Time Marches On

I graduated high school 25 years ago today. Now, I look back on a bittersweet anniversary.

I graduated from high school twenty-five years ago today, on June 28, 1999, a day that seems both impossibly long ago and almost yesterday. I tend not to think about it much these days, except on the big anniversaries. The day itself was long and miserable, and I nearly died, and when it was over I had only an inkling of how much had changed.

My former high school, still looking pretty much the same.

Graduation day for the Auburn High School class of 1999 was a hot, humid affair. The temperature hit 96° with high humidity, and the balloons and bunting in the school’s maroon and white colors seemed to melt in the heat. We had all been out of school a few weeks by the time we came together at the football stadium for commencement, and it was the last time we would all be gathered in one place—indeed, the last time I would ever see most of the three-hundred-some-odd classmates. We all put on our caps and gowns, maroon for boys and white for girls (or men and women, as I suppose we had then become), though the “maroon” was more of a pinkish magenta, and I remember thinking how strange that they were the same color as the ones in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s graduation day apocalypse, which had aired a few weeks earlier. The school selected the cheapest, plastic-like gowns, which trapped the heat as the sun beat down on us. They neglected to provide any water—these were the days before everyone carried water bottles constantly.

I gave a graduation speech to a thousand or more people, and being me, I filled it with the apocalyptic prophecies that were supposed to fall on us in succession, from Nostradamus’s predicted disaster of July 1999 to the Millennium and the fictitious Maya Apocalypse of 2012. We were supposed to overcome those horrors to a glorious future. We got different apocalypses instead.

When the speeches ended, and everyone had handed the principal a shiny new 1999 penny (and a wad of gum from one joker’s mouth), I was already feeling ill from the heat. I shook hands with friends and hugged them and posed for photos with some of them—among the few photos of me to survive from that time—and when I got home, I passed out from a heat stroke, convinced I was dying. Obviously, I did not die, but my life did flash before my eyes.

It is no surprise that like many people I found adolescence difficult, but I had special challenges that made it harder, only some of which I can write about even now since there are still too many people who would be upset or embarrassed. Too, I need to remember that people around the world are reading this, and I shouldn’t name names or provide too many identifying details—at least not until someone commissions a memoir.

I was a lonely child who got dealt a poor hand. Gay, neurodivergent, academically gifted but athletically untalented—I was designed to have nothing in common with my peers. Middle school had been unpleasant. I was tested several times to determine if I were gifted or retarded, as they called it back then. I developed a crush on a boy, though I didn’t quite understand that was what was happening, and he seemed to like me back. He saw how I struggled with gym class and tried to make it better. I can remember writing his name in my notebook, like any kid with a first crush. But that sort of thing wasn’t allowed in those days, so the adults tried to keep us separated, and one day he was gone, and no one would tell me what happened. An older boy cornered me in an empty locker room, and, perceiving me to be gay, threatened to kill me and would have tried had a gym teacher not walked in. So, I learned to speak and stand and walk the “right” way.

In high school, I tried to try to become a better version of myself, but it wasn’t easy. I always wondered what it was like for the kids who had teachers and coaches who served as mentors and guides. I never had that. I have only two memories of anything a teacher ever said to me. The first was a pompous English teacher who thought he was paying me a compliment when he told me that he believed I was a space alien sent to earth to observe humanity. The other was the faculty supervisor of the National Honor Society who yelled at me for efficiently setting up an assembly line to quickly make food baskets for those in need because, apparently, the goal wasn’t to feed the unhoused but for students to spend a fixed number of hours filling the baskets.

I faced an almost impossible task trying to mask not just my sexuality but also my neurodivergent quirks, and I know that left me seeming aloof and stiff. It was the best I could do in a time when it was common for kids to wish gay people dead and to threaten to use violence if they ever encountered one. There was an ever-present fear that in saying the wrong thing, I might be found out. I became good at distracting from myself, and it took a very long time for me to make real friends. Sophomore year, a very popular boy befriended me in a formless, ramshackle health class we had together, and the excessive free time the incompetent teacher provided made the difference. With his help and support, I grew enormously over the next few years, learned better social skills, and came close to having some of the normal experiences of high schoolers. I remember writing in his yearbook “thanks for lending me a social life,” and I knew then as now that it wasn’t really a joke. We went to college together, and as our lives gradually drifted apart during those four years, I learned how much I had lived in his shadow. But, if I can be funny and charming, it is because of the skills I built in those years.

By the time I graduated high school, I had a good number of friends and acquaintances and could easily be mistaken for one of the gang, and at the round of graduation parties that followed—at one, a mistake that turned a maroon-trimmed cake pink led to many gay jokes—we all promised to stay in touch long after we had all gone to college and moved away. I didn’t believe them, and with rare exception, the only time I ever saw any of them again was at our ten-year high school reunion. (There was one guy who unexpectedly reached out, only to reveal he had become evangelical and wanted to berate me for my homosexual “sin” and offer Jesus’ help.) I can’t really blame anyone for that. I wasn’t able to share enough of myself back then, which was the result of my limitations, my fears, and the oppressive culture of the time.

Looking back is bittersweet. Things are so much different now, personally and culturally. Sometimes, I wish I had been born twenty years later, when it might not have been so hard. And yet sometimes I miss being young and the experiences one only has in youth. I just wish I had been able to have more of them.