Real Queer America: LGBT Stories From Red States by Samantha Allen

Author:Samantha Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

A mere four years later, I discover that many of my reference points in Bloomington are gone.

Under the Saturday sun, Corey, Billy, and I walk through the lush green paths of the Indiana University campus, spotting two rabbits, a pair of deer, and more chipmunks than we can count along the way. We are hoping to revisit the entrance to the Kinsey Institute, provided that the door to the campus building in which it is located is unlocked on a summer weekend.

I pull the handle of the door to Morrison Hall and feel a wave of relief as it gives way. The musty smell of the building overwhelms me with its forgotten familiarity, resurfacing old sensations as if I’m experiencing them for the first time: the rush I felt when I said hi to Corey in the elevator, the excitement of her agreeing in this very lobby to go to dinner with me. I think back to the skittish version of myself that pulled open that same door in 2013, excited to take the elevator to the Kinsey Institute and start my fellowship but nervous about how I looked: I had decided to stop wearing my wig that summer after months of growing out my hair, but I was still wearing breast forms as I waited for the estradiol to change my figure.

I look at us now, four years older, married, holding hands. For us, this is holy ground.

Corey hits the elevator button and it lights up. The doors slide open and we step inside. Unlike the city of Bloomington itself, the elevator is smaller than I remember it—and its size explains why a shy little yam like me had no choice but to talk to Corey. For two people to ride together, we must have been almost touching. With three people it is downright claustrophobic.

The Kinsey Institute is still on the third floor and is closed for the weekend, but we expected that to be the case. Instead we take a dozen pictures in front of the gold-colored hallway sign, trying to get a selfie of us kissing that doesn’t look too gross to post on Instagram. A visiting researcher who is working on the weekend awkwardly passes us on his way to the elevator, wondering aloud what we are doing.

“Can we see the reading room?” we ask him, after sharing a brief version of our love story.

The answer is no. A burst pipe last summer damaged much of this building; the reading room—the space where Corey and I first laid eyes on each other—is still closed for repairs.10 There’s no way for us to see the spot where (I later learned) Corey ogled my butt as I bent over the photocopier or to sit at the table where I watched hours of fetish pornography—for science, of course.

We go back to the lobby instead and Corey starts making out with me so passionately that Billy gets uncomfortable and steps outside to wait for her ravenousness to run its course. Corey’s hands begin to wander.

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