My Penn State

I am a Penn Stater.  And I don’t understand football. 

In fact, until recently, the only sport that interested me was tennis.  My friends are still surprised by my new interest in baseball.  As I watched the recent World Series, Heidi tried to trip me up by asking how many field goals the Cardinals had.  When I replied, "What are field goals?” we both laughed.  I might be the only Penn Stater who has never attended a Nittany Lions football game--even though I spent seven years in Happy Valley while I got my PhD in English.  That was the longest I had lived anywhere since I was a child, so State College became home.  My body still remembers the slope of South Allen Street and the few steps it takes to cross College Avenue to the mall lined with Dutch elms. 

Despite my lack of interest in football, I understood early its importance at Penn State.  I worked at the alumni magazine as a proofreader my first year in State College; the offices were in Old Main , and I heard frequent references to Joe Paterno.  At the end of that year, I toured the capitol building in Washington, D.C.; while I waited to enter the senate chamber, the security guard on duty asked me where I was from.  When I told him I was visiting from Penn State, he replied, “Ah!  Joe Pa!” with a smile on his face.  I smiled back while shrugging inwardly. 

For me, Penn State was never about football.  Rather, it was where I finally felt comfortable in my own skin, coming out as a lesbian and coming into my professional identity.  

I attended my first National Coming Out Day rally on the steps of Schwab Auditorium on a drizzly October morning, handing out flyers announcing the first meeting of the Coalition of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Graduate Students, which I co-founded in 1991.  I still wear a t-shirt decorated with a purple Nittany Lion composed of double-woman and double-man symbols inside a black triangle.  I helped to organize the first gay rights march through State College; I staffed the Gay and Lesbian Switchboard every Friday night for years (by the end of which we had changed its name to include Bisexual and Transgender).   I fell in love and entered my first relationship.

While I was at Penn State, I shopped at a farmers' market for the first time and planted my first garden, learning the difference between annuals and perennials.  My then-partner and I grew huge "pillows" of glorious impatiens.  When I would walk on campus in front of Old Main, I would notice the red impatiens in the sun wilting while the ones in the shade thrived.  I'd shake my head knowingly. 

In State College, I had weekly lunches of Chinese food or sushi with a dedicated dissertation director who made sure her advisees understood the demands of the profession and who sent feedback on my chapters before I had recovered from drafting them.  Over those years, I made friends who nursed me through having my wisdom teeth pulled, who brought me my first live Christmas tree, who went dancing with me on “gay night” at the club so I didn’t have to go alone.  I opened my first email account--with a psu.edu ending.  I learned to surf the internet.  I had students who challenged me and taught me; some of them were even English majors who played on the football team. 

State College was the place that launched me.  And I missed it, feeling the warmth of my old home when I heard Penn State sports mentioned on the radio now and then.

Now, I can't turn on NPR without hearing about the child-sex-abuse scandal at Penn State.  The week the news broke, I felt like I was punched in the gut, and then I felt sick to my stomach for days.  I found myself listening to the dates of the attacks and then breathing a little more easily when I heard they were after 1997.  That was when I moved to the Midwest to start my life as a professor. 

Still, as a Penn Stater, somehow I feel responsible for those children.  So how was it that those who knew about the abuse did not feel obliged to stop it?  I know many writers have offered thoughtful answers to that question, and others have expressed rage at the lack of intervention.  And I am not naive; I know the abuse of children is not unusual, that such horrors are perpetrated everywhere, all the time.

What I am struck by is this sense of connection, this sense of responsibility to Penn State and to State College that I feel even now, nearly fifteen years after I left there.  Perhaps that connection is one of the legacies of Penn State, too: I know so many of my fellow alumni are struggling with this horror and with what restorative justice can look like. 

Last summer, my partner, Marilyn, and I stopped in State College for a couple of days on a road trip out east.  We parked our car at the Atherton Hotel and walked everywhere those two days: to a musical at the wonderful theater downtown, to the Creamery (it had moved since our last visit, and that unnerved me until we found it again), to brunch at the Corner Room.  Marilyn has connections to three other Big Ten universities, but she now shares my affection for State College.  It can have that effect. 

On College Avenue, I bought a blue tie-dye t-shirt that says HAPPY VALLEY across the front.  I wore it last on a warm October afternoon in Connecticut, playing Rummikub on the patio with our nine-year-old twin nephews.  After this recent story from Penn State, I am reminded how some people see my beloved boys, and I feel unspeakable horror and a furious sense of protectiveness.   I am not sure if the words on the t-shirt will feel true again. 

I also know, though, that Penn State is much more than the recent scandal.  And that it will always be the place where I became more myself, where I found what I needed at a crucial time in my life.  I imagine I will return to South Allen Street and walk up the mall lined with Dutch elms.  I am struck, though, by how these recent events, though not directly connected to me and conveyed to me only by the media, can change my sense of the place I called home.