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Skeletons out of closet, onto Internet
By Lindsay Wilson
lwilso55@mscd.edu

Would you share a secret with a stranger? Would you tell that stranger your darkest fear, your most shameful desire, your deepest regret? Under the condition of anonymity, more than 70,000 people have done just that, catapulting Frank Warren and his community art project, PostSecret, to fame.

Warren, the man behind postsecret.com and the bestselling book PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives, was on campus Sept. 18 at the Tivoli Turnhalle to discuss how a simple idea has grown into an international phenomenon.

In Nov. 2004, Warren launched a collective art project for the Artomatic art exhibition in Washington, D.C. He passed out 3,000 blank postcards to strangers in the Washington metro area, inviting them to write down a secret and then mail the card to his Maryland home. The instructions were simple: share a secret, any secret, as long as it had never been shared with anyone else before.

The secrets started pouring in. And they continued to pour in, even after the exhibition was over.

“I receive between 100 to 200 postcards a day. I’ve gotten postcards in German, Portuguese and Braille. I’ve gotten secrets written on parking tickets, funeral announcements, wedding announcements, sonograms and CDs,” Warren said, and while some are funny, poignant, gross, touching or shocking, taken together they “show all of our humanity.”

Warren has received confessions of hidden love (“I’m in love with my best friend, but he’s gay, and I’m a lesbian”), silly habits (“I like to watch Dr. Phil … drunk”) and childhood trauma (“I walked in on my stepbrother raping my mom”).

Warren said he was overwhelmed with the trust of thousands of strangers, and wanted to honor these people and their secrets. He began posting images of the cards online, and postsecret.com was born.

“I think there’s a real purity with postsecret.com. Everything goes through me. I have no regard for corporate or commercial interests or advertisers,” Warren said.

He said he believes this form allows us to “take off our social masks and communicate with no boundaries.”

Every Sunday, Warren posts 20 to 35 new secrets and tries to create a cohesive story from them.
He told of one person who revealed they had been molested in the second grade, and another who revealed they had molested someone. One asked for forgiveness, the other offered it. Warren posted them together. It’s secrets like these which “link anonymous souls,” he said.

With the popularity of the website, a book soon followed. The bestselling PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives was released in December 2005. That same year, pop band The All-American Rejects featured postcards from Warren’s project on the music video for their number-one hit single “Dirty Little Secret.” A second book, My Secret: A PostSecret Book, is scheduled for release next month.

Through all of his success and rise to fame, Warren has remained grounded.

“I feel as though this project found me,” he said, “I don’t fully understand what’s happening.”

But he does understand his project has created a kind of community.

“The secrets that we carry, we think they isolate us, but they are the things that make us human.”