Almost Like Being in Love by Steve Kluger Page A

you had to say to him was “Anita Bryant” and his ears stayed red for three days. Now it was my turn.

    “This is bullshit,” I blurted in the middle of Philosophy 108. “What’s this got to do with what’s happening in San Francisco?” The prof, an old guy in his forties who was used to this kind of thing, stopped dead in his tracks halfway through one of Plato’s tired old dialogues and tried to keep it light.

    “As it pertains to Ovid?” he asked with his constipated grin and the usual stick up his ass. I could hear a couple of snickers in the amphitheater, but so what? Let ’em laugh. Right, Trav?

    “No, goddammit! Those guys have been dead for two thousand years.
    Who have we had since then except Eleanor Roosevelt and John Lennon?
    Okay, look—” By now I was really getting up a good head of steam.
    “There’s straight people and there’s the rest of us. I’m not asking for a new Bill of Rights, but I want some answers. This is Philosophy, isn’t it?”
    From the back of the room, a kid wearing an Indiana T-shirt began to clap slowly, and then a guy on the rowing team stood up.

    “He’s right,” he said. “Me and my boyfriend got the shit kicked out of us in Marblehead and all we were doing was linking pinkies on the beach. What’s that all about?”

    “Yeah,” said another. “The same thing happened to us in Gloucester.”

    “Shut the fuck up and sit down,” said a third. “If you don’t like it, go back to Provincetown where you belong.” And that pretty much did it for Plato and Ovid and the remainder of the toga club. By the end of the class I had a B+ in Philosophy and twenty-three freshmen of every orientation imaginable crowded in a circle around me as though Ann Landers had grown a dick. ice going, McKenna. Now what? So rather than own up to the fact that I was an ordinary fraud with a big mouth, I just pretended to be Travis and said the first thing that popped into my head: Harvey Milk had believed in dignity for everyone, so we were going to honor him with the same kind of respect. We’d celebrate his life with a rock concert in his memory, and we wouldn’t stop singing until Dan White found his sorry ass behind bars for the next 120 years. Craig, dude—where is this coming from? As I watched them tumble out of the room with an energy that hadn’t been there before, I turned to Charleen, mystified.

    “Uh—what just happened here?” I asked mildly.

    “You’re a troublemaker,” she replied with a smirk. “I knew it!”'P.S. I’d been doing the peripheral thing from force of habit and noticed that Clayton hadn’t taken his eyes off of me for forty-five minutes. But for once I didn’t give a shit. Much.(

    Charleen squared everything with Harvard, though it wasn’t easy. After they found out what the concert was about, they didn’t want to give us the Yard between Memorial Church and Widener Library—until Charleen began shooting off her mouth about civil liberties violations and de facto discrimination and wouldn’t it be unfortunate if the Boston Globe got their hands on a story like that? (When Charleen puts her mind to it, she can be a bigger pain in the ass than I can.) Within an hour and a half, she had a permit, a stage, eighteen speakers, four electricians, and the phone number of a hunky little math major she’d met in the elevator.

    The night of the concert was practically tropical by Boston standards: 41 degrees and dropping. (Of course, had I known I was going to wind up stripped down to my underpants, I might have been more cautious.
    But I didn’t, so I wasn’t.( Thanks to Charleen, who’d blabbed to the Globe anyway, we’d lined up eight solid acts from the student body and two real ones: a first-ever reunion of Buffalo Springfield and the eternally subversive prodding of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. 'Let’s face it. How much consciousness were we really going to raise on Craig McKenna and his magic guitar?) I thought it was kind of