Chapter 25: Getting Around

Wednesday, October 10, 1984

Paige and I picked up copies of the Batt on our way into Chemistry. She started reading it once we’d sat down, and had turned to the letters page before I did. Whatever she read caused her to need to stifle a fit of the giggles when Dr. Johnson started his lecture.

I had to wait through the class to find out what was so funny. It turned out that one letter-writer had opined that anything to do with gay people was automatically ‘sexual’ because being gay meant you had sex with people of the same gender. That meant that gay people were constantly talking about ‘sex,’ something that the writer felt straight people didn’t do.

In my opinion, anyone saying they were straight, or referencing their opposite-sex partner, was talking about ‘sex’ in exactly the same way. I’d been friends with Cal and Andy for four years. While I could guess, I didn’t know what they did in bed. Or, for that matter, if they did anything in bed. As far as I was concerned, we’d never talked about ‘sex’ (beyond, maybe, my polite encouragement for them to consider protection).

That wasn’t what got Paige going, though. What caused the giggles was one sentence in the article and one following it. The author had written, about gay people having sex, ‘Now, to spell it out, this means mutual masturbation, oral copulation and anal intercourse.’ Immediately following the letter, some helpful editor had added, in italics, ‘EDITOR’S NOTE: mutual masturbation, oral copulation, and anal intercourse are heterosexual acts also.’

Paige finally got to giggle as she showed me. We both found it hilarious, of course. She also found it hilarious that I praised the editor for adding the Oxford comma when responding.

Angie and Jas got in on the amusement just before golf. Cammie and Mel had already read it by the time we caught up to them.

We all continued to have a good laugh about the letter over the course of the day. Sometimes it was hard to believe that the people who wrote some of the letters could think that they were helping their cause, yet there continued to be some absurd letters. This wasn’t the worst of them, but the editor’s comment promoted it to being the most memorable thus far.

Since GSS couldn’t meet on campus (except occasionally, thanks to the efforts of SWAMP), meetings were held where they would fit. Today’s meeting was held in the back of the Bryan Luby’s.

Luby’s Cafeteria is a Texas institution. They serve pretty good cafeteria food for reasonable prices. Some people would dispute my calling it just ‘pretty good,’ but that’s a matter of opinion. Luby’s fans are pretty fanatical. For me ... well, I’d had better.

That said, they were good, and most of their locations were huge and had large meeting areas. It was an obvious benefit to them to host a large group since most people would opt to have dinner there.

We did, and we enjoyed the food.

The meeting? Parts were good, and parts were not so good. There was some obvious infighting between factions within GSS. Some of the women felt that ‘Gay’ didn’t include them, while others thought the distinction was silly. Some of the men felt the ‘Gay is not enough’ women were making a mountain out of a molehill. There were disputes about whether the needs of one faction were being promoted over another, and whether people who could more easily stay ‘closeted’ were ‘hurting the cause’ by doing so.

The whole thing made my head hurt and my heart hurt even more. Pretty much everyone had a point, but when you added the points together, it turned out that people who should be allies were wasting their time making life harder for each other.

Maybe we could help. If we did, it would have to be Angie, Paige, Mel, and Cammie leading the charge. Straight people were welcome, even encouraged, but a straight person expressing an opinion on the infighting wouldn’t be.

After the actual business was concluded, people just started chatting with each other. I talked to two guys and one girl that I vaguely knew from my classes. We might or might not be friends, but I think it mattered to them to know that someone else in their class was a supporter.

They might have thought I was gay, too. It’s not like I was wearing an ‘I’m straight’ shirt or anything. That was something I was conscious of. It’s possible that someone might feel like I was here under ‘false pretenses.’

I could handle someone making a pass at me. It wouldn’t be the first time. I could turn them down gracefully. But someone who thought I was pretending to be gay, for whatever reason, might feel betrayed.

Jas and I seemed to me to obviously be a couple, but there were a number of male/female pairs. Some of them were likely just friends. Maybe some of them were each others’ ‘beards’ out in public. I didn’t know, and I wasn’t about to ask.

Angie, Paige, Cammie, and Mel were the ones who would have to do the heavy lifting here. I could (and would!) help, but I wanted no part in leading anything. There was too much chance of further straining nerves that were obviously already somewhat frayed.

Thursday, October 11, 1984

As we had last Sunday, we gathered in front of the TV. This time it was for the vice presidential debate between Bush and Ferraro. That turned out to be a far more spirited debate than I’d remembered — but, again, my memories were ancient and not to be trusted.

Whether or not they wanted Reagan to win, the girls were all pulling for Ferraro. Angie, in particular, complained about having missed it the first time and proclaimed that she was grateful to have gotten the chance to see it now.

Ferraro’s best moment of the debate was calling out Bush for acting like he was teaching her about foreign policy. It was rude, patronizing, and uncalled-for. I still thought he’d made a good President (and, most likely, would have in 1980, too), but not a great President. He might (or might not) have been great if he’d won in 1980, but eight years of Reagan changed what he could do.

That said, if this Bush was able to fend off the ‘all taxes are bad, all of the time’ crowd, he might have been more successful.

I had mixed feelings about that, too, though. Had Bush won a second term, many things would have been different. Would that have been good or bad? How could anyone tell?

That was a question that would take years to work out, though. In the meantime, we had an election to get through.

Ferraro was almost certainly not going to be the first female vice president, but she proved she was worthy to be considered for the job, at least, and that was a victory in itself. We could all agree on that.

Friday, October 12, 1984

As we had last time, we hit the road right after our last class. While there wasn’t the pressure to get there for a concert, we had dinner scheduled with Candice and Sherry at seven at the mall pizza place. Traffic was worse than I’d anticipated, but we wound up arriving only ten minutes late, thank goodness! I’d been wishing for a cell phone during the worst of the traffic delays.

Everyone hugged everyone, and then we headed in. The place wasn’t all that crowded, which really didn’t bode well for them. A few years ago, this place would have been pretty busy on a Friday night. I was pretty sure it had closed by the late 1980s in my first life, and history seemed to be repeating itself.

Sad, but life moves on. This entire mall would have a major remodel by the early 1990s. Some of that was necessary (for instance, the movie theater where we’d had such interesting ‘practice dates’ would suffer a roof collapse sometime soonish), but most of it was bringing it up to modern standards.

Much better than what was happening to Northwest Mall, though. It would be a nearly abandoned, mostly derelict structure within a decade or so, with only a few businesses using exterior entrances remaining.

That, in turn, reminded me of Ms. Lin and her very good Chinese restaurant in a very bad location. If I could, I wanted to help her. It wouldn’t be soon, but perhaps one day I could.

In the meantime, the subject was Candice and Sherry. Sherry was pumped up about the game and convinced UH was going to win. None of us were particularly confident about A&M, so she pretty much won that discussion by default. I’m not sure that satisfied her completely, but sometimes you take what you can get.

Beyond football, she didn’t have a lot positive to say about UH. I was pretty sure that she wasn’t very attached to it so far. They spent quite a bit of time talking about her transferring next year, assuming Candice received a scholarship to go somewhere else.

A&M seemed to be a favorite, largely on the strength of them knowing us and our having a residence to offer. They even tentatively discussed a spring trip to visit if things were looking good.

I didn’t see us being super close with them. Friends, but not family, not in the way the six of us were becoming ‘family.’ Telling Candice the big secret was almost certainly not in the cards. She’d only spent a semester with us and just didn’t have the context to be asking big questions.

And, if Candice was out, Sherry was that much more unlikely. We knew her, we liked her, we were happy to spend time with her, but there were many people who’d be ahead of Sherry on the list, if there was a list.

Things could change, of course, but I doubted they would change that much. Perhaps if someone slipped and said entirely the wrong thing at the wrong time, or perhaps if it became necessary in some way, but we already had plenty of close friends who didn’t know and would never know.