Terras Irradient: Give Light to the World
I’ve been doing a lot of travelling and reflection during the past week, and this is why it’s taken me so long to post again on this blog. This weekend I officially became a graduate of Amherst College, and it seems appropriate to take some time to speak on how transformative my four years of college (three of which I have spent at Amherst) have been to me as a person. The transformation was wide-ranging, but coming to terms with my sexuality was no small part of it; this is why I see my blog as a fitting platform for such musings.
I came to Amherst in late 2005, after a fifteen-month odyssey whose final objective seemed delusional when I had started. To those around me, and to me as well, getting into an American college or university, and with generous funding, sounded like something I was not entirely cut out for. I was actively discouraged by some of my teachers, and only passively discouraged by most others. I had always been a good student, but never quite the academic star; as far as the Romanian higher education system was concerned, I bore the stamp of intellectual mediocrity. And that stamp would have undoubtedly become destiny, were it not for that decision I took in June 2004, to delay going to university for a year, and focus on one thing and one thing only: getting into a Liberal Arts program.
As I have already hinted, at the time my decision seemed crazy, and deep down I had little faith in my own chances. Yet I carried on with it, for one reason. Deep down I also realized I needed to run away from that country. I had felt traumatized by the tight regimen of repression I had imposed upon myself throughout the past six years. Every gay joke, every feeling of guilt, every shudder at the thought that the outside world might discover my “terrible secret,” all of them had slowly eaten away at whatever determination to stay I had ever had.
It would be disingenous out of me to say these were the only reasons that drove me to American academia. Migration researchers like to speak of push and pull factors. My repressed sexuality was only one of the “pushes.” Even more salient were the material conditions of higher education in my home country, and the bleak career prospects I felt I would have faced. Compounding everything was Romanian intellectual parochialism and insularity. I had a queasy feeling reading Romanian intellectual journals, namely that the writers were obsessed with one thing and one thing only: their own country. I won’t belabor the point any more, else I risk comitting the same sin of cultural self-absorbtion.
“Push” factors, those things drawing me to America were just as strong as what drove me away from Romania. The Liberal Arts model, emphasizing k nowledge for knowledge’s sake was a major attraction. The idea of participating in collegiate life, of being part of a small, tight-knit four-year long intentional community devoted primarily to learning also played a large part in my decision. Last but not least, having access to the kind of academic resources a Liberal Arts education could provide — huge open-stacks libraries, approachable professors, state-of-the-art labs — was yet another factor making my seemingly delusional decision nonetheless a very clear one.
How and why I got into Amherst is still a mystery to me, even though I have spoken several times to the very admissions officers who took the decision to let me in. Before hearing the good news about Amherst (on March 7, 2005 — I remember that day vividly — I had already been rejected twice by two lesser-ranked schools I had chosen through “Early Decision.” Not surprisingly, I had grown quite despondent by that time, and I was happy at least I was going somewhere — the International University of Bremen (now Jacobs University) — but was not entirely sure how I could afford to go there, given that the state of their finances only allowed for bare-bones financial aid for their students. I did not manage to “compute” getting into Amherst for a long time: I only fully realized it once I got to campus.
I have mentioned my sexuality in passing mostly because it was nothing more than a passing thought at the time. I had grown up telling myself I was “straight,” and was not ready to accept anything different. Part of it was my own internalized homophobia, but another part of it was a genuine (and I believe well-founded) fear of the consequences of coming out for a high-school student with big dreams. But my life went into fast-forward the summer before college. I got into contact with an old team-mate, D., a brilliant American of strange ways, who was now getting ready to go to an Ivy League school himself. Somehow aware of Eastern European homophobia, D. thanked me for “tolerating his obviously homosexual ways.” I jumped at the opportunity to tell him that while my ways may not be as obvious, I was also “a little bisexual,” or whatever euphemism I felt comfortable with using at the time when speaking about my sexuality. A long discussion ensued and somehow he made me feel more comfortable with myself — the truth is I wanted to be, I was ready for a change — and I took then the decision to finally come out to myself and eventually to the world.
This first coming out would repeat itself tens of times when I finally got to Amherst, and the conversations would get progressivelly less awkward, though they would never lose their essential strangeness. Even though I had expected a tolerant atmosphere, I was surprised by how ordinary being queer was. “Dude, I’m from San Francisco” was the surprised answer my straight male roommate gave to me when I came out to him, visibly scared of how he migth feel sharing a room with “a gay.” Every such reaction — and they were many, by far outnumbering the hateful stares I was afraid of getting — every such shrug off in front of the meaning of whatever the “news” may mean progressively contributed to the construction of a positive identity for myself. I discovered what “pride” was all about at Amherst.
The last piece of the coming out puzzle was telling my family. I feared nothing more than my parents’ rejection, and I spent an entire year preparing for two half-hour conversations I would eventually have with them. Eventually I had those two conversations, and they went much better than I could have eventually anticipated. My parents proved to be the loving, understanding people I felt they would turn out to be when faced with the news, but up to the very moment I came out to them I was constantly fearing the worst, my family disowning me, which I had learned was thankfully uncommon but not unheard of for queer Romanian youth.
Before long I had also learned about the social disadvantages of being gay at Amherst. There were not a lot of out guys, and there wasn’t much of a scene to speak of. I have always felt extremely awkward about the hook-up culture, and I felt I couldn’t get into it both because I found it utterly unattractive and because I had limited social skills when it came to engaging in such awkward-by-necessity interactions. By the end of my Amherst career I had been through two comitted relationships, but both of them were long-distance; Amherst came to feel isolating and the interactions with the rest of the queer community were marred by a strange bout of cabin fever, the kind of off-limits feeling you develop when someone feels too close for comfort.
This is essentially the only regret I have about Amherst. It was no perfect institution, but otherwise I can hardly find enough superlatives to speak of my experience. In four years I was able to delve deep into whatever caught my attention at the time — German, American Studies, U.S. History, Post-colonialism, and eventually Sociology and Statistics. It is stereotypical to speak of all the intellectual conversations I have had in four years of college, of all the great people I have met and the few good friends I made, but nonetheless I feel like I must do it, because this was the essence of my Amherst experience.
After that first year, once the news of my difference had made the rounds, and the novelty worn off, I felt finally liberated. There were no more awkward conversations to be had. Everyone knew. And for most parts everyone was comfortable with it. I will not speak of the exceptions, because they would be few, and I would not like to speak unflatteringly of any of my former classmates no matter their beliefs about me. And with these exceptions I learned I could live; in the end the world will never be as accepting as you’d like it to be.
Even though I was interested in all things social, I did not want to study sexuality while at Amherst for the simple reason that I felt I could not have enough distance to analyze the subject. Instead I became engrossed in the study of race in America and elsewhere, out of the same impulse to reflect upon my own difference and social marginality in general. I had had a great time being engrossed into this field, though studying a subject on which probably tens of thousands of books have been written has not come without its frustrations. The complications of race have been humbling to me as a scholar, and if I have learned one thing it is how limited the scope of real change can be.
The lesson of Amherst has been that while change may have limits, those limits are worth pushing. Terras Irradient (”give light to the world”) may seem like a haughty motto, but I have become convinced of how important its pursuit is. The danger is to think that you and only you have the light to begin with, and to act to patronize the rest of the world in your quest to illuminate it. Even though the world needs to be enlightened, about queer issues and many even more important things, the light does not have to come from one source only. My mission cannot be to formulate a universal truth emanating from my inherently limited thinking, but rather to pursue the truth through honest dialogue with others. This is why I chose to write this essay.
This means I took fahbulous pictures, the best of which are available over