Free Party of One by Dave Holmes Page B

gay, and no, I had no ulterior motives in telling him. The only thing that’s changed between the two of us is that our friendship has grown that much stronger. I’m not saying it’s always going to be that easy for you, but it will always be that gratifying.
    You’d be surprised how open-minded your friends can be, and you won’t believe how great it feels to have that weight off your shoulders. This may be hard to accept, but you’ll never be “straight.” You can, however, be straight with your friends about your sexuality, and that’s about the most admirable thing I can think of.
    I didn’t set out to change the world with this letter but I hope I’ve changed some people’s outlook on things a little bit. Homosexuality will always be an issue. Just because Holy Cross is so conservative doesn’t mean it should be swept under the rug here. I hope I’ve created something that will be debated among friends, something that can be talked about honestly and unapologetically. I sincerely hope that in the future, when the subject of homosexuality is discussed, all people here can take the steps either to come out of the closet, or to make it easier for others to do so. Maybe then, we can all talk about it the way we talk about other issues. Let’s hope it’s more than twice in the next 148 years.
    Gay at the Cross
    Please know that I am now, having typed that out in 2016, in a full-body cringe. But in 1991, I read it proudly, as though some smarter person had written it. I went over it again and again. I had done it. I was ready to see how the rest of the world would respond.
    People responded in one of two ways:
    1. They read it and paid attention to how closely and eagerly I listened when I asked their feelings about it. Immediately, they put two and two together like the international bright young things they were, said they were proud of whoever wrote it, and then had the grace to act surprised when I told them it was me. Or:
    2. They read it, and assumed it had been written in jest. There were more than a few of these, and it stopped me dead every time. I had prepared myself for every possible outcome except this one. There were people in 1991, in a school of 2600 people, who could not believe there would be
one
homosexual among them. It knocked me off my feet, like Charlie Brown getting flattened on the pitcher’s mound in a
Peanuts
cartoon.
    But category two was a fraction of the size of category one, and I began to tell a few friends, and then they told a few friends, because that’s the way a small college works, and then suddenly I was out. People knew. It was a
thing.
Someone would come up to me in a bar and say: “Dave, I think my little brother is gay; what should I do to make him feel comfortable enough to tell me?” And I would answer: “What is your name?”
    Being out ended up being a nonissue. We were learning to be good little Catholics at Holy Cross, acknowledging but never really talking about the hard stuff.
    The letter got the Chaplain’s Office talking. Holy Cross is run by the Jesuits, a progressive order of priests (as orders of priests go), and it turned out they were waiting for someone to bring the issue to their doorstep. What they decided to do was issue a poll, through students’ PO boxes, about sexual issues. Are you sexually active? Do you use contraception? How would you describe your sexuality: homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual? The poll was a little intrusive and clumsy, but what are you going to do with celibates? I filled mine out, folded it up, sent it back through the mail, and began actively counting the minutes until the results would be published.
    I went to a meeting of the Campus Activities Board, and someone pulled that poll out from their backpack, and my friend Ana took a close look at it, and said, “Oh, no.”
    “What?” I said.
    “I made a mistake on this,” she said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “See here where it says, ‘How would you describe