The Gays of Eigenmann Hall

After meeting no gay people  at all (that I knew of) through high school and college, I moved to Bloomington, Indiana in 1982 to work on my M.A. in English, and within a few weeks I met four!

Four gay men right in Eigenmann Hall, the graduate student dorm, right in the 13th floor tv lounge!

Well...sort of.




1.  On Friday nights, some of the guys liked to watch The Dukes of Hazzard in the 13th floor tv lounge.  One night I knocked on the door of an optometry student named Mark to tell him it was time, and he was sitting cozily on his bed next to another guy.

 "Who's this?"  I asked, grinning.
 "My...um...brother, visiting for the weekend," Mark told me.

Yeah, right.  If I believed that, I'd believe that we were watching Dukes of Hazard to look at Cousin Daisy.

Nearly every weekend, Mark had different "brother" or "friend" visiting.  But he never actually Said the Word.




2. On the night of September 25th, I went to an adult bookstore and asked "Do you have anything gay?"  The resulting Gayellow Pages got me the number of a gay student group.  I was afraid to go to meetings, since they said that they were "monitored by the police" (I thought that being gay was illegal in Indiana).  But I did contact the group's secretary, Joseph (not his real name), a doctoral student in philosophy who lived two floors down.  He Said the Word, but thought "gay" meant "pedophile."

 "Jeff, look at that!" he exclaimed as we watched Voyagers one Sunday night. "Incredible!"

I agreed: "Wow, Jon-Erik Hexum with his shirt off!"

"What? No, not him!  What kind of self-respecting homo are you?  I'm talking about the boy!"

12 year old Meeno Peluce?

3. Joseph introduced me to Rick, a doctoral student in history.  He said he was "gay," but he tongue-lolled over women.  There's nothing wrong with being bisexual, but there's a lot wrong with  his insistence that all gay men dig women.  

One Sunday night he knocked on my door to tell me that I had missed a really good episode of One Day at a Time.  

"Why, did Max (Michael Lembeck) take his shirt off?" I asked.

"What?  Are you kidding?"  he exclaimed, flustered.  "There was a really hot close-up of Barbara (Valerie Bertinelli), cleavage and all!"

"But...she's a woman.  Why would I...."

"Who cares if you're gay or straight?  If Barbara's cleavage doesn't get you going, man, you don't have a pulse!"


4. I don't remember how I met Andrei, an engineering student from Poland.  He was on the down low: "In my country, you are expected to get married and have children, but other than that, no one cares what you do."  He would go out with his girlfriend, then call me at 2:00 am: "I'm so horny I could **** a cow!  Please come to my room!"  It wasn't hard to resist such a gracious invitation.

Honorary #5: Terry, a MFA student in theater, was flamboyantly swishy, with an overmodulated voice, fluttering hands, a fabulous wardrobe, and metrosexual hair care products.  But he claimed to be straight, and regaled the 13th floor with tales of seducing a different lady every night.

So much for Eigenmann Hall.