A long overdue thank you
Dear Professor….
This email will come out of the blue, but I’ve thought of you a number of times today. Back in the spring of 1989, I took your Freshman Seminar on the reading of fiction. I was, at the time, wholly closeted — I’d come out to myself, right as I finished high school, but through my first year at Cornell, I remained silent about being gay, scared in particular by the juvenile homophobia of the other freshmen in the North Campus suite where I’d assigned temporary housing. Although I found a room of my own, as it were, a safe, single room in Dickson Hall after three or four weeks, I kept my secrets to myself for the rest of freshman year.
There are all sorts of things I remember from your seminar more than two decades later, from my first exposure to Flannery O’Connor & Leo Tolstoy to a stern warning from you about plagiarism (I can assure you of my innocence, although as I teach students about academic integrity and as I prosecute plagiarism myself, I keep in mind your balance of tone and judicious decision making). I also remember the first guy with whom I got involved; I met him in that seminar, as you assigned us to read & critique each other’s papers. That, though, is a story for another day.
But the thing I remember most of all from English 270 is Blue Jeans Day. In a stark contrast to your professorial attire, I remember the blue jeans jacket you wore, expressing your open support for lesbian and gay rights. For a closeted eighteen-year-old, that gesture was an invaluable lifeline, a promise that I was not entirely alone, a hint that, as we might say today, it would get better.
I cracked open the closet door as a sophomore, and by midway through my junior year, I’d come all the way out. Skip forward to 2010, and (notwithstanding the B+ I got in that challenging Freshman Seminar) I’m teaching my own Freshman Seminar at Harvard. Today, wearing purple in support of the queer youth driven to suicide by bullying, I had the distinct sense of paying your kindness forward, for whatever first-year students or whomever else might take some comfort in this act. So I figured the least I could do was to thank you directly as well, for the smallest yet most important of moments more than two decades ago.
With deep gratitude,
Ian Lekus
Tags: cornell, lgbt rights, teaching
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
