by Jacob Tobia
The rest of the day, which I spent running around campus in heels, was earth-shattering in that it was almost uneventful. After leaving my dorm, I headed to the dining hall to meet my friends for breakfast and got pretty much nothing but praise. I wasn’t just daring for wearing high heels; it seemed that I was downright inspirational and, in the context of nerd camp, kind of cool. It went by like a dream. Friend after friend stopped to take pictures with me and my shoes. People exclaimed at my ability to walk in heels that were so high without falling. And apparently, when I had high heels on, my scrawny legs (that had been less-than-affectionately called “chicken legs” on many occasions) were suddenly great legs. In heels, I wasn’t scrawny—I was waifish and flowing and gorgeous and glamorous. Go figure.
The affirmation I received radically shifted my consciousness. Up until that point in my life, the script had always gone like this:
ACT I: Jacob attempts to be feminine
ACT II: Jacob is chastised for being feminine
ACT III: Jacob gives up on being feminine
For the first time in my life, I realized this script wasn’t the only possible version. I started rewriting, going through drafts like:
ACT I: Jacob attempts to be feminine
ACT II: Jacob is praised for being feminine, and people realize it’s actually pretty great/interesting
ACT III: Jacob gets a book deal and a TV show
Or:
ACT I: Jacob attempts to be feminine
ACT II: Jacob is praised for being feminine and everyone is fine with it
ACT III: Jacob runs for Senate, helps pass universal healthcare and a living wage, and gets to wear one of Madeleine Albright’s brooches—on loan from the Smithsonian—to the inauguration of their sexy, handsome husband as president.
ACT IV: While maintaining their public criticality of the military-industrial complex and calling for the abolition of the American prison system as we know it, Jacob manages to be the most fabulous First Lady since Michelle Obama.
After going out on a limb and falling so many times, I was convinced that branches were designed to break. That day, the branch finally held. I didn’t fall. It didn’t break. And from my new vantage point, I saw infinite possibility.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that the day I chose to wear heels for the first time just happened to be the day that the supervisors from the North Carolina Department of Education came to assess how the program was going. Without realizing who they were, I sashayed past their table with my tray of eggs like I owned the place. What they thought, I can never be sure, but I will say this: The year after I attended, Governor’s School started getting its funding cut by the North Carolina General Assembly. The unspoken consensus of conservative legislators was that the program was basically a queer socialist liberal recruitment camp for homosexuals. I can’t know for sure whether that stereotype was wholly based on me, but if I ever found out that it was, I’d be honored.
* * *
—
As compelling as the essay was, many people in my life were apprehensive. An essay like that, an essay about wearing high heels and being the gayest thing on the planet, was seen as a big risk back in 2009. After all, Lady Gaga hadn’t come out with Born This Way, Barack Obama was still “undecided” on the question of same-sex marriage, and streaming TV basically didn’t even exist, so no one knew who Laverne Cox was yet (can you imagine?). It was a darker time, exempting the fact that Donald wasn’t smashing stuff in the White House yet.
My parents, more than anyone else, were hesitant—and, on a few occasions, outright angry—about my essay. They were terrified that I was destroying my life (and sabotaging any chance I had of getting into a good school) by writing about high heels. In their eyes, I was likely throwing away all my hard work over a pair of shoes.
Thankfully, my teachers were hesitantly optimistic, and they helped me tweak the essay to make it more palatable to colleges. We honed the essay so it would more adequately address the diversity prompt on the Common Application, and added paragraphs like this one:
The pain in my feet was more than simply a physical pain; it was a pain that mirrored some part of what women are subjected to each day, and each step seemed to teach me something new. With each step, I began to more seriously question what this pain meant about masculine privilege. Was this why women are often expected to be subservient? Was this why there is a glass ceiling? Was this what Susan B. Anthony was referring to when she said, “The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it”? With each step, I began to envision a world where women and men would not be confined by their gender, but liberated by it.
I think my teachers and college counselors were probably thinking, Jacob, you can write about wearing high heels for your college essays, but for the love of God, please don’t say you liked it! High heels are uncomfortable and awful and real feminism is trying to get away from high heels, okay?
And in my head I was probably like, But high heels are so cute and powerful, and yes, I may have a colonized aesthetic sensibility, but so do you, and ugh fine okay, I’ll take out the part where I write about loving how my legs looked.
So instead of writing about how sexy my legs looked in heels, I did what any self-respecting college administrator would want and added some boring neoliberal stuff about diversity, doubling down on my gay manhood in the process:
As a gay man, I understand diversity through the lens of privilege; because, in essence, diversity and privilege are diametrically opposed to one another. The presence of privilege is the absence of diversity, and conversely, true diversity can only exist after all systems of privilege have broken down. I have come to understand this through the process of coming out and through various advocacy efforts in my church, school, and larger community. I have learned that the walls of “the closet” are not composed of ignorance as much as they are built by the reality of heterosexual privilege. Thus, the closet door is the threshold between the world of privilege and the world of diversity.
(I mean, it’s good, but it’s kind of a snoozefest, right? I was eighteen years old and I sound like a forty-three-year-old VP of Student Affairs.)
Through this understanding of privilege as antithetical to diversity, I constantly strive to understand my own privilege in the name of furthering diversity. That is what I sought to do by wearing a pair of high heels for a day. Because high heels are such an emphatic symbol of feminine oppression, I sought to break down some of my own privilege as a male through wearing them. In turn, through breaking down my masculine privilege, I was able to further diversity in the community around me.
(The fact that I had to double down on my “male privilege” in order to make this essay make sense fucking sucks. Sure, there are ways in which I have had greater access to privilege because I was legally designated male at birth, but I think the whole having-to-silence-my-gender-identity-for-two-decades-of-my-life-then-being-a-gender-freak-for-the-rest-of-it thing more than accounts for that. What’s interesting, though, is that if you just replace the word privilege with identity, this part of the essay still reads true. I sought to break down not “my own privilege as a male,” but “my own identity as a male.” Through “breaking down my masculine identity,” I was in fact able to further diversity in the community around me.)
That is how I understand diversity. Diversity is not a statistic or a static state of being; rather, it is a way to approach the world around you. It constitutes the ability to deeply empathize with those around you, and the propensity to consider experiences that are not your own. It requires you to not only reconsider your preconceived notions of normality, but to truly immerse yourself in the world of another person. Diversity is an action, not a state of being, and that action is the action of sacrifice. In order to truly understand another perspective of the world, you must be willing to sacrifice the way that you are used to e
xperiencing it. You must put aside your privilege and step into the role of someone else. You must give up what you have in order to understand who you are. That is the kind of challenging and exciting diversity that I try to practice in my everyday life, and that is the kind of diversity that I will bring to a college campus.
(Okay so maybe some of that was insightful, but I was super bored by it at the time.)
As it turned out, my parents’ anxiety was completely unfounded, because girl, that essay got me into Harvard. I wrote about wearing high heels and being a total goddess and Harvard was like, “Yeah we def want this cutie in our freshman class next year!” My admissions officer at Harvard even sent me a handwritten note saying that it was one of the best college essays she’d ever read in her entire career as an admissions counselor.
It also got me into Princeton and Columbia. And a full ride at Duke. Oh, and a full ride at UNC, too. Interestingly enough, it did not get me into either Yale or Brown, Ivy League schools that are notoriously queerer than the others. Go figure. They probably had too many queens already.
Based on some bad advice and knowing nothing about how elite culture works in New York City, I ended up choosing to go to Duke on a full ride, even though Harvard would’ve been fairly affordable with financial aid. And since I am a petty and insecure person, I’ve always been grumpy about that decision because
Duke was kind of awful in a way that Harvard may not have been.
I mean don’t get me wrong, Harvard is atrocious, too. It can be a cutthroat, cruel place and as an institution it is singularly responsible for incredible inequality throughout the world. I am not endorsing Harvard here. But when choosing between fancy private schools, it’s not a question of if you’re going to go to school with assholes, it’s a question of what type of assholes you’ll go to school with. And the truth is that I find the average Harvard asshole a fraction more tolerable than the average Duke asshole: Duke assholes love money and basketball; Harvard assholes love money and books. Also, as an actual Southerner, there was something uniquely insufferable about a kid from New Jersey coming to Duke, learning to play banjo, and pretending to understand barbecue.
No one tells you that if you don’t actually go to Harvard, you don’t get to tell people that you got in.
Like, if you actually graduated from Harvard, you get to walk around with your crimson-colored, Harvard-branded dick out all day being like, “I graduated from Haaaaaaaahvahhhhd. Look at me!” even though everyone knows that graduating from Harvard doesn’t mean shit. Everyone who goes to Harvard pretty much graduates. Graduating isn’t the hard part. It’s the getting in that counts.*
But if you’re dumb like me and get in and then don’t go like a provincial queer idiot, then you don’t get to walk around parties with your dick out being like, “I went to Harvard!” You actually have to move to New York City without a job at the New Yorker already lined up, keep your dick in your pants while attending a fancy party at the Harvard Club, and then get drunk enough to start blurting out, like some insecure asshole, “Oh, I totally got into Harvard but didn’t go” in order for people to fully understand your intellectual pedigree.
Then people are always like, “Well, why didn’t you go?” and you have to be like, “Because I wasn’t a personal-brand-obsessed monster when I was eighteen so I thought I could pass the whole ‘went to Harvard’ thing up? Also I guess I didn’t realize that it might be cool to go to a school that is basically a feeder for (hiccup) SNL writers? Who even cares about Lorne fuggin Michaels (hiccup) anyway? Fuck you, Kristen Wiig, I love you (gag) so goddamn much. Alsoo I’m durnk rightnow so pease don’t makeme essplain m’self. HEY. hey. hey. y’know Kate McKinnonm isLESbian rihgt? I wann’be (retch) lebbian too—” before you run to the bathroom to avoid throwing up on the floor.
Anyway, the point is, I wrote an essay about wearing high heels and got into Harvard because of it but didn’t go because I didn’t understand elite culture. For the love of God, can someone please go update my Wikipedia page? I’m really tired of drunkenly telling people I got in. I’d rather drunkenly tell people to read my Wikipedia page and let Wikipedia do the heavy lifting.
At the time, getting into Harvard specifically because I was both super smart and super queer felt like just the validation I needed. As a queer high schooler, I was often denied the same types of validation that were afforded to my peers. I never had a boyfriend or a girlfriend. I never asked a crush to prom or was asked to prom by someone who had a crush on me. I didn’t have the unequivocal support of my church or my faith community. I didn’t see lots of people like me all over TV or in the movies. I didn’t even have the validation of being able to shop in the stores I wanted to shop in or wear the clothing I felt most comfortable in. Validations were few and far between. “Achievement” was often all that I had. I clung to it with all of my traumatized, emotionally neglected might.
That’s why affirmation from Harvard hit the spot, albeit acidly. Harvard felt like my consolation prize, granted to me in exchange for rarely feeling at home in my body or my community growing up. It was a lonely, selfish affirmation—one that few of my peers could share—but it made all the difference to me at the time.
My senior year, I didn’t go to my prom. I was spared having to hide in plain sight amid my mostly straight, mostly cis classmates while they celebrated their gender and sexuality openly. I didn’t have to spend an evening standing around in a tux that I hated, constantly being reminded of the fact that feeling sexually isolated and sexually unattractive go hand in hand. I didn’t have to spend an evening longing to be touched while I watched my friends touch one another freely.
While the rest of my friends were dancing at senior prom, I was at Harvard’s “for admitted students” weekend, watching a student fashion show and hearing a speech from Vera Wang.
That weekend, for the first time in my life, I tasted a new flavor. Wrapped in the validation of the ivory tower, protected for the first time by its toxic mantle of privilege, I finally gave myself permission to feel bitter and vindictive toward all the straight and cisgender people I grew up with. Sitting in Harvard’s Memorial Hall, listening to Vera Wang talk about her journey as an Asian American woman in the fashion world, a brooding thought flashed through my head, directed at all the people who hadn’t created space for me throughout my life, at all the people who never had to feel uncertain in their gender or isolated in their sexuality:
I made it. Take that, motherfuckers.
* * *
—
As complicated as it was, this affirmation emboldened me to start claiming my truth differently. There was a world out there that could affirm me, that could hold the full complexity of my queerness. Or so I thought.
From that emboldened, vindictive place, I was able to begin the long process of holding my church accountable for abandoning me in my time of need.
Graduation Sunday is an annual celebration for church members who are completing their education, from high school diplomas to PhDs. Each senior wears their graduation robes to the service and stands before the congregation to be celebrated. The usual sermon is replaced by senior sermons, where chosen high school seniors ascend to the pulpit to preach. It is a special moment in any young person’s church life, a send-off as you begin your journey into the adult world.
Normally, senior sermons are beautiful, indulgent, sentimental, and tearful. Or they’re poorly written, uncomfortable, and awkwardly delivered. Either way, they are the time when you say thank you to the church for everything.
But by the time I sat down to write my senior sermon, I felt hollowed out. I tried to write a sentimental sermon with soaring prose that would shine above the others. I tried to write a sermon replete with love, gratitude, and adoration. But it simply wouldn’t come. By that point, I’d been too hurt, too dismissed, too scarred by my church to leave on good terms or to let them off the hook.
When I
sat down to write, the words that flowed from my fingers scared me. Among the requisite reflections on how St. Francis United Methodist Church had helped me grow, on how much the church had taught me about myself, I wrote this:
Things haven’t always been so wonderful for me at St. Francis. As one of the very few openly gay members of this congregation, there have been times when I have needed support and have not been supported, and there have been times when I have needed to be nurtured, and not been. In many ways, as a gay Christian, I have been alone in struggling to reconcile my gay identity with my faith. Thus, it is my sincerest hope for St. Francis that I will be leaving behind a changed church. It is my sincerest hope that, when I’m gone, St. Francis will continue to grow and continue to thrive, and it is my sincerest hope that I am leaving behind a St. Francis that will actively support and nurture all the diverse and wonderful members of its congregation.
After I finished writing, it struck me: My senior sermon wasn’t me saying thank you—it was me saying good-bye. It was my breakup letter. It was the only way I knew to tell people I had to go, that this relationship was no longer working, was, in fact, abusive. When I read the sermon to my mother, she begged me not to give it. She knew I was injured, that I was hurting, but this just wasn’t what senior sermons were for.
