It was one of those beautiful late summer days in New York -- a real melancholy heartbreaker. Larry and I finished loading his car with all the stuff I was going to take with me and we set out for Massachusetts and the campus that would be my home for the next four years and that, according to the brochures, I would come to love as much as I did my childhood home, if not more so.
That sort of cotton candy world, however, was not mine. The best thing about childhood and adolescence, as far as I'm concerned, is that they are temporary.
But not temporary enough, for a part of them seems to break off and lodge inside you, forever binding you to their conditions, and those are the conditions that too significantly determine who you are, how you process things, think, and feel. Sometimes, they can be downright crippling.
In my case, my entire youth can be described by the word "split."
What appeared to the world wasn't what I really was, even though it was. Inside myself I was someone else, someone whom I cherished and was ashamed of, whom I was keeping prisoner. Not only was I hidden from others -- who must have suspected there was something missing that they were not seeing -- but I could not acknowledge myself even to myself. I was hiding from myself. But all too often in dreams, or posing in front of the bathroom mirror when the bathroom door was locked, I broke out, insisting I was there. Then I projected my wished-for-self, the image I had of myself that I had to suppress. Doing that I worked myself into a frenzy until the explosion that shattered me brought me back to reality and I had to clean up and appear as I was expected to be.
I tried to be what I wasn't. I couldn't be who I was. In the end I was nobody. And I was lost. And it was all too complicated even to begin to figure out.
There, in college, nevertheless, I was to come into my own and finally end that split that had been tormenting me, even when I somehow kept myself from knowing that I was -- perhaps then most -- when I was desperately falsifying everything I did and felt.
The sun was low in the sky when we hit the Mass Pike.
Gee, Larry, I said, as the car turned on to Campus Road, I don't know how I can thank you enough for driving me up here. The last weeks, ever since I came out to my parents, have been awful. It's lucky I can pay for this myself between my savings, scholarship, and a small loan, 'cause my parents have just about disowned me.
Steve, Larry said, how long have we known each other?
A long time, I said.
Since third grade.
Right.
To me you've always been queer, so add to that a sexual dimension and it doesn't even register.
Marc, my roommate wasn't due till tomorrow, so Larry could sleep in his bed overnight and drive back to the city in the morning.
No, Larry and I aren't lovers. We never even jerked off together. Actually, I think he's asexual. I know I'm probably wrong about that, but I've never really seen him show an interest, sexually, in anybody, no matter what sex. He likes to read science fiction and horror stories -- Thomas Ligotti is his favorite author -- and write computer programs. In fact he's not even going to college. He's been tapped by a huge software designer and is going out to California to work ninety hours a week and become a cyber millionaire. He's tall but not well built; skinny but lacking tonus. I've seen him in a bathing suit. It's not a turn on. His skin is a little pasty. But we're not friends because of his looks. He's funny, interesting, and he's also got a heart of gold. And I have no secrets from him.
Well, almost none.
There's one I've hinted at, deeper even than the one I let out to my folks that caused such a dislocation of affection. But that one just wasn't ready to come out. Not yet. I didn't know if it ever would, ever could, if I ever could face it in the light of day. It was stuck in the bathroom mirror, but it was also lurking in the future for me. I didn't know it then, but it was waiting for Marc, who at that time was only a name to me to get it out from behind the looking glass.
Larry and I walked around the small New England town, then went to the movies. It was a college town so there was what they used to call an Art House and we saw "Walk on Water." Then we went to the Student Union and met some other newcomers. We were a week ahead of everyone else because of freshman orientation.
We got to talking about the war and the military, and I was glad to see that most of the kids I spoke with loathed war and wanted nothing to do with the military, except for a rather muscle-bound guy with a skin that showed he was recovering from a pretty bad case of acne. James affected a William Buckley drawl and said that Ah, the defense of what we have come to prize -- elongating the "i" and sounding the "z" -- as liberty was as natural as the vi-o-lence that had been hard-wired, yes, into our [pause] systems, not by, ah, Darwinian evolution as atheistically postulated by the spiritually barren, but, ah, by a loving divinity who offered us, no?, he interrupted himself with a saccharine smile, the challenge of discovering our own, ah, excellence. Don't you think so?
Larry said, no, he didn't think so, and James responded with the same condescension that marked (marred) everything about him.
Perhaps, ah, that can be attributed to your not thinking at all, he said and grinned as if he were blessed with the devil's own wit.
Larry chose to say nothing, which I admired, and I was about to say something in his behalf, but he put his hand on my shoulder, and a guy named Ricky said he had tickets to the Rolling Stones concert and was going to the show with his mother, who was fifty-three and a corporate lawyer and had a poster of Mick Jagger shirtless hanging in her bathroom. He was laughing.
But James sneered, and began to say, The 'sixties, ah..., but Ricky gave him a big smile and said in a fake Texas drawl, Watch it, boy, that's my Mom you're about traduce, and even James laughed.
After Larry left midday Sunday, I felt how empty it would be not to have him in my life day to day.
In the half light of an early November late afternoon I sat at my desk bent over the keyboard of my computer writing an explication of the "Parable of the Cave" until I heard a familiar voice, as if from inside my head, softly say Daylight, and I relaxed, stretched and leaned back in the chair and slowly began to stimulate my nipples with my thumbs. My body shuddered, my head fell backwards, my mouth sprung open, my eyes fixated on the crystal pendulous from the ceiling. Marc was at my side, above me, his tongue was in my mouth and then he withdrew and let drop inside my mouth an accumulation of his spittle and I drank it, as if swallowing a magic potion and felt its transformative power, its corrosive effect on my old identity and how I was being refashioned inside out.
To belong to him. What bliss. To yield to him. To surrender. To be true. I felt myself rising to the surface.
Daylight, he said, and I thought, Daylight is what they cannot see in the cave and for Plato daylight is a metaphor.
Daylight is a metaphor, I said out loud.
A metaphor for what, Marc said, framed naked in the bathroom doorway, except for a white towel hung around his waist, both hands vigorously toweling his dark hair dry so that his well muscled chest and flat, ridged belly were stretched to their tautest.
For truth, I said, for the truth that exists beyond the truth that the people in the cave think is the truth.
Come on, he said, pulling on a pair of loose jeans over his jock. You've been at that thing all day. Let's go over to the weight room for a workout.
Yes, sir, I said grinning, as if I were obeying an order rather than responding to an invitation.
The daffodils and tulips were poking up in their beds brightening the dreary winter world, offering, however, no assurance that there would not be another attack of snow. The vigor in the air embraced our lungs. Despite the reasons for despair we clung to hope. No; hope clung to us. We were young and though we knew better than to think we might prevail, we had no apparatus for believing we would not.
But in a small way, which might signal something growing, we just had. More than three hundred of us, circling the great red stone building of the Student Union, a monument to the nineteenth-century aesthetic of gloriously heavy and ornate decoration, we had driven the military recruiters off the campus.
It felt like a double victory for me. Not only had we mounted a successful protest against the army recruiters, but I had been able to shape the way people actually thought about the issue. The protest was about more than the army's policy of sexual discrimination. It was a demonstration of pacifist sentiment against war itself in any form.
Did you see this? Marc said to me one evening, barging into our suite and waving a brochure announcing the recruiters would be on campus for a week beginning next Wednesday.
I looked at it and looked at him.
There's a meeting in the Student Union in an hour, he said. Let's go.
I'm reluctant, I said.
Why are you reluctant?
Because they're going to picket the army for the wrong reason.
Marc looked at me without saying anything.
I continued.
I know the line they're gonna take. They're going to argue that the army discriminates against gays and therefore shouldn't be allowed onto the campus. I hate that argument.
I don't oppose the army because it discriminates against me because I'm gay. I oppose the army because it makes war. War legitimates violence as a mode of discourse. I oppose the army because it's about killing and being killed, wounding and being wounded. It is a great engine of grief and makes whatever is bad worse. It responds to conflict with force rather than vision. It represents everything that contradicts science, the liberal arts, and the humanities. Military force is like a whirlwind. The violence of each army justifies the violence of an opposing army. Every act of violence is used to justify an act of counter violence. And every act of violence generates violence in an endless circle. And all the violence achieves is keeping the powerful with their own private agenda in power over the rest of us, and the rest of us manic and scared.
So say that at the meeting.
I can't, I said.
You can't?
It's too complicated and I get tongue-tied.
Daylight, he said.
I knew what he was doing and wanted to protest, but as I was beginning to, I felt my knees buckle and I was crouching before him, my head bowed. I heard his voice like a clear wind emptying my mind.
Of course, I did as Marc commanded, and I was surprised to see how many of the others agreed with me.
Steve is right, Sarah said with a fire in her voice. We lose when we compromise even if we win. Because we haven't won what we want! We don't want the army to be gay. We want war to be gone.
And that became our slogan against those few who thought that for strategic reasons we had to soft pedal our pacifism. And there were even a few, gay people, too, who thought that war was a reasonable and acceptable part of life.
Look at the last election, Jake said, arguing for compromise.
A lot a good it did Kerry coming on as an ineffective Bush, huh? Marc responded. "Welcome Aboard!"
After the meeting, a core of us went to Sarah and Mandy's -- they had a place off campus -- for beers. We drank; we smoked. Slowly the talk went from politics to jokes and then to school gossip until only Marc and Sarah and Mandy and I were left.
Is it true what everyone says about you guys? Sarah said when we were alone.
What, that we're queer? I said turning Marc's face towards me and kissing him on the lips.
No, Sarah said, slipping an arm around Mandy. Everybody knows that, but the way that you're queer.
What way? Marc said.
You're not making this easy, Sarah said.
You're tough, Sarah, Marc said. Go ahead.
Ok, she said, that you have a master slave thing going.
He owns me, I said.
Doesn't that go against the democratic anarchist principles you espouse.
Go figure, I said, bending to kiss Marc's wrist.
Sarah slapped me lightly on the cheek.
Hey, hey, Marc said, only I'm allowed to do that.
We were exhausted but euphoric and in front of everybody, including the local TV news cameras, Marc took me in his arms and kissed me on the mouth.
Before we knew it, a TV microphone was by our lips and a reporter was intoning in that odd diction of theirs, So, is this a victory for gay rights?
No, I said, laughing. It's a victory for peace. We're not struggling to get gays into the military. We're trying to get militarism out of our lives, to get rid of a way of life inextricably bound to militarism.
But don't you support the troops? the reporter insisted, coming in from left field.
In the only way that is supportive, I shot back, by stopping the war immediately and releasing them from the military.
To everyone's surprise they aired the whole interview on the evening news -- kiss and comments --and there was even a video link at Michael Moore's website.
There was a new spirit that you could feel spreading over the school in the following weeks. People were friendlier to each other. People who didn't know each other before got into conversations with each other in the lounges, dining halls, on the lawns. Students and teachers started talking to each other outside of classes, and learning from each other.
And in the classrooms something downright strange was happening. Students began getting interested in the things they were studying. Aristotle and St. Augustine and John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith and Marx and Freud and Milton and Hawthorne and John Ruskin and Michelangelo and Picasso and Camus and Virginia Woolf and Darwin suddenly seemed to be about something. Literature and science, the arts and the social sciences became important to the process of discovering what was what and how things ought to be. Classroom discussions were livelier and kids started doing the reading, arguing, agreeing, disagreeing, reframing, reaffirming.
And then Drexel Henry, the dean of students sent me an e-mail.
Mr. Elkind, he wrote, in view of your apparent inability to exercise the academic modesty that any well-disciplined student must appreciate, I cannot see how you can reasonably expect the university to continue to support you, as it has been doing, with scholarship funds. Drexel Henry, Dean of Students, Robertson Hall 231.
Jesus Christ, I said turning from the screen and looking at Marc, who didn't know what I was talking about. I'm done for.
But Sarah was reading Abby Hoffman's memoir, "Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture," and said it was the best thing that could have happened.
Right, I said, frowning.
No, she said. It's news.
And we were back on television when forty-three students sat down outside the dean's office.
If he thinks we're going to subordinate our intelligence, our beliefs, our minds to his will because of economic threats, blackmail, actually, he's out of his mind, Marc said.
We're living in a country, Sarah said, where we're hypnotized and brainwashed all day long by advertising firms working for the government and the corporations to make us believe what they want us to and to act how they want us to, and if we don't, then they go to the next level -- punishment.
And we're supposed to believe that what they want us to believe is our own belief. It's the old hypnotic trick of making you believe that the hypnotist's will is your will, I said.
(That's something I know something about), I wanted to add, but restrained myself. I just glanced quickly at Marc and winked instead.
And when it doesn't work, as in the present instance, then the subtle coercion of hypnosis gives way to punishment, like threatening to cut off Steve's scholarship, Sarah said.
Drexel Henry for his part was on the defensive when he was interviewed.
After all, the reporter asked, don't students have first amendment rights to free speech and free assembly, Dr. Henry?
Up to a point, he answered.
What point is that?
It's hard to be doctrinaire about it, he said. Each case must be judged on its own merits.
And the present case? Doesn't the present decision send the message that students ought to hesitate before expressing themselves.
Every responsible citizen, Henry responded slowly, ought to hesitate before he or she speaks. I think that would raise the national conversation to a better level.
Steve Elkind, the student in question in this case is a straight A student. How can you justify taking away his scholarship for expressing a political belief?
I think it would be better to stick with ideas here and not to discuss individuals, Henry responded, ending the interview.
Suddenly the story had legs, strong muscular legs, and, much to the chagrin of the university trustees, it kept on walking, all the way to the press and the cable channels.
I didn't have the time to be worried about my future. It was too good.
God damn it, Henry, Marc intoned imitating Harley L. Pinchon, the chairman of the university board of trustees, yelling at the dean, you've made a fucking mess. I feel like it's 1968 again, and I don't like the feeling. Do something. And do something quickly.
And he actually did. I received an invitation to his house.
I'm glad you could stop by, the dean said as he led me into a large, beige colored living room.
Have a seat.
There were canapés on the side table and a bottle of wine.
He offered me some canapés -- bacon and peanut butter on crackers. I declined.
Some wine, then? he said.
No thank you.
He was wearing a maroon smoking jacket and slippers.
I'm afraid, he said, lighting his pipe, and sitting in a wing chair across from me, we got off to a bad start. I guess you see me as one of the guys wearing the black hats.
I looked at him, waiting for him to say something.
Look, he said, I'm not a hard-nosed guy. I believe in compromise. If you can promise and demonstrate that you are willing to align your behavior to the demands of institutional responsibility, and if you can discipline your need to act out in impulsive ways that ought to have been discarded with adolescence, then there may be grounds for reconsideration.
Huh? I said.
Come, come, Mr. Elkind, relax, he said.
That was a strange thing to say because I didn't feel ... not relaxed.
I just kept staring at him.
Can I have your word, he said, floundering, and we can put an end to this? He sucked on his pipe and gave me an intent look.
Where are your loyalties? I asked.
Excuse me? he said.
Your loyalties? What do you stand for? What makes you a man?
I'd say there are many things. But perhaps the first among them is maturity.
Maturity, I repeated.
Maturity, he repeated, as if tasting the word.
I'd say, he said, expanding, as if reflecting deeply, maturity is a character trait that is based on a sense of modesty, intellectual modesty as well as modesty of behavior. It is based on tolerance of other positions and points of view. Army recruiters certainly have a right to express their point of view, wouldn't you agree?
They aren't expressing a point of view, I said.
Oh, come now.
They are actively enlisting people for war.
But who are you to say they oughtn't to do that?
Does it, I said, turning his words against him, in any way demonstrate modesty of thought or behavior in your government to invade a country and kill its people, and in order to do so, fabricate a set of deceptions and lies? And to dupe countless numbers of men and women to kill and be killed, to maim and be maimed? Does that sound like modesty?
I was trying to keep the edge out of my voice.
I'm not here to argue with you, he said.
No, I said, that would be immodest and immature.
I can't see, he said, what you accomplish by sarcasm.
I actually doubt, I said, if you can see anything at all. You don't seem to see that you are a little man with a little power trying to make other people obey your will, just like your president. You're a pimp, but I'm not your whore.
You said that? Sarah said.
What else could I say? I answered.
You didn't feel the least bit, ah, put off by his arguments or intimidated by his authority, not confused, as it were, by his, ah, power? James asked. You didn't worry at all about how you would manage without the money?
I'm not for sale, I said, with a little too much hauteur.
Well, he said, as if he were wise beyond his years, when you really get down to it, things aren't always, perhaps, as clear as that.
When you know your own mind, I said, smiling at Marc, everything is as clear as daylight.
[When you write to me, please put the name of the story in the subject slot. Thanks]