by Dave Holmes
Freshman year, our social options were limited unless we had fake IDs, and mine was questionable: I was David Knight from Simsquix, Montana, standing in front of what is clearly a posterboard backdrop in the rough shape of a Montana driver’s license. It only worked in the most rugged of townie bars that were the most desperate for business. You didn’t want to go there unless you were in a pack, and you couldn’t assemble a pack because most people didn’t have fake IDs. So unless there was an off-campus party and the news trickled down to us, we were stuck watching Blockbuster rentals in our rooms. When we finished our movies, we rewound (because we were kind) and we left them by our front doors, just in case anyone else wanted to watch them during the three-night rental period. The first time I did this, the guys across the hall grabbed my movie, and then two hours later there was a knock on my door. I answered, and they were all there, wearing faces of agitation. “What is wrong with you, Holmes?”
“Excuse me?”
“That is the weirdest movie we have ever seen.” They handed it back to me and left, and I looked down at it. It was John Waters’s Hairspray.
I was on a campus full of eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds who had never seen—and never would—a weirder movie than Hairspray. Oh, dear God, I thought, what have I done?
6. “You Happy Puppet”—10,000 Maniacs
I was afraid and lonely and I was tired of being afraid and lonely, and I needed a plan, because I couldn’t spend every waking moment at the campus radio station numbing out to music. So I made a decision. I decided to be one of these people. I pasted a smile on my face and I joked around with people; I was always on. And then I decided I was not only going to be one of these people, I was going to be the best one of these people. Light on my feet. Quick with a quip. At every party, at every event, in every bar. I went through a disposable camera a week, making people take photos of me with all my new friends as proof. Look, I belong here! Look at my friends! Wheee! I was the last to leave every party because I was afraid that if I left anyone behind, they’d talk to each other and piece me together.
7. “Vogue”—Madonna
I had an impression of an effeminate gay man that I did a lot. A lot. Generally, when people do impressions of gay men, which in the twentieth century was a popular thing to do, they give their character a lisp: “Oh, Thergio, thtop it!” they’ll thay. This is simply incorrect, from a linguistic anthropological standpoint. The gay accent—the sound some men make with their voices that marks them as homosexual whether they actually are or not—has no lisp. What it has is a hissing sibilance in the s. A sharpness. It is unmistakable, and it is not a speech impediment, and every gay man I have ever met who does not naturally use it in his speech does a spot-on impression of someone who does. It’s necessary for survival in the years before you come out. To do a flawless stereotypical-gay-man impression is to distance yourself from stereotypical gay men, which for all you know means “all gay men.” It is to say: you may suspect me of being homosexual, but here, let me take care of that. Let me do an impression of how ridiculous a real gay man sounds, and then go back to my serious, respectable normal voice, thereby giving you a comparison that proves conclusively that I am not that. You see the difference?
It is a thing many of us have done, but it doesn’t make it any nicer to look back on.
8. “Slack Motherfucker”—Superchunk
Being everywhere and everything to everyone took energy, which I replenished by sleeping all day, every day. I never went to class. I skipped lectures, I didn’t read books, and I had no idea what my professors looked like. It was a clear cry for help, but you weren’t supposed to need this kind of help by the time you got to college, so nobody answered. I took a logic class, and I never went, and because I never went, I flunked it, and I failed even to see the perfect logic in that.
9. “Between Something and Nothing”—The Ocean Blue
These were my two speeds: socializing and sleeping. Either I was manically trying to dazzle or I was unconscious. I was doing nothing academically because I had no idea what to do. I changed majors three times: pre-med, pre-law, English. Nothing took. I was sinking in quicksand.
10. “Fun and Games”—The Connells
By the end of my freshman year, I met a couple of people in my Acting 101 class, and they invited me to hang out on their hall across campus in Wheeler. These guys were more relaxed, more accepting, and I felt like I could breathe around them a little bit. Finally, I began to feel like I was finding my footing. But the die was cast: I’d let things go for too long to catch up academically. The Wheeler guys invited me to share their house when the whole campus went to Hyannis the week after spring finals, and I went. It was lovely, and they were lovely, and I was beginning to think that I belonged just as I was beginning to realize that I wouldn’t be allowed to come back.
10. “Here’s Where the Story Ends”—The Sundays
Back in St. Louis in May of 1990, I went to check the mail and there was a notice for a piece of certified mail from the 01610 area code. I knew in my heart what was in that envelope and all of the blood ran out of my head and into my stomach. I’d been kicked out. I could apply to come back after one year. My parents were furious and I was mortified, and we were all ignoring the clear message the universe was sending us.
11. “See a Little Light”—Bob Mould
In the 1990–91 school year, I lived at home with my parents and took night classes at Washington University in St. Louis. I was in with the retirees and the extension students, and I put my nose to the grindstone because I was determined to get back to Holy Cross and finish what I had started. I did my studying in the Wash U library, made a few friends just from striking up conversations there, and I started getting invited to fraternity parties. I went, because I had nothing else to do, and it wasn’t until I got a couple of bids that I realized that what I’d been doing was “rushing.” Nobody knew I was a night student, or if they did know they didn’t care. I pledged Kappa Sigma. I went through ritual and became an active brother, and they asked me to direct the spring musical they did each year with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority—so it was clear they not only knew whom they were dealing with, but wanted me around anyway. At the end of the year, I had a fraternity house to live in if I wanted to, and my grades were good enough that I could fully matriculate to the regular, daytime Washington University. Things were going well for me in St. Louis. I was succeeding, and I was succeeding as myself.
But I was determined to win back the favor of the one who had rejected me, so I reapplied after that year to Holy Cross and they let me back in and I went.
12. “Where’d You Go?”—The Mighty Mighty Bosstones
By the time I got back to Holy Cross, a whole year had happened without me there, and while I still had friends, it was hard to get back in step. Plus we were juniors now—or they were, I had to repeat sophomore year—so most of my friends had gone abroad. I was alone again, naturally.
13. “Silent All These Years”—Tori Amos
I was probably supposed to be going to a school where people had open meltdowns, and went through bisexual phases, and broke their legs jumping out of trees while on mushrooms, but I was determined to make my relationship with this very normal, very practical place work this time. As a compromise, I turned off everything that was unique about myself. I was still manically social, but I wasn’t dealing with what was happening in my mind or soul or crotch.
14. “Kiss Them for Me”—Siouxsie and the Banshees
I made a lot of desperate, late-night phone calls to Ned all through college, just to hear the voice of someone who knew me. He went to Rice in Houston, a university for brainy kids, where he studied architecture with a side order of Foucault and Derrida and queer theory. “Queer theory?” I asked him. “What’s that?”
“It’s like poststructuralism? It’s, like…we do, like, textual analysis? But from like a gay angle? It’s like…I just wrote a paper about the butch/femme dynamic in Laverne & Shirle
y.”
He was also out of the closet and part of an active and vibrant gay community on campus, dating up a storm. There were places where you could not only be out of the closet and be taken seriously, but also watch sitcoms for course credit. I had not missed the boat so much as failed to understand the concept of boats.
15. “Regret”—New Order
College was, all the way around, a weird and isolating experience, and I made it that way all by myself, so much so that even now I can’t engage with it without using a whimsical framing device like this. I took the time in my life when I was supposed to be figuring out who I was, and I spent it trying to be a fictional character. Ultimately, I look on this whole time in my life the way you do when you’re looking at a picture of yourself with your worst haircut.
In 1991, I was back at Holy Cross, grateful for the second chance it had given me, yet also suffering from a debilitating cocktail of sexual frustration and loneliness that I can only call hornliness. The campus’s situation on the side of a massive hill in central Massachusetts forced everyone walking class-to-class and party-to-party to tackle inclines and stairs, which meant that there were alarmingly shapely thighs and calves as far as the eye could see, but none for me to touch. There was literally not one openly gay student or faculty member. It was like being starving and penniless outside a Krispy Kreme that’s just lit its HOT DOUGHNUTS NOW sign. Excruciating.
Luckily for me, there was some rock-solid yearning music in 1991. The bands coming out of Boston sounded the way a sweater feels. They were autumn in aural form. I had The Lemonheads, The Blake Babies, Juliana Hatfield, and Buffalo Tom on a constant loop in my head and my Volkswagen Jetta.
On the other hand, there was also an entire Suzanne Vega album called 99.9F° that was largely a concept album about AIDS, and I had a scorching case of HIV-infection paranoia. I’d occasionally been brave enough to drive myself down to Boston and explore the gay bars, where I met a handful of guys from other, more diverse schools. I hooked up with a couple of them over the course of a few months—just innocent, over-the-jeans kind of stuff—but I was so skittish and so poorly informed that I became convinced I was HIV-positive, and the fear drowned out the thrill. There was nowhere on campus to get tested because Holy Cross was a Catholic school, and I couldn’t even conceive of the level of panic I’d face waiting to get a result at the free clinic, and then what if someone drove past while I walked in? Then they’d know, then everyone would know. Staying terrified at all times and pretending everything was great felt like the wiser option. My full AIDS action plan was to steer clear of that Suzanne Vega album.
I wanted to be out of the closet for one reason and one reason only: to find a boyfriend. I wanted to send up a flare, a signal that said “I’m here and I’m gay and everything’s fine,” and if anyone saw it and came to find me, the fact that everything was not at all fine wouldn’t even matter anymore, because we’d have each other.
I was too afraid to do it. But I had to do something.
The only thing I could think of was to write an anonymous letter to the school newspaper, The Crusader. I could tell my story. I could reveal that I was here, an actual homosexual, walking among the rest of the student body. And I could withhold my actual name. And then I could listen closely for everyone’s reactions. I could force a conversation.
So I wrote the letter.
I agonized over the wording. I was determined not to sound sad or terrified, although I was. I avoided anything that might make it sound like I had anything approaching sexual feelings, as though I were not an anthropomorphic cartoon boner at every minute of every day. I was very careful not to sound like a human being with needs; it was too risky. I dropped the letter into the campus mailbox and I waited.
And they published it, word for word. It was right there when the paper came out Friday morning, dead center in the op-ed section. I have typed it out and included it here in full, and it is all I can do not to type in little interjections from the present day. Things like “I KNOW,” and “SOMEONE PLEASE HELP THIS BOY,” and “SOMEONE PLEASE SLAP THIS BOY.”
To the editor:
This may very well be the first letter this publication has ever received which has been inspired by a correction. Recently, a correction ran which stated that the recent forum on Gay and Lesbian rights was not the first time homosexuality was addressed on campus, that indeed two years ago a forum on sexuality was held, and that homosexuality was discussed there. The more I thought about that fact, the more absurd it seemed. Homosexuality has been discussed openly twice in 148 years at this school. There’s something wrong with that. I love Holy Cross, normally I would be the last to criticize it. However, speaking as a homosexual man, I feel that something needs to be done about this.
As I stated, I am a homosexual. And despite what some of you might think, I’m not alone here. Statistically speaking, ten to fifteen percent of the United States population is gay. That means there are anywhere between 260–390 gays and lesbians on this campus. We’re everywhere, and we don’t fit the stereotype. Speaking of myself, I don’t lisp, can’t decorate a room to save my life, and have never, ever vogued.
I have even been on a sports team and dated women. Like most of the gays and lesbians on campus, I’m your typical Holy Cross student. Look around you next time you go to Stoney’s or Joe De’s. Chances are at least one of the people you came in with is gay. We’re your friends, your roommates, your teammates. And, be assured, we’re not going to hurt you. Nothing could be further from my mind than being anything other than friends with the men I hang around with, and I know that the rest of us on campus feel the same way. Please don’t feel threatened.
The reason why this is all so important to me right now is that I’m currently in the process of “coming out of the closet” and I have a few words of advice for anyone who’s reading this. First for all you straight people out there: as I said before, you have a gay friend. And chances are you don’t know it yet. The reason why you don’t is because your friend is scared to death to tell you. You may be the most understanding person in the world, but the fact is that we live in a homophobic society. Gays are discriminated against on a regular basis, and are almost always referred to as something less than respectable.
It’s downright terrifying for someone to tell his/her friends that he/she is part of this socially unacceptable part of the populace.
However, I do have faith in the students here. I think we’re all enlightened enough to overcome our preconceived ideas and accept things which are foreign to us. And if any of you out there aren’t, then you have the problem. You can change your mind, we can’t change our sexuality. Homosexuality isn’t a sin, a crime, a disease or even (in the broader scheme of things) a problem. Homophobia is. But it’s easily overcome. You owe it to your friends and to yourself to take the steps toward broadening your mind. And should your gay friend ever “come out” to you, please remember a few things. First: he/she is the same person he/she was before you knew about it. He/she is not suddenly your enemy. Second, it takes a lot of courage for someone to “come out,” even more when one is “coming out” to a close friend, since they risk losing that friendship which they treasure. Recognize that. You may be completely repulsed by the idea of homosexuality, but that doesn’t mean you need to be repulsed by your friend.
For those of you out there who are gay, I ask only this: don’t be afraid to tell your friends. I know what it’s like in the closet, since for all intents and purposes I’m still there. It’s no fun. Yes, it’s difficult to tell people, but it’s worth it. You owe it to your friends and ultimately to yourself to be honest. I’m still not ready to let the world know, but after having told a few of my close friends here, I can honestly say I don’t regret it. I remember vividly the first time I told someone here. I hemmed and hawed and talked circles around it for hours, then finally just came right out and said that I’m gay. I was scared to death to look my friend in the eye, I was prepared for him to get up a
nd leave. But he didn’t. He nodded and said “Okay,” and smiled, and that was that. We talked about it, we even laughed about it, and at the end of the night, he thanked me for being honest with him. I can definitely say it was the best feeling I’d ever had. And the next day, we could still talk about it. We still do. No, he’s not gay, and no, I had no ulterior motives in telling him. The only thing that’s changed between the two of us is that our friendship has grown that much stronger. I’m not saying it’s always going to be that easy for you, but it will always be that gratifying.
You’d be surprised how open-minded your friends can be, and you won’t believe how great it feels to have that weight off your shoulders. This may be hard to accept, but you’ll never be “straight.” You can, however, be straight with your friends about your sexuality, and that’s about the most admirable thing I can think of.
I didn’t set out to change the world with this letter but I hope I’ve changed some people’s outlook on things a little bit. Homosexuality will always be an issue. Just because Holy Cross is so conservative doesn’t mean it should be swept under the rug here. I hope I’ve created something that will be debated among friends, something that can be talked about honestly and unapologetically. I sincerely hope that in the future, when the subject of homosexuality is discussed, all people here can take the steps either to come out of the closet, or to make it easier for others to do so. Maybe then, we can all talk about it the way we talk about other issues. Let’s hope it’s more than twice in the next 148 years.