~

The night the Spee announced they were going co-ed, they held a mixer. The lights in the courtyard were turned on and the upstairs windows opened. The club’s flag flapped in the wind. A friend of mine said the place looked stately. Inviting, even. I thought it looked proud.

Days later a friend told me I would have found the deliberation to allow women into the club “hilarious.” Another disclosed that the vote was “unanimous.” There was, in each of these interactions, the distinct tone of celebration. “Look!” they wanted to say. “Progress!”

Sometimes, when I still ate meals at 76 Mt. Auburn Street, members would talk about going co-ed. People tip-toed this way and that. “We see both sides!” they said. “We shouldn’t do it now, but we should definitely be the first!” Others nodded and chewed in agreement.

On the second Friday of September the Spee became “the first.” To which I say: congrats. But to which I also say: Maybe—just maybe—you’ve missed the entire point.

~

This past year I took a leave of absence from Harvard. After hanging around LA for a little too long, I decided to hit the road for a month. I stopped and saw various friends at various colleges around the country—from Colorado to St. Louis to Ohio. I met their friends, saw their apartments and went to their parties.

I remember one particular night in which a jazz band played. The house overflowed and the floor buckled from the weight of the thing. People danced, laughed, kissed and did those other things one does at parties. It was, in all senses of the word, normal. Another Friday night.

And yet the whole thing felt entirely queer to me. There was a decided sense of communion, of camaraderie, that was unfamiliar. There were no furtive glances across the room—nobody surveyed the social latticework. People came, went, and came again, danced with and next to strangers, shared and spilt beers. There was no list, no one “at the door,” no incessant questioning of place or belonging. Because there was no need. We all participated and belonged to that same club; that easy faith in the future, that submission to the immediate, that clear eyed naiveté. Youth.

It was, unequivocally, the most fun I’d had in a long time.

~

The other day I stood on the rooftop of Felipe’s. School had just begun, and the recent closings of the clubs had turned the Mexican establishment into a refuge for the occupants of Mt. Auburn Street. People moved about, changed places, played the game. Circles formed: the Porcellian in one corner, the Spee in another, the Bee between the two, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum. I stood among them all—at once bemused, angry, lonely.

After hearing that I had formally left the Spee, a member of the PC suggested I should punch in the fall. He assured me that I would “love the guys” and the guys “would love” me. Most importantly, he said, it would be “the biggest 'fuck you' to the Spee.”

The biggest fuck you to the Spee. I laughed and shook my head no; he shrugged and sipped his beer and soon after that I left. Outside people walked in twos and threes and cars sped down JFK and clouds churned overhead. I walked down Mt. Auburn and entered my dorm and got in my bed and laid down. I thought about leaving again; I dreamt about cutting ties, about starting anew. I thought of these things while listening to the sounds of a party above me and shouts on the streets for friends to wait up and the din of the rooftop bar across the way until suddenly I closed my eyes and became very sleepy, and all I could feel was the world spinning beneath me, one great revolving door, that widening gyre, turning and turning on its own strange accord.

Eli Wilson Pelton '17 is a history and literature concentrator living in Adams House.