I didn’t have time to dwell on my breakup anyway, as I grew regretful in my senior year over having wasted so much time on my dating life and how I would graduate without having made the most out of my Harvard experience. In particular, over the years when I’d read so much feminist and queer theory full of activist rebellion, I never did manage to be a political voice on campus, and I promised myself that I would get more involved. I also knew whose orbit I once again needed to cross: Josh Oppenheimer.

I first heard about Josh on my initial Harvard visit, the spring of my senior year in high school after I got accepted. My host started talking about this brilliant queer performance artist who lived in his entryway and was doing a show the following night in a drained swimming pool. When he invited me to come along, I was too intrigued to resist.

But once I found myself crowded around the far end of the pool at Adams House, I couldn’t really follow what the piece was about. I only witnessed the teetering danger of Josh potentially falling into the pool as he pontificated at the edge, bald-headed in a white minimalist tube of a gown that made him both androgynous and alien. His pronouncements had an air of importance, the youthful conviction that his words had never been said before. Even the moments when he had to get into the pool using the rungs of a ladder, an awkward maneuver at best, were imbued with a certain delicacy of purpose, lit as he was by those clip lights you get at the hardware store. As he declaimed, and asserted, and pronounced, in ways that resisted my attempts to comprehend, I did understand that if this was something I could do at Harvard—witness and celebrate the illegible yet ardent manifesto of a gowned man in a drained swimming pool—then maybe I could blend right in.

But instead of following Josh’s focused example, I’d spent so much of my time at school craving boys, too many hours cruising for them on- and offline. I heard of a kiss-in he and some friends were planning for Ralph Reed, the head of the Christian Coalition, who was coming to Harvard that fall; I decided to join.