Storytelling as Public Modality: Analyzing Joel Burns’s “It Gets Better” Speech

Storytelling as Public Modality:Analyzing Joel Burns’s ‘‘It Gets Better’’ Speech

Laura W. Black and Leah Sprain

This study analyzes the testimony given by Fort Worth City CouncilmanJoel Burns in response to the suicides of bullied teens. Like other tes-timonies included in the ‘‘It Gets Better’’ project, Burns’s speechincluded his personal story of being bullied because of his sexual ori-entation, considering suicide, and persevering to lead a successfuladult life. His speech was given in a city council meeting in Texas, buthis message reached a much wider audience. Drawing on the publicmodalities framework, this study employs narrative and discourseanalysis to examine his story and the public reactions to it. The anal-ysis focuses on the discursive invocation of emotion, multiple audi-ences, and the role of technology to engage publics. This analysisfurthers research on how personal stories function in public meetingsand serve as a modality to engage broader publics.

Keywords: ‘‘It Gets Better; ’’ LGBT; Narrative; Public Meetings; PublicModalities; Public Testimony

City council meetings are an important part of local public life in smalltowns and big cities around the US. Local public meetings are ‘‘a stapleof U.S. democracy’’ (Tracy, 2010, p. 3). They provide an opportunity for

Qualitative Communication Research, Vol. 2, No. 2, Summer 2013, pp. 109–132. ISSN 2161–9107, eISSN 2161–9115. ! 2013 The Regents of the University of California. All rightsreserved. Request permission to photocopy or reproduce article content at the Universityof California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/qcr.2013.2.2.109.

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communities to raise issues, deliberate about proposals, make decisions,and discuss how policies will be implemented. A great deal of researchexists about public meetings (for a review see Tracy &Dimmock, 2004),much of which focuses on issues of fairness (Webler & Renn, 1995;Webler & Tuler, 2000), decision-making processes and goals (Kelshaw& Gastil, 2007; McComas, 2001), motivations for participation(McComas, Besley, & Trumbo, 2006), and the role of citizens’ com-ments (McComas, Besley, & Black, 2010).

Communication scholar Karen Tracy highlights the importance ofunderstanding what she terms ‘‘ordinary democracy,’’ or the commu-nicative practices that occur in local governance groups (Tracy, 2010).Although most political communication research focuses on nationalpolitics, many important public decisions that affect people’s everydaylives are made at the community level. Increasingly, communicationscholars have begun attending to the discourse occurring in theselocal-level public meetings (Black, Leighter, & Gastil, 2009; Leighter& Black, 2010; Townsend, 2009; Tracy, 2010). These meetingsinvolve routinized communicative practices among elected officials,community members, and stakeholders. The communication in suchmeetings typically follows a fairly standard structure as dictated byRobert’s Rules of Order, and agendas include statements by electedofficials, presentations by invited guests, votes, and public comments.Although there are certainly moments of dispute, and occasionallydrama, much of what happens at city council meetings follows pre-dictable patterns.

This study examines a moment that breaks away from those pre-dictable patterns. In October of 2010, Joel Burns, a City Councilman inFt. Worth, Texas, asked the mayor for a moment of personal privilegeto make a public statement (The Last Word, 2010). Burns, who wasopenly gay when he was elected to public office, told about his experi-ence as a young teen growing up in Crowley, Texas. He later posted hisstory online as part of the ‘‘It Gets Better’’ project (IGB), a campaignthat encouraged people to make and share videos through YouTube ‘‘toshow young LGBT people the levels of happiness, potential, and pos-itivity their lives will reach—if they can just get through their teen years’’(It Gets Better, 2010). Like many other statements included in the IGBcampaign, Burns’s story tells of being bullied because of his sexuality,but then eventually going on to have a happy and successful adult life.His speech, which lasted almost 13 minutes, was vivid and emotional,

110 Laura W. Black and Leah Sprain

and at several points he was caught up in tears, apparently struggling toregain his composure sufficiently to finish his statement.

Not only did Councilman Burns’s story deviate from the typicalpattern of interaction that happens during a city council meeting, it alsohad a profound impact far beyond the walls of the council chamber.Burns posted the video of his speech on YouTube as part of the IGBcampaign. Since then, it has been watched over 2.8 million times, morethan any other IGB video, including those by founders Dan Savage andTerry Miller, President Obama, and celebrities such as Adam Lambert.Within days, Burns was contacted by thousands of people, many ofwhom were young people who had been influenced by his speech(National Public Radio, 2010). Burns was interviewed by NationalPublic Radio, CNN, the Today Show, the Ellen DeGeneres Show, andother local and national television news programs (Ward, 2010). Burns’svideo was later uploaded as a TEDBest of theWeb video. He was invitedto participate in the 2011 Conference on Bullying Prevention at theWhite House (Burns, 2011). In interviews, Burns recounted stories ofteens sending him suicide notes that they choose not to use after watchinghis video. In short, his statement at his local city council meeting had veryreal influence on struggling kids and propelled him into the nationalspotlight as an advocate for LGBT youth.

Why was his story so powerful? Although city council meetings arenot designed to be a forum for personal narratives, storytelling is notunheard of in public meetings. A growing body of scholarly work hasbegun to recognize the role of personal stories in public meetings (Black,2009a, 2009b; Polletta, 2006; Polletta & Lee, 2006; Ryfe, 2006). In thisstudy, we draw on narrative scholarship to examine both the structureand content of Councilman Burns’s personal story, paying particularattention to the discourses about emotion in the story and the publicreactions to it. We then use the public modalities framework to suggesthow this story engaged and aligned new publics.

Understanding Stories

It is not our intention in this essay to survey the vast body of narrativescholarship (for such a review, see Langellier, 1989). Scholars offera variety of conceptualizations of stories and narrative. One useful dis-tinction is the difference between a story told by a single individual andthe larger concept of cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Narrative

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research that focuses primarily on ‘‘personal stories’’ typically examinespeople’s descriptions of their experience in a storied form (see Labov &Waletzky, 1967). As Ryfe notes, stories ‘‘pivot around a problem’’(2006, p. 74), and this problem is part of what makes the story worthtelling. Such stories are often described in structural terms that distin-guish them from other forms of discourse (such as facts, opinions, lists,etc.). For instance, Browning (1992) defines stories as ‘‘communicationsabout personal experience told in everyday discourse’’ (p. 285). Suchstories are local and context-sensitive, and they follow a narrative (ratherthan argumentative or logical) structure. In contrast, the concept ofmeta-narrative describes the larger scale social and cultural stories thatguide and give meaning to people’s everyday experiences. LindemannNelson (2001) defines these master narratives as ‘‘the stories found lyingabout in our culture that serve as summaries of socially shared under-standings’’ (p. 6). Individuals’ stories can draw on, construct, or challengelarger cultural meta-narratives, and they serve a variety of discursive func-tions (Riessman, 2008).

In this study, we begin by analyzing the personal story told byCouncilman Burns. To do so, we draw on scholarship that examinesthe structural aspects of personal stories. According to this body ofwork, stories tend to follow a general narrative structure, are typicallytold about events in the past, hold meaning for the tellers, and includeaspects of drama such as characters, plot, and a moral. Narrative scholarsacknowledge that storytellers vary in how they narrate and recountpersonal experiences. They sometimes jump around in time, circle backto tell about events that occurred earlier in the chronology of events, andsometimes even begin at the end of the story (Riessman, 2008). Yetdespite this variation in format, stories of personal experience still por-tray a chronological account of events. Sociolinguists note that stories ofpersonal experience, such as the one given by Councilman Burns, oftenfollow a predictable structure of introduction, complicating action, res-olution, and evaluation (Labov & Waletsky, 1967). The complicatingaction is the heart of the story—it describes the central problem faced bythe characters that calls for some kind of resolution. The events of thestory are evaluated through an explicitly stated moral and through me-tadiscursive talk and description of emotion (Schiffrin, 1990), and theseevaluations help the listeners discern the meaning of the story. Thesediscursive features mark pieces of discourse as ‘‘stories,’’ which areunderstood in particular ways by people who hear them.


Yet looking at the structure of Councilman Burns speech alone willnot account for its impact. We must also consider the context, the audi-ence, and the larger meta-narratives that are evident in the story. Langel-lier’s (1989) description of ‘‘narrative as a social process’’ is a useful anchorfor exploring storytelling in public meetings. Treating narratives as part ofa social process simultaneously recognizes that there are discrete units ofdiscourse that can reasonably be called ‘‘stories,’’ while acknowledgingthat these stories occur within larger interaction processes and masternarratives.

To see these stories as part of a social process involves asking ‘‘notjust how do people manage to do personal narratives in conversation,but what else are they doing as they tell stories?’’ (Langellier, 1989, p.261). This perspective recognizes that people in a context such asa public meeting may tell stories about their personal experiences.However, analysis takes a context-sensitive approach to ‘‘entertainquestions about how narratives are used not only in talk but to talk,not only to recapitulate past events, but to negotiate present and futureevents’’ (p. 261). Viewing stories as part of a social process allows us toidentify stories told by public meeting participants and also to discernpatterns of responses and meanings associated with such stories. Tell-ing a personal story in a public space invites response and reactionfrom listeners. As Peterson and Langellier note, ‘‘Storytelling is par-ticipatory and participants perform the work of establishing, main-taining, prolonging, modifying, and discontinuing the interaction’’(2006, 127). Thus, to understand the impact of a particular story, itis important to examine the context and audiences of the storytellingevent.

Storytelling in the Public Sphere

To fully understand participation in Councilman Burns’s story, analysisneeds to consider more than the immediate audience present at the citycouncil meeting. Through media coverage and posting the video onYouTube, the story circulated far beyond the council chambers. Thesemedia not only brought the story to new audiences, but they enablednew types of participation with Burns’ story—interaction that shapesthe ultimate impact of the story itself. We draw on a public modalitiesframework (Brouwer & Asen, 2010) to understand how Burns’s storyengaged and continues to engage new audiences.


Public sphere scholarship has been increasingly interested in howpublics are constituted and maintained. In addition to thinking aboutpublics in terms of spheres, networks, and screens, Brouwer and Asen(2010) introduced public modalities as a new metaphor for thinkingabout publics. This metaphor positions scholars to attend to movementand process, presuming that ‘‘how we proceed in an activity shapes theactivity itself ’’ (p. 19). The concept of public modalities plays with theunderstanding of mode as a synonym for channel or type of communi-cation to suggest publics can be understood as the processes throughwhich publics are engaged, conveyed, and created. This framework hasbeen used to research a variety of ‘‘modes,’’ such as places of memory(Aden, 2012), everyday talk (Pezzullo & Depoe, 2010), and participa-tory media (Howard, 2010).

To analyze Burns’s speech using the modalities framework, we con-sider the technological channels that were involved—an oral speech ata city council meeting, local cable broadcast and Internet streaming ofthe council meeting, YouTube, subsequent media interviews, and thesharing of this video through social media. But a modality perspectivealso orients us to how the testimony itself functions as a mode of dissem-ination. Beyond the structure of the narrative, the emotions expressed inthe speech and the emotional responses it elicits in audiences are centralto understanding the nature of public engagement and connection in thiscase.

We draw on work in discourse studies and cultural studies to under-stand how emotion contributes to our understanding of Burns’s narra-tive. Within cultural studies, Massumi (1995) argues affect needs to betaken seriously in cultural and political theory. Separating emotion fromaffect, Massumi considers how differences between form-content andintensity-effect enable ‘‘a different connectivity’’ that is central to under-standing the affective response to media (in Massumi’s case, images andfilm). For Massumi, deep affective reactions are connected to form-content, particularly when someone consciously positions oneself in a lineof narrative continuity, only to have this continuity jarred in some way.

We employ discourse analysis to account for avowals of emotion(Besnier, 1990), affect displays (Edwards, 1999), and instances whennarrative continuity is jarred by form not matching content. A discourseanalytic approach allows us to study how emotions are invoked and whatkind of discursive work such invocations perform. Edwards (1999)argues that an analyst can examine the invocation of emotion within


narratives as a means of understanding how emotions and scenarios arediscursively worked up and made relevant for audiences. Talk of feelingsalso involves appraisals of persons, events, and states of affairs that helpanalysts understand the discursive work of the narrative (Buttny & Ellis,2007). Whereas this falls short of Massumi’s (1995) full understandingof affect, this focus on discourse as a social practice rather than mentalexpression suggests how we might think of emotion operating as a modeof public engagement.

Analysis

This section analyzes Councilman Burns’s speech by exploring the set-ting, the audience, the structural aspects of his story, and some of theevents that happened for Councilman Burns in the months followinghis speech. Woven into this narrative analysis is discourse analysis offirst-person avowals of emotion and affect displays.

Setting and Introduction

As noted above, Councilman Burns’s speech occurred during a regularlyscheduled city council meeting on October 12, 2010. The purpose ofthis segment, as announced at the meeting, was for ‘‘Announcements byCity Council members and staff regarding upcoming and recent eventsand recognition of citizens.’’ As it was October, the council memberswere wearing pink shirts in honor of breast cancer awareness, whichBurns notes at the beginning of his announcement:

Mayor, as you know, we are gathered here today in our pink shirts tobring awareness to the fight against breast cancer here in Ft. Worthand around the globe. But tonight I ask my colleagues’ indulgence inallowing me to use my announcements time to talk briefly aboutanother issue that pulls at my heart.

In this brief introduction, Burns acknowledges that what he is about todo is different from what is scheduled for the meeting that night. Hisuse of the phrase ‘‘ask my colleagues’ indulgence’’ demonstrates a politerequest for attention even though his announcement is not in line withtopical theme of the meeting. The issue itself is framed in emotivelanguage as Burns notes that it ‘‘pulls at my heart,’’ which marks thetopic of the speech as both emotional and personal. From the videofootage, it is not clear whether any of the other council members, staff,


or people in the audience knew what Burns was going to say in hisannouncement. In a later interview, Burns reported that he had askedthe mayor permission to give an extended speech (The Last Word,2010).

Burns then shows projected photos of five young teens who tooktheir lives after being bullied for being gay or being perceived as gay. Hechronicles each boy’s story, as the photos are projected on a screen, andends with the story of a teenage boy ‘‘who killed himself after attendinga city council meeting in Norman, OK, where speakers made dispar-aging, anti-gay remarks.’’ During this section, his delivery is measuredyet punctuated with affect displays such as deep breaths and increasingthe pitch of his voice when reporting about a mother who pulled her sondown when he hung himself. In later interviews, Burns commented onhow all of these stories troubled him greatly, and this final story was thespark that prompted him to share his story: ‘‘If there is any better venuefor me to take this on, it’s at my own city council meeting’’ (Silverman,2010).

Audience

Burns then describes his intended audience. The audience is threefold.One audience is the people who are physically in the room where he isspeaking (other council members and people in the audience). A secondpotential audience consists of other adults in the Ft. Worth area whoBurns thinks might see his speech on local television or online throughthe council’s website, or learn about it from local news media. Thisgroup includes voters in his area and community members who mayform impressions of him based on his talk. Burns briefly acknowledgesthese audience groups with a statement of public advocacy about bul-lying. However, only a few minutes into his speech, Burns discursivelysets this adult audience aside and does not return to it until near the endof his presentation. According to Burns, the real audience for his storyconsists of LGBT youth in Ft. Worth, TX, and beyond, and he soonbegins to speak directly to them.

There is a conversation for the adults in this room, and those watching,to have. And we will have it: That this bullying and harassment in ourschools must stop and that our schools must be a safe place to learn andto grow. It is never acceptable for us to be the cause of any child to feel


unloved or worthless. And I am committed to this cause and will bepart of that conversation.

But tonight I’d like to talk to the 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17-year-olds atPascal, and at Arlington Heights, and Trimble Tech High Schools, orDaggett and Rosemont Middle Schools, or any school in Ft. Worth.Or anywhere across the country, for that matter. I know that life canseem unbearable. I know that people in your household or in yourschool may not understand you, and that they may even physicallyharm you. But I want you to know that it gets better.

It is not unusual for public officials to address multiple audiences ina single speech. Burns has access to this public platform by virtue of hisrole as a member of the city council, and it makes sense for him to usethat public platform as a way to share his message. It is striking,however, that an elected official would discursively sideline the adultaudience that is physically present and use the platform of a city coun-cil meeting to reach out to youth, who are not typically included in thecity council meeting space or frequent online viewers of thesemeetings.

Burns’s final sentence in this segment clearly connects to the IGBproject. As he explicitly reaches out to his self-identified primary audi-ence and demonstrates a connection with them, he offers the statement‘‘it gets better.’’ This statement is both the tagline of the IGB projectand, in narrative terms, a kind of abstract for his story that provides thekey moral or evaluation of the events he is about to tell. After thisstatement, he pauses for several seconds, then transitions to telling hisown personal story.

Telling His Story

Burns’s story, for the most part, follows the standard narrative structureidentified by sociolinguistic and communication scholars. He begins bysetting the scene of the story and describing himself as a young teen. Hisparents, he says, are a Methodist church pianist and a cowboy named‘‘Butch.’’ He mentions the town he lived in, and describes himself asa ‘‘sensitive kid, but friendly,’’ a ‘‘band dork,’’ a ‘‘gangly’’ teen who playedbasketball and did other typical activities. He notes, ‘‘I was teased, likeall kids, but I was fairly confident, but I didn’t let it bother me much.’’This kind of narrative introduction, which describes the background


information for the story and introduces the scene and characters, isa very common way for people to set the stage for their stories.

According to Labov and Waletzky’s (1967) structural analyses ofpersonal stories, the next step in the story would be to describe a series ofevents leading up to a complicating action or problem, which will thenbe resolved in some way. Burns’s story maps fairly well onto this struc-tural description. He describes recognizing that something about himwas changing. Although he does not explicitly talk about this as hissexuality, one can infer that this is what he means when he says, ‘‘as Ientered adolescence, I started having feelings that I didn’t understandand couldn’t explain, but I knew they didn’t mesh with the image ofwhat I thought I was supposed to be.’’ Next, he describes events thatserve as the rising actions in his story and the culmination of theseactions in a crisis moment.

One day when I was in the 9th grade, just starting Crowley HighSchool, I was cornered after school by some older kids who roughed meup. They said that I was a faggot and that I should die and go to Hellwhere I belonged. That erupted the fear that I had kept pushed down:that what I was beginning to feel on the inside must somehow beshowing on the outside.

Ashamed, humiliated, and confused, I went home. ‘‘There must besomething very wrong with me,’’ I thought. Something I could neverlet my family, or anyone else, know.

Burns notes key emotions—fear, shame, humiliation, confusion—aswell as cognition about emotion (‘‘there must be something very wrongwith me’’) as he sets up the culminating event of his narrative. At thispoint, Burns stops his story and pauses for 11 seconds, which is anextremely long silence for a public presentation. He is visibly shakenand begins to cry, wipes his eyes, and looks up at the ceiling—one of thefirst times he has looked away from his script for any length of time.Very quietly, the mayor says to Burns ‘‘take your time, take your time.’’

From a narrative perspective, what the audience expects to hear issome kind of resolution; a description of what happened next to addressthese complicated and emotional events. In many stories, the resolution iswhere the drama of the story really comes through (Labov & Waletsky,1967; Polanyi, 1985). This kind of resolution to the complicating actionis implicit and expected; without a resolution, the storyteller creates a kind


of cliffhanger and the audience is left wondering how it ended. In thiscase, Burns seems to have written down the next events in his story, yet hedecides not to tell them. He breaks from the script and looks directly atthe audience in the room.

I think I’m going to have too hard a time with the next couple ofsentences I wrote. And also, I don’t—I don’t want my mother andfather to bear the pain of having to hear me say them. [7 second pause.]So, I will just say—I’ll skip ahead.

This moment, where he decides not to tell the rest his story, is veryemotionally intense. As listeners, we found this moment to be bothpowerful and heart wrenching. Burns is clearly emotionally distressedduring this part of his address, and he takes several long pauses as hestruggles to regain his composure.

In a subsequent interview, Burns tells a reporter,

An hour before the meeting, I showed my husband what I was going toread, and he said, ‘‘The details you’re going to talk about are verygraphic, and hard to hear, and I want you to think about what yourmom and dad are going to feel like.’’ And I’m glad I didn’t say itbecause I don’t want the focus of my story to be on that on bleak, darkday. (Howorth, 2010)

This account suggests that concern about how his parents would feelplayed a significant part in prompting him not to share the culminatingaction. In other interviews, Burns acknowledged that what he left out ofthe speech was a description of how he nearly attempted suicide in thatmoment (Such is Life Videos, 2010b). Yet by not reading the ‘‘graphicdetails,’’ Burns decided to give his story a different focus, one that is less‘‘bleak’’ and ‘‘dark.’’

After another lengthy pause, Burns looks down, returns to his script,and continues his story, which presumes the audience had heard thesentences he did not read.

I have never told this story to anyone before tonight. Not my family,not my husband, not anyone. But the numerous suicides in recent dayshave upset me so much. And it has just torn at my heart.

And even though there may be some political repercussions for tellingmy story, this story is not just for the adults who might choose or not


choose to support me. This story is for the young people who might beholding that gun tonight. Or the rope. Or the pill bottle.

You need to know that the story doesn’t end—where I did not tell it—on that unfortunate day. There’s so, so, somuch more. Yes, high schoolwas difficult. Coming out was painful. But life got so much better forme. And I want to tell any teen who might see this; give yourselfa chance to see how much life—how much better life will get. And itwill get better.

You will get out of the household that doesn’t accept you. You will getout of that high school, and you will never have to deal with those jerksagain if you don’t want to. You will find and you will make new friendswho will understand you, and life will get so, so, so much better.

In this reflection, Burns briefly highlights the multiple audiences again,acknowledging that there may be political risk for him in telling hisstory in this public setting. Again, though, he speaks directly to theaudience of teens to share the moral of his story: It gets better. Life gotbetter for him, and it will get better for them too. This juxtapositionbetween life during high school and life afterward is highlighted by hisemotional avowals; although high school is ‘‘difficult,’’ and coming outis ‘‘painful,’’ life now is full of ‘‘happy memories,’’ understanding, and‘‘love and support,’’ and it can be that way for his listeners too.

Burns then talks about how he wishes he could show the ‘‘13 yearold version of me’’ how much better his life became. Burns describesseveral key happy moments in his life: meeting and later proposing tohis husband, building a good relationship with his parents, being electedto city council as an openly gay man, and lovingly sitting with hishospitalized father who was recovering from surgery. As he describesmany of these moments, Burns continues to cry, but he goes on with hisstory.

Concluding with a Call to Action

At the conclusion of his speech, Burns explicitly addresses his multipleaudiences. For each, he states the key message he wishes to convey,based on his painful experience as a teen and as a successful adult whonow addresses the council. First, to the teens who he has taken as hisprimary audience, he says, ‘‘Things will get easier; please stick around.’’


To those who are feeling very alone tonight, please know that Iunderstand how you feel. But things will get easier. Please stick aroundto make those happy memories for yourself. It may not seem like ittonight, but they will. And the attitudes of society will change. Pleaselive long enough to be there to see it.

To his second audience, the adults who are either in the room orviewing his speech, he issues a different call to action. His message tothe adults is short. Essentially he says, as adults, we have an obligation toend bullying, and Burns can help by providing resources. He againthanks them for ‘‘allowing’’ him the time and space to tell his story inthis public meeting context.

Finally, he speaks to a very personal audience, the members of hisfamily. This is not a call to action, but a message of love, empathy, andgratitude.

And to J.D. and the rest of my family, I’m sorry for you learning of thispainful personal story in this public way for the first time. But knowthat I am able to tell it because of your love for me. And Mom andDad, I’m alive today because you love me.

He concludes his speech by once again addressing his primary audienceand reiterating the key moral of his story and the larger message of theIGB campaign: ‘‘Again, attitudes will change. Life will get better. Youwill have a lifetime of happy memories, if you just allow yourself andgive yourself the time to make it. Thank you.’’

Thus, Burns concludes his speech by providing different messagestargeted to different audiences. Although all of his varied audiences arestill there throughout the speech, Burns addresses them separately. Hediscursively positions himself as speaking primarily to LGBT youth,and his primary message of hope and encouragement is aimed towardthem. This message requires discursive work because it does not followexpectations for interaction at city council meetings. Yet his story alsocreates a call for action on the part of adults that is reinforced byallowing them to overhear his personal story.

Although Burns highlights only briefly his role as a public official(when he mentions possible political repercussions for telling his story),we argue that this identity and the corresponding location of his story-telling help shape the impact of his message. Unlike other IGB videos,which have speakers directly talking to the camera, Burns’s video clearly


shows interaction during the city council meeting. In this way, Burns’sspeech normalizes LGBT rhetoric by showcasing it in such a mundanesetting. It also offers a stark contrast to the case Burns references wherea council member in another state made disparaging anti-gay remarks.This context, Burns’s story, and the way he attends to varied audiencesallow Burns to offer a powerful message of hope.

After the Story Was Told

Immediately after Burns completed his story, the city council membersand audience gave him a standing ovation. The council then tooka break, and the video of his talk ends at this point. Yet the impact ofthis story can be seen in events that occurred over the next few months.The next day, Burns posted the video on YouTube as part of the IGBproject, and, as noted by several news stories over the next few days (e.g.The Last Word, 2010), it went viral. It was posted on many blogs,shared through social networking sites, and became one of the most‘‘popular’’ videos on the IGB homepage. The video was also posted onBurns’s professional homepage and his Facebook page along with waysfor viewers to contact him. At the time of this writing, the YouTubevideo of his speech has been viewed over 2.8 million times.

The dispersion of Burns’s video through these online forms madehis story widely accessible to youth around the world. Baym (2011)argues that although YouTube meets broader criteria for social network-ing where participants can construct public profiles and connect withusers with whom they share a connection, most people use it only asa video-viewing site. From a modalities perspective, Burns used You-Tube as a mode of dissemination. But the primary mode for engagingthe public was his story itself (the content of the video) not the tech-nological channel used to share it.

Three days after his speech, Burns reported that he had received12,000 emails in response to the video, many from young people whohad been bullied and were inspired by his story (National Public Radio,2010). Burns reported that he had to get technological help to keep hissite running, so he could respond to all the messages coming in frompeople around the world. In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres oneweek after his speech, Burns said he’d been contacted by ‘‘countless’’teens ‘‘from every continent,’’ who reached out to him via email orFacebook or his political website (Such is Life Videos, 2010a).


They said, ‘‘I was in a really, really bad place and I was making plans totake my own life.’’ And the fact that they have reconsidered that, that’sworth me crying at city council, worth the heartache for my mom anddad, worth every bit of all of that because they are still alive.

Analyzing Responses

The messages that Burns received are private, but we can trace some ofthe public responses to this speech. The YouTube video, for example,received over 32,000 comments, which comprise nearly 3000 pages oftext when copied into a Word document. Many of these commentsreference each other, rather than the speech itself, as the commentsection became a place to talk about gay rights more broadly and notjust this speech. To illustrate how people participated in Burns’s narra-tive, we analyzed the 184 comments on the TED talks link to the video.These comments were selected because they are easily accessible toreaders at the TED site,1 and they reflect many of the same sentimentsfound on the YouTube site, while being a more manageable data set foranalysis.

As mentioned above, the comment section for Burns’s video becamea site for discussing various gay rights issues. Of the 184 comments onthe TED site, only 71 explicitly mention Burns or his speech. The othercomments respond to other comments left by participants, includingextended exchanges about the Clinton-era Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policyin the military, and the morality of homosexuality. Within the com-ments that explicitly reference Burns or his speech, we found the fol-lowing patterns.

First, people frequently invoke emotions in response to watching hisvideo. People report that the speech ‘‘had me feeling for his situation’’and ‘‘went deep with me.’’ One person called it ‘‘by far, the most movingthing I’ve seen via the TED website.’’ People characterized Burns’sspeech as ‘‘spoken from the heart,’’ calling it ‘‘courageous and power-ful.’’ There was often a pairing of potentially opposite emotional dis-plays: tears and happiness. For example, ‘‘This talk had me close totears, but I am so glad that TED has chosen to place on here. Quitepossibly the most moving talk I have ever seen.’’ Burns’s husband J. D.Angle captures the tension between tears and positive emotions, say-ing the speech ‘‘is painful to watch, but that is what is so powerful’’(The Last Word, 2010).


Second, people orient to Burns’s political position as an elected publicofficial in Texas. One person commented, ‘‘A councilman? A small stepfor man, a giant leap for humanity.’’ The following extended commentsuggests why his position makes his story particularly powerful:

I am grateful some politician/public figure said it gets better, and iswilling to reach out to those who want help. It reaches so much furtherthan those of us who are simply telling the limited numbers of peoplewe meet every day. Moreover, it reaches the silent population whomeven those who want to help can’t see. All the more powerful it is that itcomes from a personal story—and that it is one of those public piecesthat shows a person who has feelings, not a mere speaker with an ideaand argument. Public figures are often excellent as the leaders ofrhetoric and debate; its [sic] time they became leaders of compassion,acceptance, and feelings as well.

For this commenter, that Burns is ‘‘a person who has feelings’’ combinedwith his speaking in a platform available to politicians makes this mes-sage reach further than is possible for those using personal networks. Asseveral other people remarked, telling something ‘‘so personal and sointimate’’ in public takes on additional significance because of what canbe perceived as potential risk to his public role. Yet it also provides a newmodel of leadership, one based on valuing emotions such as ‘‘compas-sion, acceptance, and feelings.’’

Finally, people offer their own stories in response to Burns. Of the 71comments that referenced Burns or his speech, 25 comments offeredtheir own story in response to Burns. Several of these narratives iden-tified with Burns’s experience, noting that they too had been bullied,isolated, and had contemplated suicide. For example:

I am 20 and gay. I must say that I have been in his shoes and have feltthe pain, the societal dismissal of my being and the blatant disrespectfor who I am. The night I came out to my mother, I called an olderfriend of mine who was already out and told me several months priorthat he was there for me whenever I did come out. I didn’t speak to himfrom the day he told me he was there for me up til the day I came out.But when I came out, he was. I have made an ever lasting best friend,he helped me get my first job which helped me really grow up intoa responsible adult. I am with my partner for nearly 2 years. We owna home and have a close-nit [sic] group of friends and family. Though


he is from a ‘‘southern, redneck, conservative’’ family, I have beenlovingly accepted as a member of it. The biggest lesson to me in myown personal growth is: when things are hard, they will get better.

This story, like others, draws on and reinforces the master narrative ofthe IGB project by framing the writer’s own experience in terms of thelarger message of hope, persistence, and social change. Although manyof the stories were shorter than this example, taken together they dem-onstrate how viewers took up and responded to Burns’s story, internal-izing his message, and extending it through their own experiences.

Discussion

Councilman Burns’s speech was highly successful in reaching out toLGBT teens and helping shape the public discourse about bullying.In this way, his speech was both a personal statement that motivatedand inspired others and a political act that had implications for publicpolicy. Three essential aspects of his speech are worthy of reflectionhere: the setting and audience, aspects of the story, and the emotionalcharacteristics of the telling.

Personal Story in a Public Space

Part of what stands out about this speech is the public setting and itscorresponding audiences. That Burns is an elected official is importantbecause it gave him access to a public forum. Rather than making a videoprivately and posting it to the IGB project, Burns chose to use that publicforum to address bullying issues. Because he is a city council member, hehad the opportunity to give an uninterrupted 13-minute speech thatwould be video recorded and locally televised. This public speaking acthelped put anti-bullying efforts into the public eye and reached a widerrange of audience members than a more targeted video would have.

As evident in his speech, Burns skillfully manages his multipleaudiences. He thanks and acknowledges the adult audience and hasa brief call to action for them. He speaks directly to youth in his geo-graphic area and focuses the bulk of his speech on his message ofcompassion, encouragement, and hope for them and their future. Asan elected official Burns has access to a public audience, and yet theprimary audience he claims for his talk is explicitly not the people whoare in the room where he is speaking. Of course, the adult audience does


not go away during his speech, but Burns discursively directs his story toLGBT youth. As our analysis shows, Burns skillfully addresses multipleaudiences in his speech. Moreover, by speaking in that room on theoccasion of a city council meeting, he is able to reach audiences that areperhaps far larger and broader than he could have imagined.

Telling his story publicly also exposed his vulnerability as an electedofficial. Although Burns was openly gay when he was elected to citycouncil, his political platform prior to this speech did not seem to becentered on LGBT issues. Near the end of his speech, he expressesconcern about the possible political ramifications of sharing his storyin this public setting and acknowledges that it could cause some votersto not support him for future elections. The vulnerability also extendedto his family members and seems to be the reason that he chose not toarticulate the culminating event of his personal story.

Yet telling this private story in public as a public figure makes itresonate with people. From a modalities perspective, Burns not onlyspeaks in a public forum, but he uses his story to engage publics aroundthe globe. Although YouTube can be watched by anyone with Internetaccess, this does not mean that the channel itself typically functions asa means of engaging and sustaining public attention on a politicalissue. If a modalities perspective draws our attention to the ‘‘productivecontingency of public life’’ (Brouwer & Asen, 2010, p. 19), we mustacknowledge that putting a speech on YouTube does not necessitatea worldwide public will engage the video. Instead, Burns’s story itself iscentral to understanding how a city council meeting is transformedinto a viral video, a story of hope, and a means of preventing suicide.

The Untold Story

Another intriguing aspect of Burns’ speech is that the narrative structureof his story is very clear, but the climatic event at the peak of his storyremains untold. Although it is unusual to omit the details of the cul-minating event of a story, in this situation it may make his story morepowerful. This moment is especially poignant as he takes a lengthypause and struggles visibly with his emotional expression while the roomsits in rapt silence. He also breaks from his script—and his story aimedat youth—to speak directly to the audience in the room. He voices hisconcern for his parents and makes the meta-level comment ‘‘I’ll just skipahead.’’ This break away from the narrative and to the physically present


public space is powerful as it acknowledges the tension between thedeeply personal story he is telling and the interactional obligations ofa public meeting.

He later muses that this break kept the focus of the story on whathappens after the potential suicide. By not recounting the details, cer-tainly it keeps attention from the grim details of that day. But it alsoends up functioning as Massumi’s (1995) break in narrative continuity.Although he never tells audiences what happened, his affect displaysbetray the desperation of that moment. Moreover, by not sharing de-tails, he performs a disconnect between form and content that mayfacilitate a different connectivity to the story about hope.

Another interesting narrative aspect of Burns’s speech is that itconnects his own description of his experience to the master narrativeof the IGB project and a master narrative of political action. WhenCouncilman Burns tells youth about how he would like to take theyounger version of himself out of the place of despair and show himthe happy life events since that time, Burns clearly follows a masterplotthat runs throughout the IGB campaign. The idea that life will getbetter for LGBT youth is the campaign’s primary message. Burns’s storyof his own life maps well onto this message and helps to build the masternarrative of future success.

His story, though, also has an aspect of political action. Because ofBurns’s role as an elected official and his ability to speak to multipleaudiences, his message moves well beyond a call for LGBT kids to stickit out and survive the bullying they may encounter. His call for action onthe part of adults and his claims that society will change to become moreinclusive rely on a political advocacy frame that is not as clear in many ofthe other IGB videos.

Burns’s speech and its broad reception also had a profound impact onhis own life. As described above, his story gained national media atten-tion, and within a few months, Burns had been invited to participate inthe White House Conference on Bullying Prevention (Burns, 2011). Hespoke about bullying in other public realms and actively worked on anti-bullying efforts. In April 2011, Burns, his husband, and MSNBC hostLawrence O’Donnell received an award from GLAAD for OutstandingTV Journalism Segment. At the awards ceremony, Burns thanked theGLAAD staff for the help they had given him and then commented onhow his life had changed after giving his speech at the city councilmeeting in October. He laughed, ‘‘When I made those comments, I


thought I was just talking to people in Ft. Worth, Texas. I had no ideahow much I was going to blow up my life’’ (Mattskal, 2011). In short, hisspeech and the way it was taken up by the IGB project and surroundingcommunity online, propelled Joel Burns into the national spotlight as ananti-bullying activist and a political advocate for LGBT youth.

Genuine, Raw Emotion

Finally, another aspect of the story that makes it so moving is thepowerful emotional expression. The video was made in real time, withno editing, and Burns’s emotions are clearly evident throughout thespeech. As viewers of this video, we found it difficult to watch hisstruggle to regain composure when he considers how his story willinfluence his family, his tears when he describes a tender moment withhis aging father, and his emphatic emphasis on phrases like ‘‘tore at myheart’’ as he pleads with teens to ‘‘just stick around.’’ This level ofemotional expression is far from the norm at city council meetings andis unusual even among IGB videos. Burns’s speech was inspired by hisdeeply sad response to tragic stories of teen suicide. During his interviewwith Ellen DeGeneres, Burns said he left the office at noon the daybefore the council meeting, went home, ‘‘cried a lot,’’ and sat down towrite out his story. He did not edit it before he spoke at city council thenext day, and his speech has a clear sense of resonance and truth.

We believe that this emotional expression is an important part ofwhat gives Burns’s story such power as a public modality. Interviewersand bloggers commented that his story was genuine, heartfelt, raw, andreal. These descriptors are very different from typical descriptions ofpolitical speeches, and this juxtaposition is part of what makes JoelBurns stand out. Interestingly, although televised interviews with Burnsoften begin with snippets of the video, they all involved editing to makethe message clearer and all edited out some of Burns’s more emotive andextended moments. Presumably this editing is necessary for the timeconstraints of televised interviews. Yet this choice again highlights thetension between the real, genuine, and raw emotion in Burns’s story andthe societal expectations of an elected public official.

Conclusion

Councilman Joel Burns’s speech provides a very rich example of per-sonal narrative in a public meeting. The attributes of his speech analyzed


here—such as the setting, the audience, the narrative structure, andemotion—could prompt future research into the role of personal storiesin public discourse. By drawing on the public modalities framework,this analysis also shows both the power of his story and the impacta story can have when widely dispersed through online technologiesand social media.

The presumption within the public modalities framework (Brouwer& Asen, 2010) is that modalities present a social, transformative pro-cess, which may advance praiseworthy or censurable ends. ‘‘The criticalcharacter of public modalities arises from the intervention and judgmentof the scholar, who discerns the values implicated in particular engage-ments and judges their progressive or regressive qualities’’ (Brouwer &Asen, 2010, p. 21). As allies of the LGBT community, we remainmoved and awed by Burns’s speech and the power his story has had forso many people. We commend him on giving the speech and for takingup political action on the issues of bullying, tolerance, and social change.We hope that this analysis highlights the reasons the speech was sosuccessful as well as the larger issues inherent in the IGB campaign.

Note

1. TED video and comments are available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/joel_burns_tells_gay_teens_it_gets_better.html

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Storytelling as Public Modality: Analyzing Joel Burns’s “It Gets Better” Speech

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