As A Brown University Alumnus, Let Me Say: Fuck This
A Brown alumnus recalls his time at the ‘gayest’ university and calls for the Brown community to stand united against the Trump deal.
by Sandy Ernest Allen
When I was a senior in college, at Brown, still fully closeted and wearing a kind of “straight girl” drag day and night, my very best friend was a gay guy. We lived across the street from each other and did everything together, cooked dinners, cried over our heartbreaks, went out drinking. I even drove with him home for Thanksgiving. That year he scored a dream job (in our view at least, as young drunks): Selling shots in his underwear at the big gay bar downtown.
During his shifts, I would often go sit there, upstairs, with the actual drag queens, and sip a Manhattan or whatever, while he perused the dance floor downstairs selling liquor out of test-tubes. The rest of the patrons were mostly all men and some of them would even eye me and wonder, even aloud: What was my deal? Why was I there? I often sat there with my drink, wondering the same: Why was I always most comfortable amongst queer men, in such spaces? Nowadays as an out queer man this all … makes a lot of sense.
I’d known I was trans since preschool but had stuffed this self-knowledge deep down. By the time I went to Brown, I didn’t think of myself as belonging beneath any “LGBT” type umbrella. I just had lots of gay friends, I reasoned; I just did theater. Coming from liberal Marin County, CA, I found the even-further-left politics of some of my fellow classmates a bit intimidating, especially when I’d first arrived in Providence. Now I see myself as a closeted trans person attracted to, and afraid of, my own truths.
This last week, I was in the bath on Wednesday afternoon when a friend texted a random “Just sending you hugs” sort of message. I thought for half a second and realized it probably related to the news I’d also seen … and hence I’d gotten into a bath.
The awful news I’d seen, which people have since continued messaging me about as if someone has died: In exchange for restoring $50 million of federal research funding that had been stripped away for zero reason, my alma mater Brown University has agreed to base their policy towards trans students on the president’s executive order from earlier this year (asserting the fiction that there are only two sexes, unchangeable even pre-birth). This will impact present trans and gender-nonconforming students in particular, which strikes me as callous on the university’s part. In my view, it’s unconscionable for my own former institution of higher education to have, against science, conceded trans rights, my rights, while negotiating with this abusive president.
As a Brown alum who’s trans I am … feeling all this.
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When I arrived at Brown in 2005, that fall, I was astonished for example to find my dorm had sex-integrated bathrooms on a few of the floors. This was, for reasons I couldn’t articulate then, so welcome. All year, I really liked that I showered and brushed my teeth alongside men and women both. As I recall, our bathrooms were co-ed because we voted that way, the residents of this building. Now, a full two decades further into the future, if I understand what Brown’s conceded, such an arrangement would now be banned.
I had applied early to Brown — really wanted to go there and nowhere else — in large part because of its academic freedoms and its feminist, progressive atmosphere. One popular extracurricular, non-credit course, taught by students, was called FemSex. It was on gender and sexuality and was a vestige of a certain moment in feminism activism on campus. I applied, attracted perhaps to any class that was competitive to get into. I got in second semester of my junior year as I recall — and then regretted my choice immediately. The course met at night, in the library. I liked my section’s two facilitators, both lovely people. I liked my classmates. I had a problem with … something. (I had a problem with myself.) I eventually did drop out of FemSex altogether, inventing some excuse more or less.
When I was a Brown student, I couldn’t call myself “trans”. If I had heard the word, I avoided thinking about the “trans” concept. I always avoided contemplating this topic too deeply, as pertained myself — even as it all obsessed me, inside. (Contradictions others who’ve lived closeted lives will probably understand.) Back when I was a Brown student, I didn’t call myself “queer” or “gay” because I didn’t think of myself as being “a lesbian” back then, and my views of sex and gender were stubbornly binary and retro.
In hindsight, I see myself as taking FemSex as perfectly encapsulating how lost I was then: I had long “felt trans” inside and had avoided this truth, steadfastly. And it had landed me in a room of sympathetic mostly cis women who calmly explained the (to me then totally radical sounding concept of for example) neo-pronouns. I scoffed at this, amongst other moments I recall now as a trans person and regret. I find my own childish attitudes back then about trans people to be cringe, fully ironic. I see my posturing as my attempt to protect myself from …. myself.
Often I think back to my college self and note my simultaneous closeness to and fear of my own truths. I remember my female best friend and I — until our friendship finally fell apart, in a big dramatic way — how we had this ‘hilarious bit’ we’d do where we’d take photos of ourselves kissing on the lips. I remember how when that friendship ended felt like a breakup, at least to me. I remember how I was in the historically lesbian acapella group, on campus(that’s the one that had accepted me, when I’d auditioned).
By my junior year I dropped out of said group, for reasons I couldn’t then explain but in hindsight were merely: my gender. It was just too hard to spend time with a group of just women and pretend to be one. I think about the random musicals I did, which in hindsight was probably just an excuse to hang out even more than I did with (fellow) queer men. Brown, during that 2005 - 2009 era when I attended, it was this lefty paradise, the absolute gayest (or so I felt) and I loved this about it. I really did.
During my years on campus, a frequent theme amongst student conversation was our love of our president, Ruth Simmons, given her historic presidency (as the first Black woman to head an Ivy League; she was also just a very impressive figure, born in Texas, her father a share-cropper). She’s also just a world-class orator and so many students during my time were obsessed. Also, the school was, when I matriculated, very publicly reckoning with and attempting to pay some sort of reparations for the role that enslaved people had played in its literal creation. I adored such things about my university and was proud of it.
I’ve heard through the years that Brown has changed, for the worse, and I believe the talk … I mean in terms of less student freedom, less humanities, more big-dollar donors perhaps affecting the school’s drift. These are larger trends in American higher education I witnessed at the university I attended right after Brown, the University of Iowa.
And yet: I wonder how much the spirit of Brown remains the same. As a trans, Brown alum last week I woke up really sad, really angry … and also, deep down, hopeful. Hopeful the Brown student body, and our alumni base, will make hell — given this university’s longstanding, disproportionate embrace of queer students and this extremely off-brand capitulation to fascist anti-trans hate.
I do hope all cis alumni who’re my allies will give this Brown administration hell as well. I hope you’ll speak up, use your voice to stand up for the values I know many of us do share. I hope the administrators realize the cruelty of this decision — to further target and isolate Brown’s own trans students, during this already terrifying time to be a trans American, let alone a young one.
I’ve had people this week speculating at me in terms of what motivated Brown to sell out trans students and I have answered: It doesn’t matter. in my view. If it looks like a bully and walks like a bully and talks like a bully …
Same goes for democrats who sell out trans people, even gay and trans ones. I don’t care candidly what excuses are given for their behavior, what lies they tell themselves or their credulous audiences. Same goes for my cis colleagues in media who do work that harms my community, even when lots of us object as loudly as we can. Their cruel actions betray their lack of actual values — and in my view, that is all that matters.
Sandy Ernest Allen is an author, essayist and journalist whose work focuses on mental health and gender from a human rights perspective.