A Moral Failure in Azay-le-Rideau

If you’ve been following the domestic political news lately, you’re no doubt aware that Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has had some rather nasty revelations dredged up about his stint as a bully in high school – in particular one especially brutish episode from 1965 in which a (supposedly) gay student was pinned to the ground and had his hair forcefully clipped off.  Mittens was allegedly the one wielding the scissors.

Let me be clear – I really don’t give much of a damn about what Mr. Romney did 50 years ago, at least as it relates to my evaluation of him as a potential President.   His unyielding adherence to the failed neoliberal Reagan-Thatcher-Bush-Ryan economic policies, coupled with his incessant pandering to the Christian right-wing in America, means that I would rather give away a vital organ from my body than give him my vote. 

But this incident did strike me right at the heart from one particular angle:  namely, the fact that Mr. Romney has disavowed all knowledge of the incident and only, at best, given a meek apology.  “I was just a stupid high school kid and therefore can’t be held accountable for my actions – I didn’t know better!”, could be a rather succinct summary of his position.

I’m 25, and Mr. Romney is 65 – but I’m ready to exhibit some of that “wisdom” that one would have assumed he would have accrued in his additional 40 years on this planet.   I was never a bully, but there is one incident from my high school years in which my moral judgment hit a low point.  I have never before divulged the details to anybody – not my closest friends, family, even my parents – but I feel that now is the time to come clean and acknowledge one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

In June 2004 (between my Junior and Senior years of high school) I visited France for the first time.  I had been studying French for three years at the time, had already earned my status as a devout Francophile, and was so excited about the trip that I did not sleep the night before, during the 8-hour plane ride from New York City to Nice, nor for the entire first day there.  I was traveling with a few other students from my high school and our French teacher, as part of a broader group of other high school students organized under one tour group.  When we arrived at our hotel in Nice a few blocks from the famed Promenade des Anglais, we met the other high school students for the first time.  There was a large group from Selma, Alabama; some from California; and a small contingent from Austin, Texas.

Although I’m sure it comes as quite a shock to those of you who know me well, I fairly quickly bonded with several of the boys from the Selma group.  Our conversations didn’t initially revolve around any of the volatile topics that might have caused conflict, and I legitimately amazed them in quite a few ways; my fluency in French, my lack of a Southern accent despite being from a Southern town even smaller than theirs, my general knowledge of world history and French culture.   Before long we were staying  up in each others’ hotel rooms until 3 AM in the morning engaging in frolicsome banter, helping out each other with French conversational skills, and spending countless hours learning about French culture with the assistance of our bus driver Gerard (whom I will never forget – what a guy!)

Relatively quickly, however, quite a few of the Selma boys turned their attention to a red-headed boy from the Austin group.  Resplendently ginger, lanky, freckled – I remember him well, though I cannot recall his name.  He also had rather effeminate mannerisms, spoke with a bit of a lisp, and was immediately presumed by most of the Alabama group to be gay.  And from the moment early in our trip that they first latched onto his sexuality, the cruel comments (all behind his back) began:

“Ahhh you sat next to him on the métro, you better get tested for AIDS!...”

“The faggot from Texas must be at home with all these French men in tight jeans…”

“I bet he’s the bitch and his boyfriend wears the pants…”

To this day the sheer hatefulness of it all rings through – all from kids who claimed to be devout Christian and “Southern gentleman”, whatever either of those terms is worth.

The rather strong phrase “moral failure” is in the title of this post.  In fact, I had two grave moral failures that summer.  The first was that I, never once, spoke out against this hate speech coming from the Selma boys.  In fact, I laughed at it and made comments to encourage it.  I was far from a ringleader in the anti-gay vitriol, but I volunteered my tacit approval to it – my laughter at the homophobic jokes, my head nods, my utter failure to say anything that might have challenged this disgusting behavior.  It is all the more remarkable considering that, while I was still a virgin at the time, I had all but acknowledged internally to myself that I was sexually attracted to other men – and would in fact come out to one close friend a few months later during my Senior year of high school (I came out publicly to the full world while an undergraduate at the University of Florida three years later, in November 2007.)

The fact that I stood by silently while others openly, in front of me, engaged in anti-gay demagoguery – even laughing along at times – was a rather egregious moral failure in and of itself.  But to me, my biggest moral failure of all occurred one night in a hotel room in the small French town of Azay-le-Rideau (internationally known for the nearby château that bears the same name, which our group visited during a tour of the Loire Valley.)  At some point during that day, the sheer inflammatory rhetoric of the Selma boys had passed into violent threats;  several of them, enraged by the presence of a “faggot” in the group, had started to talk of slipping something into the boy from Austin’s drink, or perhaps following him at night and smashing a rock over his head.

To this day, I have no idea whether or not those kids were truly serious – but their comments lacked enough facetiousness to scare me.  I may have been enough of an immature coward to play  along with their anti-gay jokes, but I was not ready to sit back idly while somebody got hurt.  By coincidence, I was sharing a hotel room in Azay-le-Rideau with the presumed gay kid from Austin, so that evening I decided to come clean to him, tell him everything, and hopefully prevent anything nasty from happening.

That night, I was alone in my hotel room with the kid from Austin.  That was supposed to be the moment when I would come clean, apologize for having been silent, and offer my full aid and support.  We engaged in friendly conversation about French culture and how incredibly silly le subjonctif seemed to us as American English speakers.  My brain queued up the words that I was going to say.  And then…

Silence.

I panicked.  I could not push myself to bring it all out.  I sat there, and instead grabbed a pad of paper.  I scribbled down a very brief statement, along these lines:

“Hey, some of the kids from Alabama think you’re gay.  I don’t care one way or another.  They’ve been saying nasty things and I think they might try something violent against you, so watch out.”

I scribbled it on a piece of paper, my heart racing as if I were committing some incredibly unlawful act.  Shaking from anxiety at this point, I hurriedly passed the kid from Austin the piece of paper, and rushed out of our hotel room.  I ran down the corridor and the stairs, and walked hurriedly outside through the streets of Azay-le-Rideau, picking up a delectable croque-monsieur along the way.  To this day, I can still remember how panicked I was that evening – and for what?  For having been so weak as to not be able to carry on a face-to-face conversation with an amazing, intelligent kid who potentially faced an imminent threat of violent attack from Southern bigots simply on account of who he was as a person?

After what was likely no more than two hours but seemed like an eternity, I returned to our hotel room.  The kid from Austin was there in his bed, watching a French game show.  We exchanged no words, just a silent nod to acknowledge that the information exchange had been completed.  I fell asleep in a sort of quasi-hopeless anxiety, reading a brochure on the nearby Château de Chenonceau which our group would visit the next day.

In the remaining week of the trip, I explicitly went out of my way to avoid him, even once (in a seaside village in Bretagne) explicitly asking our tour organizer to not put us in the same hotel room together – but I had no problem associating with the kids from Selma, who continued their litany of homophobic jokes.  At this point I did not laugh at their commentary, but instead sat there, silently.  “These kids get along with you well”, I remember thinking.  “Why are you going to ruin this awesome trip to France over something like this?”  So I said nothing.  Nothing at all to rebut them.  Nothing at all to even remotely suggest that I disagreed with their hate.

I spent countless hours on that trip engaging in jovial banter with homophobic bigots from Alabama who would have quite literally spat in my face had they known I was gay.  And to the one kid on that trip who had the most in common with me – an incredibly intelligent kid who had the courage to come out of the closet in his early teen years (as I would later learn) - years before I did - who potentially faced physical violence of which I was aware – to him, I could only hurriedly pass a hastily written note while darting from our hotel room.  I could laugh face-to-face when the kids from Alabama denounced him as a faggot, but could not look him in the eye and state that I thought he was a great person.

I was not the Romney wielding the metaphorical scissors in France that summer – but what I did was just as morally reprehensible and casts a cloud of shame on my life which I will never outlive.

For most of the rest of that summer after returning to Florida, I felt horrible about the entire situation.  But soon after my Senior year of high school commenced, and my focus quickly turned to other things.  Scholarships.  Admissions essays.  Being a successful Student Council President.   At first I intended to write the kid from Austin and apologize, set it all right, but the days became weeks.  Weeks became months.  Before I knew it I was a University of Florida undergrad living in an elite Honors dormitory, meeting new friends and putting the first 18 years of my small town life behind me.  Then I got my first job paying more than $20 per hour with ExxonMobil.  Then I moved to Pittsburgh as a graduate student at prestigious Carnegie Mellon.  Slowly but surely the memories from that summer in France, and from that night in Azay-le-Rideau, faded into the distant past, into irrelevance.

But not anymore.

Mitt Romney has vigorously denied any memories of the haircutting incident from high school (despite over a dozen witness testimonies), and at most has claimed that he regrets being a reckless high school student.   I will no longer engage in any such moral equivocation.  I may have been a minor in the year 2004, but my moral sensibility was just as developed then as it is today  as a 25-year-old adult. 

To the kid from Austin, many years too late, I say this:

What I did and supported that summer was stupid, irrational, hateful, wrong, immature, and entirely immoral – and I cannot apologize to you strongly enough.  From the very first time that I witnessed homophobic comments on that trip, I should have aggressively made it known that I opposed such sentiments and would not take part in promoting those views.  And at a minimum, I should have had the wisdom and courage to have the face-to-face conversation with you that I dodged July 2004 in Azay-le-Rideau; the conversation that I escaped by passing you – a fellow gay kid in imminent danger of homophobic violence – a three-sentence paper note and darting from our hotel room. 

To be characteristically blunt, the fact that I was 17 years old does not make a goddamned difference.  It was wrong, it was well beyond pathetic on my part, it was a moral failure, it was disgusting behavior, and it is something I have continuously regretted in the decade since that night.

Whether Mitt Romney builds the courage to firmly acknowledge and denounce his behavior in 1965 remains to be seen.  But I am no longer willing to hide from the hurt that I undoubtedly caused in the summer of 2004, and can only hope that my example has been followed by many others who unjustifiably went morally astray at some point during their youth and would like to correct the course of their particular actions.

To the kid from Austin, who traveled across France with us in the summer of 2004 – I can’t remember your name, but in the rare chance that you read this post and are ever in New York City, give me a call.  I owe you a few drinks and would love to catch up on the last 10 years.