Make a Man Out of You.

One professor. One conversation. Nearly 50 years of reflection.

---

By Kevin Winge

I have, of late, been plunging into the vortex of a memory. It was a single encounter nearly 50 years ago, with a man of authority who dismissed me within minutes and whom I never saw again. I don’t know whether that brief meeting affected my life at all, or whether it completely changed my life’s trajectory. I hadn’t thought about it for years and would have guessed that the memory had been expunged from my mind along with details of other forgettable events, like the first time I kissed a girl. Then I met someone who knew someone who once worked for the man in question, and things began to spin, pressures began to build, and I was transported back to a day in 1978 when I was 19 and sitting across from this man who was 50. Perhaps my future was decided with absolutely no input from me. It was all so random, yet also so clear.

I had finished my first year at the University of Minnesota (U of M) in Minneapolis, having taken all the classes required as a pre-journalism major. At that time, the journalism program at the U of M was considered by some to be the top program in the country. Interest in journalism had skyrocketed following The Washington Post’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the investigative journalists who broke the story, were rock stars. Journalism schools needed a way to winnow the large pool of prospective students suddenly interested in journalism careers down to a manageable number. Many thus created a pre-journalism prerequisite; once students met the requirements, they met with an adviser who would either grant them admission to the program or turn them away.

I was one of those students inspired by Woodward and Bernstein’s muckraking, but I had been writing since before Watergate. I wrote to President Nixon in 1969, expressing my desire for an end to the Vietnam War. I wrote for my junior and senior high school newspapers and served on the yearbook club. I never fantasized that I would be a hard-nosed reporter covering politics or crime, but maybe I would be good at human-interest stories or obituaries. Postmortem human interest, if you will. I had done well in my prerequisite classes but knew, given the competition, that being accepted into the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the U of M wouldn’t be easy. Then the day arrived for my meeting with the sole adviser for the school, the professor who would determine my academic future.

In those days, I was easily intimidated by just about anyone, but especially authority figures. And I was shy, at least around people I didn’t know. I’m sure my insistence on wearing overalls, like the pop idol of the day, Leo Sayer, didn’t help make the case that I should be taken seriously. I waited my turn outside the professor’s office until my name was finally called. I took a seat directly across from him in an office with books, magazines, and newspapers filling shelves and covering the floor around his desk. It looked exactly like what I had imagined a gumshoe’s office to be, which made sense because journalists in the 1970s were detectives.

The professor was incapable of informalities or niceties, and given that there were dozens of students vying for a single spot in the program, he didn’t need to be. He cut straight to the chase.

“I think you should consider dropping out of the University and joining some branch of the military. That’s what you need to do. It will make a man out of you. After that, you could go back to college, but you’re not getting into the School of Journalism.”

That was it. That was the entire “interview.” Nothing about how I had done in my pre-journalism classes or about my grades. No interest in why I wanted to study journalism or what kind of career it might lead to. I should just quit school and join the military. He didn’t even suggest which branch would be more likely to make a man out of me. My brilliant career in journalism was over before it had even begun.

The adviser, who offered me no advice, saw something in me I hadn't yet faced or acknowledged. And clearly, he didn’t like what he saw.

I went on to a less-than-stellar undergraduate experience, trying on different majors, American Studies, Political Science, Theater, and slowly dipping my toes into the waters of coming out. I moved on, but this brief encounter remained one of my clearest memories of my college experience. It was tucked away in my brain like one of those many books that cluttered the professor’s office, just a reach away if I needed an anecdote to share with younger gays about what the “old days” were like.

With time and distance, I now see the professor’s comments for what they really were: flat-out homophobia and discrimination. There might have been legitimate reasons not to allow me into the School of Journalism, but that’s not what he focused on. Someone needed to “make a man out of me.” Well, if being a man in the professor’s eyes meant being tough, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps time and again, and having no recourse when people with power and privilege decided we were “less than,” he needn’t have given that a second thought. Faggots, in the decades when I was coming up and out, were strong, independent, resilient, and resourceful. We had to be to survive the likes of the professor.

The professor might have ended my aspirations for a career in journalism, but he didn’t silence me. Nor could he, or anyone, have imagined the new platforms, like The Porch, where our voices could be heard. Our community has a lot of stories to tell. Let’s share them.