change others’ lives, and so on through the great connected web of humanity.

It is an honor and a privilege. Thank you.

Logan Rozos is 18 years old. He made his professional acting debut in summer 2019 as Star Child on the Oprah Winfrey Network drama “David Makes Man." Logan came out as a gay transgender man to his supportive and loving parents and older sister at the age of 15 and cares passionately about advocacy for LGBT youth. Aside from acting, Logan’s passions include painting, poetry, stand-up comedy, and his Catholic faith.

See the Time Magazine article How a New Class of Trans Male Actors Are Changing the Face of Television.