At least I had tiny outlets for these fantasies, portals that allowed me temporary glimpses into a world I couldn’t belong to. Apart from Drag Night, I learned that students at Adams House were welcome to dress in drag for events like dances, readings, and parties. I’d recently read Emma in my Major British Writers class, which was my first exposure to Jane Austen, and found the machinations of old English society immensely fascinating. One of the house traditions that seemed to match this elite, aristocratic view of the world was our monthly House Tea at the master’s residence, which featured women in their Sunday best picking up round cucumber sandwiches with thumb and forefinger. It was on this occasion that I decided to wear a dress I’d picked up at a thrift store, light yellow with puffy sleeves and a built-in petticoat, as well as a periwinkle pinafore that covered the torso. I walked out in the early spring air, too chilly for my dress, to the master’s house on one end of our enclosed courtyard, and I overheard youthful conversation when I got closer to the house’s stone steps, animated men in suits, women draped in shawls discussing their latest ideas about art. I only encountered smiles when I went inside and poured some tea into a porcelain cup, then sipped with my pinky finger outstretched, an affectation I learned from I had no idea where. Soon enough, the master himself, Professor Robert Kiely, motioned me to come over to the main living room, ceilings low because people were smaller when the house was first built, where he stood with a distinguished-looking man in a well-worn grayish-brown tweed suit, with small eyes as if in a permanent squint and a puff of wavy hair, nearly white, surrounding his head like a bed skirt.

“I’d like to introduce you to one of our fine students, Marc Talusan,” Master Kiely said, entirely unfazed by my clothes even as the other man eyed me in barely hidden confusion. “He just directed an excellent musical that you have to see.”

Master Kiely described my production of Falsettos as the best show he’d seen at Harvard in years, how it managed to be both funny and deeply moving in its portrayal of the AIDS crisis. I forgot what I was wearing for a moment, as my mind transported itself to that time in high school when I sang a song from the show for a festival, played a gay character when I hadn’t even come out of the closet. Then I looked down at my floofy yellow dress and reveled at how far I had come.

“And Marc, this is Seamus Heaney; he’s a visiting professor in poetry and is living at the house while he’s here.”