Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs - Dave Holmes Page 0,26
act surprised when I told them it was me. Or:
2. They read it, and assumed it had been written in jest. There were more than a few of these, and it stopped me dead every time. I had prepared myself for every possible outcome except this one. There were people in 1991, in a school of 2600 people, who could not believe there would be one homosexual among them. It knocked me off my feet, like Charlie Brown getting flattened on the pitcher’s mound in a Peanuts cartoon.
But category two was a fraction of the size of category one, and I began to tell a few friends, and then they told a few friends, because that’s the way a small college works, and then suddenly I was out. People knew. It was a thing. Someone would come up to me in a bar and say: “Dave, I think my little brother is gay; what should I do to make him feel comfortable enough to tell me?” And I would answer: “What is your name?”
Being out ended up being a nonissue. We were learning to be good little Catholics at Holy Cross, acknowledging but never really talking about the hard stuff.
The letter got the Chaplain’s Office talking. Holy Cross is run by the Jesuits, a progressive order of priests (as orders of priests go), and it turned out they were waiting for someone to bring the issue to their doorstep. What they decided to do was issue a poll, through students’ PO boxes, about sexual issues. Are you sexually active? Do you use contraception? How would you describe your sexuality: homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual? The poll was a little intrusive and clumsy, but what are you going to do with celibates? I filled mine out, folded it up, sent it back through the mail, and began actively counting the minutes until the results would be published.
I went to a meeting of the Campus Activities Board, and someone pulled that poll out from their backpack, and my friend Ana took a close look at it, and said, “Oh, no.”
“What?” I said.
“I made a mistake on this,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“See here where it says, ‘How would you describe your sexuality?’ ‘Homosexual’ is listed first, and I checked that one off. I didn’t even read it. I just went for what was first.”
I thought it was funny, until the results were published in The Crusader a couple of weeks later. Of the respondents, two said they were homosexual. One of them was me, and one of them was Ana, who wasn’t.
The Chaplain’s Office, working off faulty intelligence, decided to put a support group together for the two students who were struggling with their sexual identities. I saw the ad right there in The Crusader a week later. That it was a support group, and not an activity group or a social group—that we were already being treated like we had a condition—didn’t even faze me. What did was the possibility that there could be, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, more than one of us. Someone who had been too afraid to fill that questionnaire out. Someone who might sit with me on a couch and understand what I was talking about when I talk about this stuff. And then we’d make out.
It was too exciting to consider, and it was all I could consider.
I visited the Chaplain’s Office and signed up for the first of what would be two separate interviews that I would have to go through to become a founding member of this group. They needed to talk to us all to make sure we weren’t pranking them, or joining the group just to cause physical violence to gays and lesbians. It was sweet. I convinced them that I was serious—that I was so gay I didn’t know what to do with myself—and was granted permission to attend the first meeting.
I was psyched.
On the day of the first meeting, I Sea Breezed my face, changed clothes seven times before settling on a simple Gap sweater and jeans—one doesn’t want to appear overeager—and went. I took a deep breath, I opened the door, and inside the room sat one facilitator from the Chaplain’s Office and three serious-looking starters from the Holy Cross women’s field hockey team. I felt like someone who had won the wrong showcase in The Price Is Right’s Showcase Showdown. Like, I came here from Iowa, and now I have a Jet Ski.