Four stories from my one art school colleague who wears women’s clothes:

1)      He was re-watching Buffy, and it really struck him how Drusilla is so gothic campy and sensitive to noise because she has PTSD from how Spike tortured her and turned her into a vampire on the day she was to become a nun.

“I had always hated her as a character,” he was like.  “But now I realize it was projection, I’m sensitive to noise too and just can’t deal with my surroundings a lot!”

2)      When his dad was a cop back in New York City, a number of times he’d have to go call on (eventually disgraced) Covenant House priest Bruce Ritter in order to see if he knew where some disappeared gay teens were.

“Hello, Father,” his dad and the other cops’d be like, as Ritter came down the staircase in this short bathrobe that ended just below his crotch, and then he’d lead them to a room in his apartment where there’d be like two or three teen boys just sprawled out across the couches.

His dad also kept him and his brothers away from *any* adult men, he now realizes in retrospect, and has now in his old age even been quite explicit to his sons about how he did that.

“I can’t stand to hang out with my own kids,” his dad was like.  “So I know something’s the hell up if some adult guy wants to always go hang out with kids.”

3)      When I told him that one art school freshperson had told me that though she tries to be sensitive with pronouns, it can be tough because you can slip up and on top of that people keep changing them, and so it’s almost like “the nerds in high school suddenly became the jock bullies,” my one colleague was like, “I’ve always said, it’s Revenge of the Nerds.”

4)      He said that he overheard a conversation where some student said that they were skipping Pride this year because of safety worries after Orlando, and another student told them straightaway, “That’s a privilege that white people have, some people can’t afford to miss Pride like that.”

(That is, some people are so oppressed, that it’s necessary for their survival to attend the city's Pride celebration.)

He says this new group of students now are fascists, and he thinks that by the time he’s old, we'll all see camps being set up again.