Ralph and I continued to see each other at events, but I more or less accepted that he wasn’t interested in me, even though I didn’t really believe him. I had too many other things to worry about, like my senior thesis on the status of women authors in Renaissance literature. I was also in crisis over a creative writing class, where the professor refused to continue meeting with me when I objected to his criticism of a story based on my bathhouse trips in London. I should have probably incorporated more of his feedback, but instead I decided he was just a prude.

I already knew my grade was in peril, so I figured I might as well go out with guns blazing and write a story that was an amalgam of my experiences dressing as a woman, slathered with the queer theory I’d absorbed in my classes. My working title was “Fucking Foucault,” and the story started off with a character—a queer albino Harvard student, obviously—who time-traveled in a velvet dress to rock Foucault’s world. I found myself composing in free verse instead of prose, so the piece became a spoken-word poem and the main character morphed into an androgynous dancer; Foucault fell out of the picture. By the time I turned in the piece, it had become a script for a one-person show called Dancing Deviant.

I began spring semester senior year excited about the prospect of staging the piece, which I envisioned as a full-fledged multimedia performance. I also decided that I wanted to perform the show during Harvard’s ARTS First Festival, a weekend in April when alumni descended on campus to celebrate the arts. Harvard funding was generous, and I’d directed several successful shows already, one of which received an award for best college production in the state, so I fully expected my proposal to be accepted. But when I went down to my mailbox a few weeks later and found a letter from the Office for the Arts, it was a form rejection that had a handwritten note on it from the program administrator, which read, “We decided that your proposal wasn’t suitable for ARTS First’s diverse audience.” Thankfully, the queer alumni association decided to fund the show.

A reporter for the Harvard Crimson who happened to be in one of my classes heard me talking about how Harvard denied me funding for reasons of decency rather than the artistic merit of my work, which to me was the equivalent of censorship. She interviewed me and asked for press images. A few days later, Kit came to breakfast and slapped the morning’s newspaper onto the table.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You might be the first naked man on the front page of the Harvard Crimson.”