The Speech

The time I half-intentionally outed myself in my college rhetoric class.

It was early afternoon in the summer of 2006, the summer after my second year at Patrick Henry College, and I was sitting in a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Three reporters from the Washington Post Style section looked across the table as I expound on the differences between the film and novel versions of The Devil Wears Prada. As a journalism student, I had found Anne Hathaway’s job as an assistant at Runway, a fictional version of Vogue, far more exciting than her self-pitying, moralistic—though admittedly very sexy—boyfriend. 

“I hated how the movie made her look bad for caring about her job,” I said. “Her boyfriend was really annoying.”

I don’t remember what we ate or anything else about the conversation, but I can still feel the reporters’ eyes riveted to me as I a spoke. I suspected that, like my college classmates, they were interpreting me in a way I rejected, a way that made me uncomfortable. I knew one of the reporters was gay—in fact, he might have been the first openly gay man I had ever talked to. The omnipresent gender policing practiced at PHC had made me aware that liking movies about fashion magazines was not something heterosexual men did, or admitted to doing. I liked it for the journalism, I had told myself, but I knew I had also reveled in the bitchy dialogue and rich depictions of couture and designer jeans in both the film and in Lauren Weisberger’s novel. I had read and re-read the parts of the book about James, an editor at Runway whose homosexuality is never openly referenced in the film, where his character is played by Stanley Tucci. “He was butt-ass naked on my couch by eleven, and boy let me tell you,” James gushes to his coworkers about the “future husband” he picks up in a bar. I tried to imagine what the future husband looked like, and then pictured him sprawled, nude, on a blood-red couch.

I knew the reporters probably assumed I was gay, and even had an inkling that their colleague, who was writing a book about PHC, had brought me to meet them as much to get me out of my fundamentalist bubble as to make contacts in the industry. I had once joked to her about a classmate who dressed colorfully and spoke in a high-pitched Southern drawl, the sort of person PHC’s Darwinian social culture had taught me to make fun of in order to protect myself. She had raised an eyebrow as we walked across the blue-carpeted dining hall. “You think he’s gay? He’s just a very Southern type to me. There’s ... other people I wonder more about.” I guessed, in the never-alighting, half-conscious state I was cultivating to cope with my life, aware and deliberately unaware at the same time, that she was talking about me. 

Patrick Henry College was a tiny oasis from the world nestled unobtrusively outside the District of Columbia, where the northern Virginia suburbs gave way to bucolic, wealthy small towns. When I arrived in August 2004, PHC hadn’t yet become famous for producing high-profile figures in the Bush and Trump administrations, but was beginning to attract attention: a few months earlier, it had been profiled in a front-page story in the New York Times headlined “College for the Home-Schooled is Shaping Leaders for the Right.” PHC’s campus still felt makeshift, an improbable setting for the deluge of international media attention it was about to receive: a single red-brick building that mimicked the style of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello sat atop a circular driveway that snaked off to one side, winding along a row of five small dorms placed around a nondescript pond students called Lake Bob.

PHC was founded by Michael Farris, a right-wing lawyer and political activist who had made his name aggressively opposing government regulation of homeschooling, which fundamentalist Christians like him and my parents saw as crucial to raising a new generation to, as it was frequently put around PHC, “lead the nation and shape the culture.” Aiming to attract products of far-right homeschool debate leagues and “worldview” camps with which Farris’ Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) had a symbiotic relationship, PHC was explicitly elitist, touting its grueling academics and mission of producing conservative Christianity’s best and brightest. Farris’ vision, he liked to say, was that “an Academy Award winner will walk down the aisle to accept his trophy. On his way, he’ll get a cellphone call; it will be the President, who happens to be his old Patrick Henry roommate, calling to congratulate him.”

It didn’t take long for rumors about my sexuality to take flight. “Everybody thinks you’re gay, by the way,” my roommate, Jack, reported one day, coming back into our room.

I tried to swallow my panic. “Who?”

Jack rehashed a conversation between several guys I didn’t know that amounted to banal homophobic banter. I felt helpless. The idea that I might be gay itself still didn’t upset me, because of course I wasn’t. But clearly an impression of me that I couldn’t control was spreading, and I sensed with rising desperation that other people might collectively create a version of me different from the official version established in my head. And if they all saw the same thing, could I be the one who was wrong? Disconnected fragments of my young life started sliding toward each other like magnets across a metal surface. My mom instructing me, over and over, to “stop crossing your legs,” or to “sit like a man.” Begging me not to wear a particularly trendy shirt to a family Easter event. “Why can’t just you dress normal?” Another relative: “Women get their hair ‘done.’ Men get their hair cut.”

I don’t remember the specific offenses against heterosexual masculinity I had committed in the eyes of Jack’s friends, but I resolved to walk straighter and more rigidly, and to try to make sure my voice was as deep as possible. One more problem with my voice to add to the list. My deep Southern accent had been almost immediately been parodied by classmates from California and the Midwest, so I was studying my own phonetics, isolating the sounds I made differently from them. I practiced a softer, more rounded ah-ee when pronouncing “I” words like white and right, instead of the harsh, blunt Southern ahh. Having to police my own movements and voice compounded the stress of being on my own for the first time, being crammed into a tiny dorm room with slovenly roommates, taking classes that were far more intellectually demanding than I was used to, and, above all, trying to relate to a real social group for the first time. On top of that, I felt I was deficient in my basic makeup as a person. I had so much catching up to do, so much about myself to change.

Before lunch, we had stopped by the Post newsroom to meet Anne Hull, another reporter whose long, deeply-reported series on gay teenagers in “real America” had appeared in the Style section two years earlier, during my first days at PHC. She had rich, golden-brown hair that looked feathery, and wore a flowing linen outfit. Her colleagues told her I was a journalism student and had enjoyed her series. As we chatted—again, I have no recollection of what was said—I wondered if she was the first lesbian I had ever spoken to, and what she was thinking about me.

Two years into college, I had gotten used to living with the sense that others interpreted me in a way I considered unfair and untrue. I might never have known about Anne’s series on rural gay teenagers if not for an upperclassman who had recommended it to me after a dinner conversation, probably because he guessed there were parallels with my own story. I went from the dining hall directly downstairs to the library, deliberately slowing my steps to disclaim my anxious curiosity. I shuffled through the stack of recent copies of the Post, past the latest installments of “Young and Gay in Real America” that were promoted on the paper’s front page. I glanced over the paragraphs, blood pounding in my head, hands trembling. Then I found the opening story: “In the Bible Belt, Acceptance is Hard Won.” I swallowed hard, making my whole body rigid the same way I would later steel myself, drawn by the same fusion of compulsion and repulsion, to watch Brokeback Mountain. Preparing to stare into the abyss.

In inhaled the first two stories, hardly stopping to catch a breath. They followed Michael Shackleford, a gay teenage boy in small-town Oklahoma, whose life was instantly recognizable to me down to the smallest details. Like his mother telling him to say clothes instead of outfits; how many countless times had I been reminded to make my innocent language conform to such gendered distinctions? (“Men get their hair cut, women get their hair done.”) Michael’s story was so simultaneously unsettling and mesmerizing that I can still, as I write this, recall lines from the article verbatim. The one about Michael lying on his back in the drive way, “fix[ing] his truck like he wishes he could fix himself,” with its suggestion of the impossibility of repair for this particular problem, pronounced a sentence whose doom seeped deep into my nervous system. There was no question that I was one of them, and maybe I couldn’t be fixed, either.

But what they were was precisely what was open to interpretation, my rational mind interjected, recovering its balance. Even though Michael’s story was familiar, especially the slowly dawning realization of my difference from other boys, I could not identify with his certainty that he was gay, how he insisted on it even in the face of his mother’s religious beliefs and tears. Michael had even had sex with another boy, something I would never have done—could never do, I thought. Parts of my life might resemble his, but I wasn’t him; I was on the side of all the people the story gently portrayed as backward and deluded, still sealed off from the reality of the outside world. I was a special student at a special college that would one day make up for the poor rednecks like Michael’s mom who sounded so helpless and uneducated in Washington Post articles, a college that was preparing us to be razor-sharp intellectuals and debaters who could articulate those same beliefs in a way no secular intellectual or liberal reporter could refute.

No, I wasn’t Michael: he had decided to be gay, and I had not. I might be something like him, but I wasn’t gay, because I hadn’t yet given in. They were the ones who had given in to the secular lie that people were born gay, rather than recognizing same-sex desire as the product of broken relationships in a fallen world. I stared at the photos of Michael, his pale skin and blond hair, the puka-shell necklace just like the one I wore, and quietly hated him. For being so much like me. For giving up, for kissing other boys, for going to a gay high school dance, a sort of thing I’d never even heard of. Looking back I might say I hated him for being brave.

I couldn’t let the gay teenagers series go. It activated all of my contradictory impulses, it attracted me and repelled me, made me want to lunge further and draw back at the same time. As a journalism student, I was learning to see the craft in article’s like Anne’s, and I could feel her skill as a storyteller moving me, making me sympathize with a character my ideological beliefs told me to reject. I felt thrilled by the power of writing to make people feel things they didn’t want to feel, to subtly influence their thinking. Even a tiny venue like PHC’s student newspaper had awakened me to the excitement of using that power for rebellion against what I was starting to see as the college’s inflexible rules and puritanical ideology. I was starting to understand that reporting stories—talking to the people I didn’t usually talk to, finding out what they were thinking and feeling—could sometimes cut through the noise of PHC’s hyper-rational culture, which could be icy and inhuman in its obsession with winning at any cost.

But then I would snap back into my PHC brain and notice that journalism like Anne’s series was exactly why America needed people like me: to use those powers for truth rather than to celebrate and humanize sinful lifestyles. There was no reason great storytellers all had to be non-Christians and have liberal politics. I suddenly had the idea of using the series as the basis of my upcoming argumentative speech for Rhetoric, a class in which we read reams of Cicero and memorized classical Greek rhetorical forms and figures of speech. At first I rejected it as too frightening a subject, too obviously close to home, given the rumors about and perceptions of me, to speak about in front of an audience. But something inside me, something I would feel over and over throughout my life, told me I had no choice: this was the story, this was authentic. It would make for better writing than anything else I could choose precisely because it terrified me, because it gripped me by the back of the neck and shook away everything false and concocted, leaving only the raw truth underneath.

My speech, the text of which is unfortunately lost to history, argued that the liberal media used sympathetic personal stories, carefully-packaged anecdotes, to induce emotion about homosexuality and drum up support for gay marriage, rather than tell the whole truth about the causes and consequences—negative, of course—of homosexuality. To bolster my argument, I deployed a column written by Daniel Okrent, the ombudsman of the New York Times, who agreed with me that his newspaper “present[ed] the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading.” The piece had been trumpeted by the right-wing media as an unusually forthright admission of the liberal media bias conservative activists had decried for decades.

But the real stakes of the speech were not its color-by-numbers conservative argument against the media’s celebration of homosexuality and promotion of same-sex marriage. They were about my own attempt to expunge the stories of gay teenagers whose lives looked so similar to my own, to reason away my own identification with and sympathy for them. I still wanted my speech, as a piece of rhetoric, to express the internal drama I felt about the series—how I was torn between the powerful empirical truth a secular journalist had captured and what I believed were the timeless, objective truths that guided my life. I decided to open by reading a long passage from the beginning of Anne’s article without identifying the source, knowing starting cold with a story about a gay teenage boy would grab my classmates’ attention and shock them. I wanted them to feel the story the way I had felt it, to shake the way I’d shaken, before I made a rhetorical turn and relieved them, the way I was trying to relieve myself, by demolishing the sympathetic emotions they might be feeling with my endlessly rehearsed rational arguments.

The night before my turn came to deliver the speech, I paced the tiny lounge of my dorm, the only private space I could find on the premises even well after midnight. I couldn’t even let myself picture myself at the front of the classroom for fear I’d stay in bed and plead illness, even take a zero on the assignment if it meant escaping the fate to which I’d sentenced myself. I held up my hastily-printed leaves and read my opening lines over and over, trying to get through them without my voice shaking. It sounded thin and helpless even in the tiny, quiet room. I had to say the word “gay” and read Michael’s quote: “I wake up and I try so hard to look at a girl. ... I tell myself I’m gonna be different. It doesn’t work.” The next morning when I said those words in class, they were going to come out in my voice, as if I were saying them about myself, because I was. +