Coming In Loud and Queer
| Coming In Loud Starting Out |  |
by Joel Nichols
I’m about to graduate from college. My friends and I are at the gates of decision, no longer under the protection of classes, University-owned housing, work-study jobs, and unending time to just “hang out.” Now graduating seniors scramble to find apartments and jobs or to figure out how to pay for graduate school.
Many of us are lucky – never again will we have such a clean slate to work with. Twenty-one-year olds can move back in with their parents or head off for adventure in American Samoa and few people will fuss. After all, youth and lack of establishment (no house, no kids, etc.) enable freedom of movement and experimentation. Of course, this freedom applies only to people with privilege, of whom there are few.
I’ve had to come to terms with privilege. At Wesleyan University, I was surrounded by kids who took theirs (and what they imagined was mine) for granted. Few students there come from backgrounds that are actually working class; across the board, nearly everyone comes from middle- and upper-class families. Funnily enough, the average, politically-progressive Wesleyan student or professor will accept that you’re poor if you’re Black or Latino, but a white boy from Vermont? Especially one who identifies with the overtly political and economically elite term “queer,” never.
Yet, from the other direction, I hold more privilege than most. Begrudgingly, I have to admit that having a B.A. begins to call my own working-class status into question. Above I wrote about the wonderful freedom of graduating from college, but, in fact, the majority of people in the country do not graduate from college and many 21-year olds have kids to clothe and feed and mortgages to pay.
So here I am, in the middle. I’m not working two jobs to pay rent, but I also do not have the luxury of being able to move to New York and “find a job when I get there.” Tens of my peers plan to do exactly that. Their parents will pay for rent and give them money for food and they just have to make sure something is lined up eventually work-wise so they have enough money to go out and have fun.
Then there’s the case of the student who’s moving home for the summer because he or she has not found a job ahead of time and has no idea where to look. Most people I know are in this category, but it’s not as cut-and-dried as it looks. I’m talking now about people who want to move in with their parents after graduation.
These kids, who are excited to live at home, are from cool cities or nice suburbs. Their parents have big, beautiful houses and live well. If my parents lived in a luxury apartment in Manhattan or had a house on Haight Street in San Francisco, I would have probably never even gone to college in the first place.
Other people who move home don’t do it because of mom cooking is easier than doing it yourself, or because there’s a pool and free cable. Most of us do it because there’s no other choice. When a boy has no money and needs to both survive and save some, he has to move back to the ranch (house) on Lovers’ Lane and shack up with his parents.
My parents are easy-going and more tolerant of my noise, mess, bad habits, and odd hours than many of my friends’ parents, but moving back in with them is a shock to my system anyway. My geography has changed from sharing a large house with 3 other students in a neighborhood surrounded by other people my age and my own phone line to a small house in Brandon where privacy is nil and neighbors and activity are non-existent.
Not to mention I need a summer job. Now that I’ve bitched for about 700 words, let me come clean. I’m not a complete lost cause because I won a fellowship to study in Germany next year. In September, I move to Berlin to research queer cultural formation and its relationship to early sexology. I still have to move out from underneath a security blanket and find housing and meet new people, but I’m supported by the fellowship.
This summer, though, I’m back at home. While hundreds of thousands of high-school and college graduates start out their lives, I’ll start mine, too, back in the same place where it began the first time.
Joel graduated on May 26th and does, in fact, live on Lovers’ Lane in Brandon.