I can’t think of another time I was moved to tears by some official memorial-spectacle – light shows, in particular, set my teeth on edge. I was in the second coed(!) class at Columbia, so the junior and senior classes were still all-male — at a time when NYC was still a very open city, where people came to find themselves, to hide, to become. It sounds silly in retrospect to say this, but there aren’t words to describe what it meant to become friends with gay men who were such radiant examples of strength, honesty, and humor. But through the unstoppable parade of new legitimacies that followed, Columbia’s architecture — part palace, part fortress, part cathedral — has resisted change. (One word: DEMOSTHENES.) But as I came along College Walk this evening, this stopped me in my tracks. It’s so right, and it brought so much back.
