With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (7 page)

At that point in my life, I wasn’t aware in any conscious way that my sexuality contributed to my sense that I was different. Mostly it felt like whatever was wrong with me was a deficiency of some sort, which was somehow linked to my responsibility for my mother’s illness. I rationalized it by thinking that some people are tall, and some people are short. Some people have a romantic life and feel good about how they look, and some people don’t. Not until college did I realize I was destined to have a romantic life after all, but it wasn’t the kind of romantic life I had planned for.

C
HAPTER
5

What I Learned in College

I
left home for Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in the fall of 1984. My friends had helped me shop and pack. My father, my friend Dorothy, and I drove up in separate cars. I was excited, of course, and nervous about leaving home.

But leave home I did. I didn’t go home on weekends or call home every Sunday. Ellen lived in Connecticut and was only a half hour away, so I had a great safety net and saw her a lot. My dad and I didn’t call each other often, but we stayed in close touch in our nontraditional eccentric ways. For example, our primary way of communicating was through his interoffice memo that included a hundred-dollar check. “To: Christine; From: LQ.” Or “To: Christine; From: Mr. Quinn.” Usually he said nothing else in the memo, but occasionally he’d write, “Attached please find an article I thought you would find of interest.” And there’d be a newspaper clipping about Glen Cove or his old neighborhood in the city or something political. That was my father’s way, and it still is. You know he’s always thinking of you, and his actions speak louder than his words. He wasn’t a cuddly father, but he was so endlessly dedicated and attentive and always there when I needed him. He still is.

Just as he had in high school, my father came to every college event he was invited to. He missed only one big occasion when I was at Trinity. It was a parents’ weekend, something he loved to attend. But my sophomore year there was a strike at work, and he was a shop steward. He felt bad about missing the weekend, but there was no way he would abandon his responsibilities to travel to Hartford and, besides, he didn’t have the money to spend on the weekend. I felt bad that he couldn’t make it, but I admired him for his loyalty to his fellow workers.

The fact that my father was the member of a union also made me something of a standout at school. I remember when I’d use my credit card, which was issued by the union, at the college bookstore, they’d take a look at the image on the front of the card—hands locked in a solidarity shake—and look confused or stunned. They weren’t being rude about it; they just couldn’t process it, because it was out of place for them.

My father called Trinity the preppiest place in America. So when it came to like-minded progressives, there weren’t a lot of us. However, the faculty was much more liberal than the students, so I felt I had the support I needed when it came to expressing my political views and doing activism on campus. And because I was an activist working on all kinds of issues and outspoken in general—and probably because of my very loud laugh—I got a reputation for being brash. No doubt I cemented that reputation when I became the Bantam, Trinity’s mascot. Here’s the story of that.

A bantam is a big fighting rooster, but of course we couldn’t have the real thing at Trinity football games. Instead, we had a human inside a bantam costume. It had a big, poufy orange-yellow chest and a head with a beak. The person inside the costume wore orange-gold tights, little yellow feathery shorts, and a blue T-shirt that had a “T” on it. My freshman year I would complain about how awful the Bantam was at the football games. He didn’t do much more than walk back and forth and flap his arms. And my friends said, “Stop complaining. You should be the Bantam next year.” So I said, “Okay, I’m gonna be the Bantam next year.” And I was! I don’t think there was much competition for this exalted job, but it was fun. My role as the Bantam was to excite the crowd, torture the cheerleaders by hitting them with their pom-poms, and get the crowd to do chants. And besides, most people didn’t know who was underneath the costume, so I had a lot of freedom to be as silly as I wanted.

Then there was the time I got beaten up. Wesleyan was our rival, and I went over to their side and started running up and down, taunting them. Some guys came down from the stands and started pouring beer all over me, pulling on my beak, and tugging on me. My friend Jon, who was calling the game on the air, sent out an SOS: “This is not a joke! Someone is beating up the Bantam. The Bantam is on the Wesleyan side, and she’s getting attacked. Please, people, help.” I couldn’t get them to stop, so I had to haul around and clock one of the guys. And when I screamed at him, he said, “Oh, I didn’t know you were a girl. Sorry.” I was all wet and droopy-beaked and had to limp back over to Trinity’s side. I went up to the dean of students and said, “Can you believe this? They poured beer on me and were really mean to me.” He said, “I hope you had your mouth open,” and walked away.

I liked Trinity. There was plenty of social life, and there were lots of different kinds of groups of people. I didn’t mind being one of the few liberals on campus—that was totally fine. I hung out with football players, and the jock crowd, and then I hung out with the hippie crowd in the fraternity I joined. I liked bopping around between groups. It was all fun and good, but I was also adrift personally, and because I was never completely rooted in one group it added to that.

I just didn’t really care about the classes. They all seemed sort of irrelevant, and they were difficult for me. Until then, school had been a breeze. But college was another thing entirely. I didn’t have particularly great study skills, because I’d never had to study that hard before. I am also an unbelievably slow reader, who has to read things a couple of times to digest them. There’s a lot of reading in college, and I just couldn’t get through it. I had a hard time keeping up. Truth is, I may not have tried that hard, but I bet if you’d asked people, they would’ve thought I was doing very well in classes. In reality, I was basically just getting by. And then the loss of my mother in the years before college had left me sad and overwhelmed, which made focusing on classes even harder.

I couldn’t shrug off the grief and the guilt. They were an enormous distraction, especially when I was supposed to be studying. Even though I knew intellectually, at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, that I wasn’t, I nonetheless felt completely and exclusively responsible for the fact that my mother had gotten sick again and had died. There was little doubt in my mind that it was my fault. I thought that if I had been more attentive to her medications, if I had never shown impatience, or if I had been less demanding, she would have survived. That idea plagued me at college and for many years afterward.

It was part and parcel of my attitude toward myself. On the one hand, I was an energetic leader and a world-class Bantam, but on the other I was not very good at my studies and still overweight. And I was drinking a lot and vomiting a lot. However, I also knew that if I threw myself into an activity, any activity that mattered to me, things would feel a lot better. Maybe I was just keeping with my family tradition. Think of my mother, ill with cancer, putting on theme birthday parties; or me in high school pulling out all the stops for Sports Night; or my father—despite the burdens of having a sick wife, an elderly mother-in-law, and a sister-in-law living at home—working on the picket line when his men were on strike.

Activity. It was the way of my family, and Trinity was where I discovered my passion for activism. Not that politics was a new interest for me. I was fascinated by it as a kid. I remember wonderful times when I was in my teens, over dinner at my friend’s house, when I’d go toe to toe with her father over current events. He was very conservative, and for the most part I managed to hold my own.

I paid close attention when my father talked about his union work and about Democratic politics. His membership in the union guaranteed medical care for our family. If we hadn’t had that insurance, my mother’s medical expenses might well have bankrupted us.

He gave me two reasons why he was a Democrat. First, he’d say, “Because they met us at the boat.” By that he meant the Democrats were there for his family when they came over from Ireland (because the Democrats were—and are—for immigrants). And second, he’d say, “FDR saved my life.” He believed deeply that FDR’s policies saved his family’s lives in the Depression.

I was eager to get involved in such a way that I felt I was having an impact. At the time, there was a big movement on college campuses across the country to get colleges and universities to pull their investments out of South African companies and any companies that did business with South Africa because of that government’s apartheid policy. It was an important international movement that helped bring an end to a totally discriminatory government. We got the Trinity student government to pass a resolution urging the college to divest, and a shantytown was set up on campus to represent the shantytowns where South African blacks were restricted to living. Trinity students slept overnight in the shanties. I was so proud to be a part of this effort and felt I was making a difference in some small way.

T
he best discovery I made at Trinity was that I could do internships through ConnPIRG, an environmental and consumer protection group (founded by Ralph Nader) that watches out for people’s interests and “stands up to powerful interests whenever they threaten our health and safety, our financial security or our right to fully participate in our democratic society.”

I signed up for every internship and activity I could find and did volunteer work, especially on environmental issues. This work was magical to me. It showed me the amazing strength of people coming together and organizing. It fueled a lifelong belief in the unstoppable power of government and citizens working together. I was assigned to work with a woman who lived a half hour or so from Hartford. Every Saturday we’d knock on doors in her town, surveying residents to document the impact of chemical waste that had been dumped there; it was similar to what had happened in Niagara Falls, New York, where the Love Canal neighborhood was built on top of a toxic waste dump. So we were going door-to-door in her town to try to replicate what had been done at Love Canal, where the government had designated the contaminated area a Superfund site so it could be cleaned up.

Next I lobbied on different pieces of legislation at the statehouse—Trinity is located in Hartford, which is Connecticut’s capital. I’d go to the statehouse a day or two every week. I’d grab state representatives in the hallways and talk to them about specific pieces of legislation, like an act to increase funding for household-hazardous-waste-cleanup days, specific days where you could go to a designated site in your community to drop off hazardous waste, like paint thinner and motor oil, that you aren’t supposed to put out with your regular garbage. These cleanup days have become a reality in New York City and many other cities and towns. I also worked with the paid lobbyists to help their efforts on specific legislation. And then I’d do the corresponding work on campus to support whatever bill I was lobbying for. That might include getting a petition signed, organizing a letter-writing campaign, or getting students to go up to the statehouse for a lobby day.

During two of my summers at Trinity, I worked to raise money for ConnPIRG. The summer of my sophomore year, I went door-to-door as a canvasser. I rang bells and asked people to become members of our citizens’ network. It was a six-day-a-week job, from ten in the morning until ten or eleven at night. We asked a lot of people to join, but we were intent on helping our cause. The second summer I ran the door-to-door operation, which was easier on my feet but also hard, because the work was exhausting and the turnover was pretty serious.

Going door-to-door is difficult because you’re completely intruding on people’s lives and space, but it’s a great way to get people involved who might not otherwise join.
Wheel of Fortune
was a very popular show that summer, and we were interrupting people in the middle of the show, right when a contestant was about to guess one of the puzzles. So when they opened the door for us, they were already unhappy. That was a challenge. But it’s a challenge for every person who puts on a coat and walking shoes and takes to the street to leaflet for something they care about deeply. Nobody likes standing in the rain and interrupting people while they’re watching their favorite shows, but this kind of commitment to action is what makes change possible. This work taught me the importance of pushing through the fear of bothering people and asking them to get involved.

During that time I learned how to organize a public event in a way that is most effective and empowering to all in attendance. Room size and the number of chairs are both important. You have to make sure you’ve got more people saying they’ll come to the event than you need to actually show up, because a certain number of people won’t show up. And you have to have fewer chairs in the room than the number of people you expect to show up, so the room will look crowded. If more people show up than you expect, then you get more chairs, but you don’t want empty seats. You don’t want people who’ve given their precious time feeling like they’re the only people who care about something—that will stop them from staying involved!

D
oing all this real work on interesting issues was so much better than sitting in a classroom. I was learning how the governmental process worked. It was very hands-on, and I loved it. I was surprised to find that the state representatives were very respectful. They treated me just like anybody else who was there to talk to them about the issues they were working on. This was the best thing for me. I guess I went a bit too far, because not long after I left Trinity, the school imposed a limit on the amount of credit students could get from internships and independent study. You might call that the Chris Quinn rule. I’m fairly sure I was the cause of it, because I’d taken so many internships and probably not enough regular classes.