From You to We

Over the years in the public version of my journal, I’ve written several times about grappling with issues related to my sexual orientation during my college years. While I wasn’t confused whatsoever about myself, quite often coming of age in a small Southern college town during the early Reagan years felt like trying to butt my head through a series of brick walls without a helmet.

I wrote a personal essay last week about being released from a campus tour guide position that I loved dearly, merely because it was suspected that I was gay. The amount of response I received was more than I ever expected. I was actually overwhelmed not only by the number of people who passed along the essay to other people, but by the sheer outpouring of concern and love from friends and strangers alike. College people I hadn’t talked to since my graduation in 1985 came out of the woodwork to say they appreciated what I’d written. People I had talked to many times since then offered me hugs and sympathy. Lots of folk started using words to describe me that ordinarily I wouldn’t be so bold as to pick for myself. Words like brave, or courageous.

Yet facing a memory I’d successfully choked down for nearly thirty years wasn’t particularly brave. It was, for a period of time after I allowed it to surface, pretty raw. Definitely painful. Talking about the incident on record for the university archivist hurt, but I pushed through. Writing about it publicly was cathartic. But brave? Nah, not really.

If you want to know what was brave in the aftermath of sharing that particular incident, look no further than when I spoke to my father about it a few days later. That took courage.

My father was also a graduate of William and Mary. I ended up attending the college in no small part because of the idyllic memories of his own college days. It really wasn’t like my father to wax rhapsodic over . . . well, anything. If one got him started on his undergraduate experience, however, the reminiscences rapidly turned into a rosy, glowing chronicle of misty dawns over the Sunken Garden, stolen kisses from apple-cheeked girls in Crim Dell, and challenging intellectual inquisitions from crusty old professors with hearts of gold that (I think) might have been pilfered somewhat from The Paper Chase.

Oh, and keggers. Lots of keggers.

The reasons I’ve never really talked with my father about the incidents of head-butting I encountered during my college years are multiple. For one thing, my family has always erred on the side of over-sharing when it comes to topics related to sex and sexuality. My mom and dad were the people, after all, who decided to illustrate the principles of the Old Testament covenant in a more modern and up-to-date way by informing my entire eighth-grade Sunday school class that I’d been circumcised near birth, prompting my peers to call me ‘Circumcision Boy’ for the rest of the year. My dad was the man who decades ago welcomed my husband to the family during our first visit South by perching on the edge of the sofa bed in his underwear and quizzing a horrified Craig in depth about his sexual history. In other words, my dad is already enough all up in my bidness that I really can’t be blamed for wanting a little distance and decorum over some parts of my life.

My parents knew that I had issues with a couple of my roommates; they didn’t know that largely they’d arisen as a result of homophobia, both internalized and institutional. They didn’t know about the tricky relationships I’d had during my college years, or the struggles I faced because of cruel and untrue rumors that people spread about me. They didn’t know the college had looked me in the face and told me it didn’t particularly care for my kind. Even in the many years after I was out to them I never spoke of these things because I didn’t want to befoul my father’s golden-tinted nostalgia when it came to his alma mater. William and Mary might not have been an ideal fit for me on some levels, but I very much respect and appreciate that my dad had a good time there. (At the keggers.)

In large part, though, I didn’t talk about many of the problems I’d faced in college because I didn’t want my dad to worry. Good parents fret about their children, even when they know they’re safe and whole. Ever since I came out, my father’s always agonized that he might have said something inadvertent when I was growing up that I might have interpreted retroactively as unloving or unsupportive. (He didn’t.) To share stories of adversity would have confirmed his fear that he hadn’t done everything humanly possible to shelter me from misfortune.

So I never shared the more grim tales of my past. Both of our instincts are to protect the other.
After I spoke to the archivist last month, however, I realized that I needed to tell these same stories to my dad. So I called him, and told him about the Stephens Project. Then I took a breath and launched into what I needed to say. I revisited the bad experiences I had with my sophomore and junior year roommates. I talked about my right-wing boyfriend. I told him the story that got so much attention last week, about my confrontation with Admissions.

The last part was the hardest of all; one of the things my father had done during his college years was, along with a handful of others, was to institute the campus tours that I so dearly had loved giving. The university had never held them before my dad and a few others from Circle K began offering them on their own to prospective students. Later on, Admissions subsumed the Circle K program as their own. My dad had been so proud of me for carrying on the family tradition that I don’t even think I’d ever admitted to him that I’d been let go as a tour guide, my senior year.

As I feared, my dad was distressed at the news. He apologized to me. He spoke carefully and regretfully, as if I were some kind of wounded veteran who was an unavoidable reminder of the nation’s pain. I told him to drop that. Here’s the thing—and I would say the very same to anyone who’s tempted to regard me as some kind of battle-scarred invalid still quivering from my injuries of three decades ago. Bad stuff happened to me in college. (Bad stuff has happened to me since, and will no doubt happen in the future.) I wish it hadn’t, but we’re all dealt certain cards in life, and all we can do is play them. Even if it were possible to make all my adversity vanish with a single wish, I wouldn’t dare do so. All kinds of experiences, good and bad, have gone into shaping me into the person I am today. I’m really fond of that person.

I think that person is pretty awesome, in fact. I see that guy in the mirror and I want to wink at him and shoot finger-guns in his direction and say, Lookin’ foxy, stallion! just because I like him that much.
So hell, if a couple of bad years is part of the price it took to get to that level of self-acceptance, I’m actually pretty okay with it. I don’t want my father fretting and fussing that he wasn’t able to shelter me from problems he didn’t know existed. He shouldn’t convince himself that my college life was one of fear and suffering. That’s not how I’d characterize it at all. Neither should he.

“I’m glad you did this,” he said, when I explained all that to him. “Talked to the people in the archives, I mean. And talked to me.”

“I’m glad I did, too,” I told him.

“We need to be sharing stories like this,” he told me. “It’s important that we share them, that we speak out, that we let others know about our experiences so that we get the message out.”

And in the end, here is why I love my dad: because in those considerate, generous sentences, he used the word we. My struggle becomes our struggle. My albatross, unasked, he automatically shoulders. He doesn’t need to; I never asked him. But he does, with gallantry. That’s why.

That’s why I especially love those friends of mine who, over the past couple of weeks, have reached out to offer similar expressions of support and concern. My past hurts aren’t their fault; there’s little they could have done to back then to remedy them. But in recognizing and acknowledging my struggles, and kneeling down to assume their share of the weight of them, they manage both to humble me and give me even more hope for the future.

They remind me that you can and should always be we.