Welcome to Rumble Strip, I'm Erica Heilman.

So I went down to a conference in Birmingham, Alabama, and I ended up, I mean this man,

I mean this man, and I remember that we touched hands by accident.

Tched hands by accident.

And then all of a sudden I started blushing and crying.

Like, oh my God, I love this.

And it was a sign.

That's Thomas Caswell.

He has autism, which doesn't tell you very much about him.

I mean, if you told him your birthday and how old you were, he could tell you what day of

the week you were born, but that also doesn't tell you very much about who he is.

autism doesn't describe a person.

If you've met one person with autism,

then you've met one person with autism.

But over the last couple of years in his early 20s, Thomas has been coming out of the

closet in stages. And along with the pretty common difficulties of coming out, there are some

special difficulties if you're a person with a disability.

Here's Thomas.

Autism is a spectrum.

Nobody on the autism spectrum is the same. Some are not able to talk that much. Some flap

their hands physically like this. Some jump up and down some anxiety makes them stutter or something that happens to me

it's funny because when when I first got here you were pulling up on your bike and I was pulling up in my car

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