Eqv.name

Dear Jan, Your letter addressed me as "Giles", below the more formal Michael G. Kotcher. This distinction suggests that you--- or one of our contemporaries who attended the EQV reunion-- remembered me. Your name was immediately familiar, though I could not put a face from 48 or 49 years ago to your name. I was at Wesleyan only from September 1958 until January 1960. My memories of EQV are the brightest spot in what was otherwise a disastrous personal experience. I returned to spend the summer of 1963 at the EQV house (using it as a "crash pad" before things were designated as such) and then met Steve Oleskey and other EQV members who were also living there that summer. I Googled Steve's name today and was deeply impressed at his accomplishments---and also a little shocked to see the face of a man in his 60's---versus the very young man I met that summer and never saw again. Over the years I've had several very meaningful encounters with David Sherman who as a sophomore in EQV introduced me to the splendors of New York cultural life when I was a freshman (1958/59). David was able to fill in some history on a couple of other EQV members, chiefly the late Pat Smith, whom I very much admired back when. And of course I have remained aware of Doug Bennett 's long and distinguished tenure as president of Wesleyan. I was always proud of EQV's choice to leave the national fraternity so that we might honor and keep the well-loved African American members in our local chapter. I also made contact now and then with the late Stuart Byron---not an EQV member as I recall-----during the late '60's until his death from AIDS in the '80's. I was tempted to return for the EQV reunion, but my feelings about Wesleyan remain intense and ambivalent half a century later. The memories of that year and a half account for much of my own version of post-traumatic stress disorder. Through an initially alluring but finally very ugly chain of events among the participants in the "College of Letters", the Ford Foundation funded experiment, I was traumatically "outed" as a gay man in the autumn of 1959 at age 18. A brilliant protégé of Norman O. Brown had committed suicide on campus in 1957/58; in awareness of that prior event and with very limited mental health resources on campus, the university moved quickly to send me home. I spent the next year in a mental hospital, an experience worse than the incidents which sent me there. I returned to the Louisville KY area; graduated from U of L; was briefly involved in the local civil rights struggles led by M.L.King's Southern Christian Leadership Council (a crucial turning point in my life); came out as a gay man in Louisville; and in 1968 moved to Manhattan. It's a small world, as we all know, and in 1968 by chance I ran into Stuart Byron on a bus in Manhattan. He had been a major participant in the autumn 1959 events at the College of Letters and had been left with a crushing, perseverative burden of guilt. We talked and were both somewhat redeemed in coming to a fresh mutual understanding a decade later. I was also thrilled to run into David Sherman at Sam Goody's once. I soon went through the archetypical radicalization of the late '60's. By 1970 I became one of the founding members of gay liberation in the Manhattan "chapter" of the Gay Liberation Front. I found an assuaging vindication and am proud to have joined in the collective leap of imagination sparked in that time, seeming so crazy then but gaining in legitimacy over 38 years. In 1972 Stuart Byron and I attended the 10th reunion of the class of 1962 together, saucily parading before our peers bedecked with gay liberation buttons. Over the decades I've fretted at regularly receiving mail from Wesleyan, nearly always requesting donations, celebrating uninterrupted post-Wesleyan careers far more illustrious than my own and provoking reminders of the years lost in the wake of my short time there. I requested that my name be removed from Wesleyan's mailing list to no avail. (My father graduated Wesleyan in the class of 1938 which may in part account for the persistence.) In recent years it came to my attention through the newspapers that Wesleyan had (for a time at least) become the queerest campus in America. No small irony in that. Last fall amid the announcements for the Homecoming weekend, I noticed that a Wesleyan professor was giving a seminar or colloquium on the history of gays at Wesleyan---or an associated topic. I wrote him an email outlining my own experiences, but received no reply. Though this email may come whining out of the blue as a sob story, in fact at 66 years old I'm at peace, happy enough, of sound mind and body. I became a registered nurse in 1974 and have spent all of that career in pediatrics, most recently on a pediatric psychiatric ward. Since the 1980's I've also maintained a small, modestly successful business selling fine modernist textiles and antique clothing to major museums throughout the US. As a pioneering, semi-scholarly dealer in this arcane niche, I've helped museums like MFA Boston, RISD Museum, LACMA, FIT Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, MAK in Vienna and others build documentary collections of the best in 20th C textile design. In closing this note, I realize I'm wishfully addressing those I knew long ago. Jan, if you want, you may forward this email -----or add it to the EQV site if it's not too transgressive. I must add that for all the bitterness in my memories of Wesleyan, there were moments of sublime and silly joy----performing in an outrageous skit with the nascent Highwaymen---listening to David's records of the Verdi Requiem ----busing down to Manhattan to see Lotte Lenya and Allegra Kent in Ballanchine's version of Weill's "Seven Deadly Sins" and walking back up the icy hill to EQV at 3 AM----seeing Arletty shake off the arresting officers in "Les Enfants du Paradis"--- swaying amid the EQV dining tables with a tray of food served from the kitchen run by our cranky old Irish [?] cook---------and much much more. (Photos of us all 50 years later are a pleasant way to jog memory, so I am including a couple of pictures taken in Oakland about a month ago during a joyous escape from New England. I'm the one on the left and the one on the right in the cap is my oldest friend Terry Bisson, from Kentucky days, a science fiction writer.) Salutations to all, > > Giles

Source: http://www.eqv.name/links/Kotcher_%20letter.pdf