all pass in a few weeks and you’ll be on to the next one. You and SWV will be back harmonizing over Fruitopias before you know it.
My senior year of college, I was the campus social chair, because I loved to throw parties and also nobody gets more done than a young person who is furiously sublimating his need for intimacy. And so it was that in the summer of 1993, I was sent to a student leadership conference at Emory University in Atlanta, where something happened to me that you are not going to believe, but that I swear to God is absolutely true.
That summer, incidentally, was the one where I had decided I would come out to my family. I was still somewhere between partially and completely out at school, and since I’d already more or less decided I wouldn’t be coming back to St. Louis after graduation, it would be the last time we’d spend more than a few days together. And how better to celebrate your last summer with your parents than by making an announcement that forces them, for at least a few brief moments, to picture you having sex?
I came home in late May, set down my bags, saw their smiling faces, and mentally dragged and dropped this task from early June to very, very late August. Oh, sure, I meant to sit them down and say something, but we were having such a nice time. I oscillated wildly between an honest desire for them not to hear about it from someone else, to a very real wish that someone else would hurry up and tell them. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t have anyone to tell me what to do, so I did nothing.
In mid-August, I hopped on a plane to Atlanta to spend three days with some other student leaders from around the country at this conference. This being the early 1990s, political correctness was in full bloom, and this event would focus on programming functions that would reflect our culture’s growing diversity. As conservative and homogeneous as my college and hometown were, I imagined this conference as a Utopia filled with different types of people, all mutually respecting one another; a really sexy Benetton ad. Whatever doubts I had about myself and my looming announcement would simply melt away under the stern eye of our retreat leaders: tough-but-caring Lou Gossett Jr. types who’d beat some pride and self-reliance into me, to the point where I’d hardly be able to wait to get home and tell my parents the good news. The informational brochure arrived a week or so before the event and revealed that the conference would be titled “Diversity: Isn’t That Special?” I had a bad feeling, and I immediately got to work repressing it.
The registration table was directly underneath the giant DIVERSITY: ISN’T THAT SPECIAL? banner, and I signed my papers and received my room assignment as Arrested Development’s “People Everyday” bumped out of the ballroom’s PA system. Just when I was finishing up, Debi, a pantsuited administrator with a fanny pack and a harsh attempt at the Chynna Phillips/Jane from Melrose Place hairdo, fixed her eyes on me with a look of practiced disapproval. “Blue eyes,” she sneered. “We know all about people like you. Go sit on the floor.” I’m more hazel, but the distinction didn’t seem important, so I went and sat on the floor next to a beefy lacrosse type in a Clemson T-shirt. “Hello,” said Clemson. “Welcome to a clumsy parable about racism.” “They wouldn’t,” I said, as a Hispanic girl from Vassar was led to a table where a group of brown-eyed people ate steak and baked potatoes. They would. They are.
And so it continued: all the brown-eyed people were shown to tables and given fancy meals, while all of the blond girls in topknots—and in the tradition of student leadership conferences, this thing was roughly 94 percent blond girls in topknots—were sent to huddle on the floor and share those packets of orange crackers with peanut butter in between. Clemson and I watched blonde after blonde hit the deck and scan the room in frustration, thinking something must be the matter, minds getting primed to be blown. A blue-eyed Janeane Garofalo type from UVA plopped herself down next to us. “Racism’s bad news, huh? Gimme a cracker.”
After all the conference attendees were accounted for, and right when we were speculating as to whether they’d lead the blue-eyed people outside