STAYING OUT

ON CAMPUS

by ANDREW MENDELSON

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I remember reading, at about the age of thirteen or fourteen, a book by Jess Stearn called The Sixth Man. And I remember that afterwards, and for the next several years, I spent a lot of time counting people off, mentally by sixes. I figured that out of my high school homeroom class of thirty-five there ought to be at least four or five others... of "us," I might say now, but

I didn't know that there was an "us" at the time. I wasn't even sure what word to use.

That may be shy I accept speaking engagements-despite the disapproval of my lover (now ex-, who worries about my career), and my colleagues (who wonder why I'm making such a fuss). I do it so that people will know the words-the right words, and the values that go with them, the words and the values that I never heard in high school and still hear too seldom in college.

There are more than ten thousand students at Stanford; more than half are men (and those who are hetero loudly lament the "Stanford ratio"). But there are only forty students at the Gay Peoples Union. Most of them are grad students. So where are the others? Should I still go around counting by sixes?

Every chance I get I talk to people about being gay. Preferably on their territory, and by their invitation. But

VECTOR

I'll invite myself if I have to: to dorms, to classes, to the dean of the chapel, to peer-counseling groups, to high schools, colleges and community religious groups. So? What do I do then? I'm not all gay people; God knows, I'm not representative of anything, let alone a kind of sexuality. I'm lucky that I have a fairly good sense of my own identity, and that I'm uninhibited enough to speak freely about my own experiences.

All I can be is myself-though that's important, I think, since I've sat in on too many speaking engagements where the speakers were anything but human. My prejudice, I guess; there's a kind of highpowered gay consciousness that turns me off. Treating the audience as if it has had ten years of T-groups, encounter groups, Esalen experience, and training with Carl Rogers doesn't seem to me the way to let an audience know that you're a person, one with values, feelings, and experiences that you probably prize (though, if you're honest, you'll admit the negative things, too) and that you want to share.

Are we so into where we're coming from that we forget where our audience is coming from? Do we spout dogma and forget to listen? And I-am I being self-chauvinist, if not gay chauvinist, in dealing solely from my own experiences?

Because there are questions that make me angry, questions like "When did you first know you were gay?" (I often reply

with, "When did you know you were straight?"). Or, "What do you think made you straight?"). And particularly anyway I don't think it matters-so I often counter with, "What do you think make you straight?"). And particularly at Stanford, where the academic mindset seems rampant, there is a tendency for the audience to adopt a position of intellectual tolerance (Isherwood calls. it "annihilation by blandness"; it used to be called wishy-washy liberalism) that's very fashionable but that precludes any real communication on an emotional level or a level of values.

So maybe I'm antagonistic. I go through the rap of "When did you know you were straight? What do you think made you that way? Have you done anything about it? And have you told your parents?" But I also answer the questions. Maybe by the end of the sequence I've made my point that causes and categorizations aren't important. Does performance determine sexuality? It's chic to be bi (at least in NY and SF); but why then does one "gay" experience make you gay forever? And can't there be gay virgins, too, just as there are straight ones?

Coming out, after all, isn't a one-time experience. There's the first phase, one of wondering, that usually ends when you admit to yourself that what you feel isn't what you're "supposed" to feel; perhaps you even put a word to