Can We Go Back?

“We are powerful because we have survived.”

Audre Lorde

It’s the spring of 2003. I’m a second semester senior at the University of Pennsylvania. I have maybe 4 weeks left before graduation and I decide now is the moment I’m ready to walk into my college’s LGBTQ+ Center. I had finally started to acknowledge my queer identity to a few close friends and was ready for a fresh start post-graduation. I was still applying for jobs and internships and wasn’t yet sure where I would land, but decided to make an appointment with the LGBT Center Director to get some advice on transitioning to life outside of Penn as a queer person.

Back then, being out as a college student was still daunting (and for many, it still is). I had essentially spent my entire college experience in the closet. It was easier to skim the surface of my social life as just a part of myself, exploring crushes and relationships with boys, but not going near my feelings for girls. I think part of me truly believed that if I pushed these feelings back far enough that they would go away. I thought I could will a different future for myself, one that placed me squarely into the range of “normal.”

It’s now 20 years later, and I’ve decided to bring my family back to campus for my 20th college reunion later this month.

I’ve lost touch with so many friends. And I have no one knocking down my door to see me again. Part of me wonders if my connections faded because of the “dual identity” I lived during my time there. I was like a fish swimming in heteronormative waters. Every once and a while, I would poke my head out and see that there were other pockets of possibility, but they felt impossible to bridge. I therefore never truly let people in to get to know me. Maybe I’m not alone in this feeling. So many of us are afraid, for different reasons, to let others in during these fraught years. And yet it’s still sad to me looking back that I was not able to open up (to myself and others) about what I was feeling and thinking and questioning as it pertained to sexuality and identity more broadly. I would likely have been met with empathy and support and realized there was a whole community of people with similar questions and life experiences.

It is largely for this reason that I feel compelled to step back onto campus 20 years later and reclaim my college experience as a queer person. I will be bringing my parents, my wife and my daughter and while I’m grateful beyond words to have them by and on my side, this pilgrimage is really a solo one.

To step back onto the Penn Quad and College Green as my full self. To walk proudly down Locust Walk and know that I’m not hiding anymore. It will surely bring up a swell of emotions, painful and joyous, but I’m prepared this time to feel them all. I will point out to my daughter the old gothic buildings where I took my first anthropology classes, the theatre world I stepped into as a college sophomore, and the tiny dorm room I lived in freshman year above the mail center in the upper Quad.

And I will walk her into the Carriage House, home to the LGBT Center, and watch her roam, free.