Institutional Disapproval

Although I’d made pretty much straight As across the board in high school, during my freshman and sophomore years in college I found myself grappling with the reality of pulling a mixed bag of Bs and Cs, with the occasional A in subjects where I could evince a little more enthusiasm. Mostly I dealt with my academic slippage by not confronting it at all. Professors would hand back a marked paper in class, and if I was pretty sure I hadn’t done as well as I wanted, I’d slip it, unlooked-at, into my notebook. I wouldn’t pull it out again until I was alone and I could steel myself in private for the disappointment. I didn’t want anyone else to see my expressions of rue.

It was a bad habit. I’m not proud. Once I finally found my academic groove, I was glad to be rid of that behavior.

Only I really wasn’t, because during this last month I uncovered something else I’d put aside during my college days. Something I planned to examine again when I had my composure and my dignity, in private, at a time when it couldn’t hurt me any longer. It wasn’t an essay or a blue exam booklet, but a memory. Even though I’d locked it away and mentally forbade myself ever to appraise it, when I unpacked it and removed it from the airless container in which it had mummified for thirty years, it hadn’t lost any of its potency. It still has sharp, painful edges that cut when I handle them. It still hurts.

My friend and old college roommate Eric earlier this month asked if I’d considered giving an oral history to the Stephens Project—an initiative by William and Mary’s Swem Library to collect and document the stories and experiences of gay and lesbian alumni, staff, and faculty about our time at the college, and the impact the college had on our sexualities.

I try to keep myself at arm’s length from any alumni activity, so my initial internal reaction was a hearty hell no! I could see that the project was worthy, though, and knew it was the kind of thing that would be a good outlet for me. Plus the grad student collecting the oral histories was already conducting a spate of them in Manhattan this week. It would be convenient not only for me to schedule an appointment while he was here, but for him as well.

Loath as I was to talk about my awful college days at length, I knew that enough decades had passed that it really was time to scrutinize the string of mostly negative events that made my college years a trial. And moreover, it seemed time to examine them as a continuous narrative, set in the context of both a socially conservative Southern college setting, and the repressed early nineteen-eighties when I was entombed there.

So I decided that I’d talk about how I’d entered college fairly at peace with my sexuality, thanks to my super-liberal parents—though I had absolutely no intentions of ever coming out during my life. I’d already patterned my future adulthood on the “confirmed bachelors” among my parents’ academic friends—a lonely life of antiques, an appreciation of Bette Davis movies, and furtive sexual trysts of which I’d never speak again.

I suspected I’d talk about how I had problems assimilating my freshmen year, but my issue was more how to pass as a white boy, than how to pass as a straight one. I’d been a racial non-minority minority in my all African-American high school. Landing feet-first in the preppy, lily-white freshman class of 1981 was more culture shock than anything I’d ever experienced.

I knew I’d talk about my sophomore year, when my first roommate sexually harassed me for months before moving out and then starting a completely false whisper campaign on campus that I’d raped him. That reputation haunted me the rest of the time I was at William and Mary. It was an impeachment I couldn’t refute or counter because it was never formally leveled against me. And in those days, the gayness of it all was even more horrifying to people than the actual crime of rape—so I was always whispered about, and always supect.

I knew I’d talk about the boyfriend I had during my junior year who made me walk fifteen feet behind him on campus and who would only have conversations with me at the campus cafeteria if we sat at adjacent tables, facing the same direction. I knew I’d talk about “The Plan” that he had, the ridiculous and totally un-ironic notion that he and I would graduate, get nice conservative jobs in Richmond, buy adjacent houses, marry pretty William and Mary grads for wives, and that on weekends we’d consummate our unholy homosexual desires in the garage while our wives gossiped over the back fence.

I figured I’d have to address my junior year roommate, who unbeknownst to me was grappling with his own sexuality and his heavily-religious background. He decided shortly before we were supposed to move into our senior dorm together that he wouldn’t be rooming with me our final year, because I was interfering with his personal relationship to God . . . which I interpreted as meaning that he’d somehow found out I was gay, and didn’t approve. And then I started to think about that first weeks of my senior year when that roommate showed up and moved into the room we’d chosen anyway, and how intolerable the time was that we lived silently side by side, not exchanging a single word.

It was while I was thinking about this painful month that I tripped some mental wire that exposed the memory I’d been trying to hide from myself for three decades. At first I recoiled. I tried to pack it away again; it shouldn’t have seen the light of day. But then I edged around the loathsome thing, kicked it a little, and decided to pull it out. Painful or not, it was the crowning summation of all the indignities I experienced at William and Mary. It went on to define my relationship to the college—or lack thereof—ever after.

So, on the day after the Supreme Court repealed DOMA, I shared the following story with a total stranger for the very first time.

I’ve had precious few moments of absolute clarity in my life, but during the summer between my sophomore and junior years I realized that I wanted to be a campus tour guide for prospective students. I don’t know what gave me the idea I’d be perfect for it, but I knew I had all the qualifications. That is, an enthusiasm for talking at length, a broad knowledge of the college and its activities, a knack for public speaking, and most importantly, the ability to lecture a group of unfamiliar high school students and their parents while walking backwards.

I’d never really manifested such college spirit as when I decided I wanted to lead campus tours. I’d never before really set myself an independent goal with no concept of how to make it come to fruition. I was not accustomed to making bold decisions and taking chances with unknown experiences. But I marched into the college admissions office, asked how one became a tour guide, and filled out a form. The secretary at the desk asked if I had an adult reference. I thought a moment, and decided to go straight to the top. I threw out the name of Mrs. Thomas Graves, wife of the college president.

I’d become acquainted with Mrs. Graves in the first month of my freshman year when she and Mr. Graves had extended an invitation to my freshman roommate—and his roommate—to dinner at the President’s House. My roommate had been a graduate of (and had a father who taught at) the Phillips Exeter Academy, a prep school in New Hampshire, where the Graves were seeking admission for one of their sons. It was supposed to be a bit of a schmoozefest and my roommate obviously did not want me there. He’d invited me only grudgingly, and because he had to. He was a bit of a Neanderthal during the entire evening. I don’t recall that he actually picked up his plate and licked off the gravy, but if I were writing a screenplay of the night, that’s what I’d have him do. It was pretty close. But I was charming and the highlight of the evening was when Mrs. Graves heard I was taking piano lessons and invited me to play Flo Ziegfield’s historic piano for her. I sat down and whipped off the “Moonlight Sonata,” which happened to be her favorite composition. She was my advocate for the rest of our mutual tenure at the college. I could do no wrong, in Mrs. Graves’ eyes.

And what was the admissions office to do, when they had the college president’s wife pressuring them into taking me on as a volunteer? They caved. So all during that summer, my junior year, and the summer following, I worked for Admissions. Once or twice a week I’d meet a group of prospective students and their parents in a room of the historic Wren building. I’d play them a promotional slide show filled with inspirational images of happy students crowded around stacks of books (in my memory the photographs always showed one white female student, one black male, an Asian female, and a Latin guy, which was totally unlike any group of undergrads I ever saw at the school), or playing lacrosse, or strolling in front of gauzy, out-of-focus Colonial Williamsburg landmarks. Then I’d turn on the lights, introduce myself, and corral the group on a one-hour loop around the campus.

I loved being a campus tour guide. I never before felt so much in my element as I did when I was conveying my enthusiasm and affection for the college on those tours. I should have had a shaky period when I was still trying to anticipate what the parents and kids wanted to hear the most, or what questions they might ask throughout the tour—but I honestly don’t remember having one. I launched into that role with a confidence that I’d never once known. I was informative. I was on point. More importantly, I was entertaining. I learned how to spice a narrative with dashes of humor. I had a fantastic time.

And my enthusiasm showed. At the end of each trip around campus I had families linger to tell me how very much they’d enjoyed the tours, and how much better they had been than visits they’d made to other institutions. Parents wrote letters of praise about me to the Admissions Office—a fat file folder full. That position was the very first job I loved. It was a volunteer job, to be sure, but I found it fulfilling in a way that no other activity during my college years ever, ever approached. I don’t know what instinct had told me that I’d be a perfect match for this responsibility. But I’d been right on the target.

My senior year came around. I was stuck in a dorm room with someone clinging desperately to his religion and who’d told me he wouldn’t be rooming with me, but appeared to be rooming with (but not speaking to) me anyway. I’d auditioned for a one-act play in the theater department and gotten a good role, only to lose it again because one of the women who’d also been cast didn’t want to have to go onstage with a gay rapist. Then, one day after one of my campus tours, one of the higher-ups in the Admissions Office asked me to come to his desk to have a little talk.

He was one of those Good Old Boys that populate the staff of Southern colleges—stuffed into a too-tight button-down, always perspiring, florid of complexion, narrow-minded, a hearty conservative fellow who’d probably been a frat boy and a William and Mary grad himself, who’d probably gotten his job through cronyism and intended to cling onto it for dear life until retirement. He was not, in other words, the kind of man I entirely trusted. But I was riding a high from giving my tour, so I was open and friendly with him as he asked me about the kinds of extracurricular activities in which I participated.

I told him about the plays in which I’d appeared, and the fun I’d been having in the school’s craft workshop. I jawed on about the writing I was doing, about the college radio. I was in the middle of explaining the work that I was doing in forming a new local chapter of Parents Anonymous when he interrupted me and said, “So . . . most of your extracurriculars are . . . artistic?”

I blinked a couple of times and started to say that a self-help group for abusive or potentially abusive parents wasn’t really considered the fine arts.

He interrupted me again, though. “But most of your activities . . . would you say they were. . . .” He lifted his head, gave me a sidelong look, and then repeated himself. “. . . artistic?”

There was something in the man’s tone that arrested my volubility. Insinuation poisoned the word. He said it as if he were saying syphilitic. I hadn’t really thought about the reasons this particular staff member might have for wanting to talk to me. But suddenly I was wary, and very much alive to the possibility that it wasn’t something good. “I suppose,” I conceded.

“You don’t play in intramural sports?” I shook my head. “No? Not even tag football? Lacrosse? Basketball? Soccer? No? You don’t belong to a fraternity?”

No, I hadn’t done any of those things. Privately, I thought they sounded deeply unappealing.

“This brings me to something we want to say, then,” said the man, leaning forward. He clutched one fist with his hand, and smiled in a falsely convivial, chummy manner. “We’ve decided this year that we need to go in a . . . new direction . . . with our campus tour guides. We really don’t find that someone artistic is a good representation of what William and Mary is all about.” I sat there, stunned, and didn’t say a word. He repeated himself in different ways. “You see, a fellow who’s artistic like yourself just isn’t a positive representative for the campus. The college doesn’t really want anyone artistic to represent it. It’s embarrassing for the college if prospects think all our students are artistic.”

I looked dead into the eyes of this man, and realized exactly what he was telling me: You’re obviously a god-damned queer. We don’t want a queer representing the College of William and Mary. My awakening to his true meaning froze me. This man, who represented everything I disliked about about smug, self-satisfied, white, male, heterosexual, small-town, Southern America was not only letting me go from a job into which I’d poured hours of volunteer time and outright passion, but he was enjoying every moment. He licked his lips and did it with relish.

So I sat there, and stared at him, and kept my exterior perfectly composed and unruffled while inside, every emergency siren blared at full blast. Never before in my life had I been called out and derided for my sexuality. Never before had I been denied anything because of who I was. This is the way things are, son, I understood the man was telling me. I get to make the rules, and I’ll kick disgusting lowlife homosexshuls like you straight to the curb. Every damn chance I get. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

It was a shock that, to this day, still feels like a knife to the chest.

When the noise in my head cleared, I heard the man trying to make the blow sound like he was doing me a favor. “It’s your senior year, anyway,” he was saying. “You don’t want to be doing something like working for the admissions office. You’ve got plans to make. Things to do.” Things that don’t include dirtying up my office, faggot, I understood him to mean, very clearly.

I stood up, smiled, nodded, and walked out of Admissions. I hadn’t even reached the front stoop before I had taken the experience, packed it away in a heavily-insulated box, and stored it in a dark place. I’d examine it later, I told myself. Later, when it didn’t hurt as much, I’d think about it.

I didn’t know it would take me twenty-nine years.

Nor did I know that even at that distance, when it was just me and a voice recorder and a friendly, listening stranger, in a silent room on a sunny summer’s afternoon in Manhattan, the memory still would slice and throb.

Even though I absolutely refused to examine my dismissal, or even acknowledge to myself why it had happened, the meeting still had consequences. I went home that afternoon to my inhospitable dorm room, looked around, and marched right out again to the student life office to request that I be transferred to a single. Once I moved, I withdrew for the rest of the year—withdrew from boundaries of the college itself to a remote off-campus dorm where I could shut the door to my single room and no one would have to see me. I withdrew from the theater department and dropped my double major. I basically dropped all my extracurriculars. One month into my senior year, I was already making plans to disengage and depart.

If someone from William and Mary’s Alumni House were to ask me why I’ve never attended a homecoming or a class reunion, I’d have a glib answer—it just wasn’t really my thing. I lived too far away. If someone asked me why I’d never once contributed to any of the college’s capital campaigns or fundraising efforts, I’d tell them that I’d worked too closely with a university development office for years to see the campaigns as anything more than shaking down the alumni . . . or that I’m cheap. If they’d asked why I didn’t submit updates to the class notes of the alumni magazine, or why I hadn’t attended any of the regional alumni auction events or meetings, I’d have replied that I simply wasn’t a joiner.

But the fact of the matter is this: I’ve never done any of those things because I had been told—at an institutional level—that the College of William and Mary wanted no truck with my kind. The college had looked into my eyes, licked its lips, and informed me that under no circumstances did I represent what they stood for. Even though I refused to examine or revisit that encounter in the admissions office, all my knee-jerk instincts to keep the college at arm’s length, to disassociate myself from my classmates and my fellow alumni, date back to that afternoon. They date back to the moment that a university official told me that I could no longer do something I loved, simply because he suspected I was gay, and simply because he didn’t like gays.

I know the college these days would have absolutely no problem taking my gay dollars. But I’m sorry—my resentment is still too strong.

Sometimes it seems one learns more about a thing in its absence, than when it’s up close and present. Detroit was like that. I understood more about Detroit and the midwest and its toxic, insular small-mindedness upon moving away than I did during the twenty-five years I was there. Likewise, when I left college, I realized how very narrow-minded and suffocated was Williamsburg, and that there was a vast world out there that didn’t share its ultra-conservative values. As Eric remarked to me, William and Mary was saltpeter to the soul; I discovered that leaving it and discovering new perspectives was the antidote.

The point I really wanted to make in my oral history was that when I left William and Mary, feeling beaten down and dispirited in a way I hadn’t when I’d entered it, I could never have imagined for myself the life that I’ve had since. I couldn’t have envisioned meeting within a mere five years the man with whom I’ve spent the last nearly quarter-century. I couldn’t have predicted how smoothly I’d come out. I would never have even fantasized about the then-unimaginable prospect that I’d be legally married or have the ability to file a joint federal income tax return. When I left college, it was with a conviction that if anything good happened to me in my life, it would be in spite of my sexuality—not alongside it, or because of it.

If anything, I’ve lived the last three decades so fully just to spite my alma mater. But damn. What rich and colorful and wonderful decades they’ve been.