Needless to say, at the urging of friends I now think of myself as "irreplaceable."
It's not true, of course, anymore than it was true that they needed to look for two people to replace me. The college has needed another full time speech teacher for years and they just chose this year make the give.
As I've been remembering my own job search and looking at those happening on campus this spring I've been cast back into a decades-old memory of Mike Swan. I became very close friends with Mike my first two years at Utah. He was loudly out and I was out as queer as well and so circumstances threw us together and then we came to like each other. He was five or six years younger than I -- around 26, I think and thin with a sweet face. After I moved into the apartment right below his in the old, chopped up Salt Lake City Mansion, we would often finish out school days with a cup of cheap from-the-bin instant cocoa and episodes of Dr. Who and Monty Python on KUED.
I don't know how Mike was as a teacher. I heard him speak at conferences a couple of times and he seemed a bit shy and hesitant. As a student speaking in classes, however, he was super intelligent, quick witted, and funny. He was often able to explain to me those cultural studies and critical theoretical concepts with which I struggled. He was also a wonderful companion to the gay bars and clubs of Salt Lake, circa 1985. We both had memberships at The Sun and other gay establishments and many Saturday nights would find us out, dancing a lot and drinking as cheaply as possible. (More about Gay Salt Lake at the time that I was just leaving may be found in the "Lambda Lore" column at QSaltLake. I remember a famous leftist communication scholar, Phil Wander from San Jose State, visiting the department. Mike and I took him down to the Sun. We thought he enjoyed himself but it turned out that he didn't "get" it. Years later he would remember it to me as a "dive bar" rather than a well-known and exciting gay dance club. His memory altered my memory of him.)
Mike was a golden child of the critical studies group. He could see the inherent self-deconstructing position of the deconstructers. Yet he was also really silly (we would sometimes walk down the halls of the U's English Department imitating John Cleese's bureaucrat from the Ministry of Silly Walks).
Maybe he would have become a good teacher. Maybe he would have gotten gig at an Research 1 Humanities department and written difficult and witty critical analyses of media texts. Instead, he died of an unsafe sex practice. Not the one killing off so many young gay men in those days -- simple unsafe sex. He was very aware of AIDS (as all in the queer community were) and talked often about using safe sex. But he was less safe in his pursuit of the pleasure in S&M. And whether by his own hand or that of another he died of auto-erotic asphyxiation one August night in 1986.
He had become so important to me so fast, in a romance of friendship, that I was broken by his sudden and unexpected exit. And now he is frozen in my memory in his bright, amusing perfection, never to grow old, never to disappoint, never to change and violate the expectations people have of him. Or to surpass those expectations.
To be changeless is to be dead.
(blogpost title)
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