Two weekends ago, a few hours before Deb Ball, some boys yelled “faggot” at me. They were standing right across the lawn from my New Apt. I could see them from my doorway.

Earlier that day, a few leaves had blown through my front door. No one had vacuumed in the pre-Deb Ball chaos and so they remained, clinging to the carpet of my ground floor apartment. The leaves brushed up against my roommate’s exposed ankles when he emerged from the bathroom, wearing men’s knit socks and a breezy floral dress. My girlfriend and I quipped and cooed at him in his dress because sometimes, gender play is allowed to be silly. Deb Ball is fun.

As my roommate bemoaned his outfit’s lack of pockets, I rolled my eyes and pulled on my jacket. My girlfriend and I walked outside and joined hands. We headed off to a pregame in another New Apt. Ahead of us were six boys talking outside of B Block. They were wearing sweatshirts, baseball hats, jeans, and sneakers. None of them were dressed in drag. They looked like bros, which is a word I hate to use (see this post for my reasoning), but I’m not quite sure how else to describe them. They stood in a tight group, hands either gripping beers or jammed into pockets, and as we approached them they looked in our direction.

“Yo, Meg,” they shouted. I ignored them.

“Yo, Meg!” they insisted. They were loud. They seemed drunk. I didn’t make eye contact with them as we got closer.

“Deb Ball’s the night that everyone’s inner faggot comes out,” one called out.

Read on after the jump:

Some of them laughed. One of them yelled “faggot” in our direction again. They all kept drinking their beers. In my Deb Ball drag, I looked just like them except they were big—the six boys were athletic, broad muscles filling their matching hoodies. My hoodie matched theirs too, except my shoulders sloped downward, leaving room between my biceps and shirt sleeves.

I can’t remember if I tightened my grip on my girlfriend’s hand or let it go as we passed them. The two of us have an unspoken way of letting go of each other when we sense the other feels uncomfortable showing same-sex attachment in public. Once, on the subway in Manhattan, there was a guy preaching in our train car. I think we both feared a religion-fueled lecture, and without talking we moved our legs so they weren’t touching. To the proselytizer, and to everyone else in the car, we became nothing but friends riding downtown together. But here, we should have been able to hold on to one another. It was cold out. We were on campus. We were 30 feet from my home. But I can’t remember if we felt safe enough to let the boys see us holding hands.

We opened the door to our friends’ apartment and told each other that what had just happened was fucked. We walked upstairs to a room of girls, dressed in various states of drag, and told them what had happened and they agreed that it was fucked. Hearing “faggot” yelled in our direction was scary, even if “dyke” would have made more sense, because I was dressed as a slight boy. Because I looked like an effeminate man. Because I date people of the same sex. Because any slur is scary when it’s hurled at you. Then we painted glitter and eyeliner and stubble on one another and went to Deb Ball and forgot.

Except when I walked out alone later that night, I was afraid again. I was afraid that the six boys in front of B block were going to yell at me. Ask me why I thought it was okay to dress up like a boy. To pretend I was a boy. To sleep with girls like I was a boy. Mostly I was afraid that they were going to tell me that I should sleep with one of them instead.

There wasn’t anyone standing outside of B Block as I walked home, but the leaves rustling against one another spooked me as I crept across the cement.

Last weekend, I was sitting in the VI, listening to some sweatshirt wearing boys in the booth next to me. They had been sitting there for a while, their glasses were mostly empty and their conversation had shifted toward the baseball game playing above the bar. Suddenly, one of them, arm firmly on the table, announced, “Boat shoes make you look fucking soft. You can’t look hard and wear boat shoes.”

I didn’t know them, and they weren’t talking to me, but I wanted to interrupt their conversation and ask them some questions. Like, “Why is it important for to you to look ‘hard?’ Do you need to look ‘hard’ so you can differentiate yourself from faggots?” Also: “Do you know that you sound like a asshole?” But I didn’t say anything. They were bigger than I was. I might run into them later while I was alone and they were drunk.

Let me be clear, by calling these boys bros, I don’t want to indict people who I associate with student athletes or Greek culture–I don’t hate bros. But I do want to say fuck you to gender-conformist, fag hating homophobes. I’m mad that you’re at Kenyon with me.

But, I don’t want you to leave. I will sacrifice my comfort, my feeling of physical safety, for you to live and eat and study near me. I’ll play pong with you. I might even buy you a beer. I would do those things for you because I think that exposure to people like me will make you realize that being a faggot is fine. That being soft is fine. And that Deb Ball is fun.