Chapter 1: Student Orientation
Saturday, August 5, 1995
Matt Griffith did not want to enroll at Midwest Christian University. His desires did not matter, though. The only person whose opinion mattered in this decision was Matthew Griffith, Sr., who wanted the family legacy carried forward through a third generation.
Matt knew there was a second, unspoken reason driving his father’s stubbornness: his father hoped that MCU would make his son more manly in the only way that counted.
Never mind that Matt was a star soccer player who had carried his high school team to the state championship. What mattered was that five years earlier, when he’d been thirteen years old, he had “allowed” himself to be molested by their church’s youth pastor. “Real men,” even teenaged not-yet-men, would have fought off such advances. That belief and the shame it birthed had forced the family to flee Enid, Oklahoma, costing Matthew Griffith, Sr., a coveted promotion at the nearby Vance Air Force Base.
Matt’s father had never forgiven his son for having been molested. He bore no such ill will towards the church that had hired the youth pastor, nor the larger denomination itself to which he still tithed ten percent of his income.
It was no surprise, then, that Matt found himself checking into MCU alone. All around him were families who were escorting their sons or daughters to college. The dads unloaded suitcases and boxes from cars and pickups and trundled them to the various dorms. Moms helped unpack or sat through parent orientation meetings.
Had Matt’s father been there, he would have cut quite the figure with his military haircut and bearing, making sure that all listeners knew he was an officer in the Air Force. He would have garnered even more attention once he “let slip” that he was second generation legacy, which he most certainly would have done. Such status might seem laughable to ivy league snobs, but to the 50,000 Oklahomans who were members of the Fundamentalist Churches of the Carpenter (fCOC) and who considered themselves the only real Christians in the state, legacy graduates were minor celebrities.
Matt lugged his belongings to his room in Faith Hall. He had expected—maybe even looked forward to having—a roommate. The housing director had explained, though, that as a favor to Mr. Griffith, Sr., Matt would have the room to himself.
Matt wondered whether his father’s request had more to do with removing temptation from his faggot son or had simply provided an excuse to flaunt his celebrity status with the housing director and gain his son a privilege forbidden to all other freshmen.
Probably both.
The room wasn’t an official single, Faith Hall being a freshman dorm, and only upperclassmen being entitled to such a privilege. The room had the standard two twin beds stacked in an “L” shape, two built-in study desks, and two small closet areas.
Matt unpacked, made his bed, and hooked up his TV and room phone. He tried calling home, but the call went straight to the answering machine.
He heard, from the hall outside his room, introductions, nervous laughter, and stilted conversations—dormmates and roommates meeting and mingling. He was relieved to not be part of it.
The noise abated around 5:00 p.m. as everyone else headed to the freshman mixer. First stop: picnic on the lawn.
Matt wasn’t hungry. Besides, he had one remaining task, hanging the poster of the Dallas Cheerleaders.
He didn’t give a shit about the Dallas Cheerleaders. He knew he was gay, had known it since before he was molested. If 1990 had played out differently, if he hadn’t been molested, setting in motion a train of events almost as traumatic as the rape itself (his mother piecing the story together and treating him like a leper, his dad going psycho and threatening conversion therapy), Matt would have found the courage to come out, hoped he would have anyway—probably no later than his sixteenth birthday. As it was, though, with the shame and the blame, he’d lost his nerve. He’d resorted to pretending to be straight—in word and deed.
Until now.
He was done with the myriad sins of commission required to perpetuate the lie that he was straight—talking about girls, affirming his church’s teachings against homosexuality, and, most importantly, either stating that he was straight or denying that he was gay.
He couldn’t afford to come out at MCU, where doing so would get him expelled—not just from school, but from his family as well. Openly gay Matt would be homeless, Jeepless, and penniless.
He had no choice but to serve out his four-year sentence here.
He could take a baby step, though, towards coming out. He’d thought this through. Sadly, he would have to maintain the affectation of being straight (dress, mannerisms, the poster). But he would no longer say things to perpetuate that lie. This baby step, switching to sins of omission, seemed the only way to thread the needle between the harsh reality of surviving in MCU’s hyper-homophobic environment and coming out.
Taking that baby step was hard enough, like jumping off a bridge into blackness, freefalling.
His entire life had unfolded in small towns where a conservative Christian worldview was on a perpetual feedback loop of church, school, and family—all of them working in tandem to reinforce Christian heteronormativity as the only acceptable lifepath.
What little anyone knew of the larger world was filtered through the lenses of the three major TV networks.
He knew that gays existed in big cities like San Francisco, where they were all dying of AIDS.
“Fag” and “queer” were insults boys hurled at each other as if that were the worst thing imaginable, yet none of them had ever met a real, breathing one—“fag,” that is.
As far as Matt could tell, coming out in Oklahoma involved no yellow brick road, no friendly fellow travelers—the one exception being the University of Oklahoma where he had wanted to enroll. Now, he would have to stumble his way to Oz—alone.
So, yeah, for now the Dallas Cheerleaders would besmirch his wall. If their presence bought him a pass from his dormmates’ whispered questions about his sexuality, it would be worth it.
He checked his watch: 5:45 p.m. He couldn’t delay any longer. He had to go to the freshman mixer—not only because it was mandatory, but also because he wanted to test a hypothesis.
