Excerpts from the book "Queer man from the campus"

Queer Man on Campus: A History of Non-Heterosexual College Men, 1945-2000
by Patrick Dilley

Excerpts from Chapter 1, page 1

When I was in the fourth grade, sitting alone at home one afternoon, I was perusing the World Book Encylopedia set we kept in the den. I looked up sex and read about the physiological facts and functions. I dutifully studied -- a prospective researcher even then -- each cross-reference. I came across an entry in the H volume. As I read it, I thought, "that is talking about me and why I like boys." That moment, for me and for others first naming of a part of themselves that they could not convey before learning new names, was a powerful experience.

Three years later, the winter of my thirteenth birthday, my family vacationed in the Florida Keys. A grandson of one of my mother's friends arrived a few days later. karl was dramatic in a 1940s Joan Crawford way, dressed a la Truman Capote (long knitted scarf and gloves, even in Florida), and a yeaqr older than I. I knew, immediately, he was like me, "not like the other kids," but I did not understand how or why I knew that. We found a fast rapport. Although the detalis of our lives were dissimilar, we shared a particular meeaning of the world in which we felt trapped: snared by high school bullies, bny small tous na dminds, by our inability to replace those bourgeois tragedies with the dramas adn comedies we wanted. that night was the first time I ever stayed wawake the entire neight, as we lay on the floor, watching and listening to the waves of the ocean, telling our stories about our Midwestern adolescennce in the dark.

The researcher I have become recognizes the patterns that form my life evidence in those moments. I continue to study identity, particularly of people "not like the others," who are sexually and emotinoally drawn to members of the same gender. I still listen to their stories, asking questions, comparing adn contrasting the tales I gather. College life== the extracurricular activities in which I participated, the topics I chose to study, the professional focus I devloped -- huilt upon both aspects of my idetnity -- as a non-heterosexual male and as a scholar of identity and higher education. The two aspects are inter-twined: without one, the other makes little sense on hits own.

(Source: http://www.amazon.com/Queer-Man-Campus-Non-Heterosexual-1945-2000/dp/0415933366#reader_0415933366)