Bloomington Sociology / Ballentine Hall / grad life (#0263)

Back to campus, and my main ‘home’ as a graduate student. There were basically two on-campus ‘homes’ for Sociology graduate students, Ballantine Hall and the Institute for Social Research (later picture). Ballantine Hall was the location of the Sociology department, the site of all of the faculty offices, and the site for very many of the classes (both that we took and that we taught).

Ballentine Hall, compared to many other buildings on campus, was relatively dreadful. At 10 stories it is the tallest building on campus and, when it was completed in 1959, the largest academic building in the world. It was just classrooms and offices, so there weren’t any open spaces to break up the sense of dull repetition. Despite its size and interior blandness, its layout was such that it was easy to navigate – except when the elevators didn’t work. Like much of campus, it’s hard to get a good picture of the building, and that was made worse on this trip by some major refurbishing that was happening. The picture link below has a good winter picture of it.

Putting aside the comments on the building, now’s a good time to say a few things about my time in Sociology there. The first thing to address is how I, an openly gay man living in what was then the ‘gay mecca’ of San Francisco, ended up at IU. For very many years I had a love/hate relationship to gay life in SF, I liked the ability to be quite open, but was frustrated by both the economics of trying to afford to live in SF and by a gay culture that had no interest in areas outside their neighborhood. In the late 70’s it was very hard to get a good job in SF, and so I decided to explore graduate school again (after an earlier attempt.)

IU was the home of some of the faculty who did some of the earliest, positive, work on gay life, and was also a well-respected school with a diverse faculty that provided multiple angles for attacking the issues I was interested in – how class prejudice had an impact on the lives of working-class gays and lesbians. Though IU fit with much of what I was concerned with academically, I was worried about moving to a small Midwestern town after having been out and spending long periods in large coastal cities (Manhattan, Boston and SF) for a number of years. I was already in my early 30’s, and not willing to go back to hiding my sexuality. So, I wrote a personal letter to the department, they gave it to a grad student (non-gay) who had moved to IU from the LA area (he became a long-term friend), and he responded with an invitation to visit. I went, felt very welcomed, and decided on IU.

Life there, as both an older graduate student and as an openly gay man, was generally good. I went to Bloomington with a friend and we were quickly welcomed into the community of sociology graduate students, and I was treated no differently by faculty (with a couple of exceptions). Surprisingly, though it felt like my relationships with the department were smooth and welcoming, many years after I left I learned that many following students characterized me as a ground-breaker in terms of making the department comfortable for gay students. Since I never felt like I was blazing new territory, I’m not quite sure how that reputation came to be.

Like in Sociology, Bloomington itself was a surprisingly welcoming community of lesbians and gay men. Though it was quickly clear that Bloomington was something special in a state that was more conservative, it also became clear over time that, though the state was conservative and even often disapproving, there was a history of tolerance that meant that we seldom felt a sense of physical danger.

As I said with the first Bloomington photo, it was an interesting experience being there. Given the divides that are happening in the country now (in 2019), it might be helpful if we got out of our enclaves more often, to see that we’re not as different as we often believe.

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One more important note about IU and Bloomington. I left Bloomington early, after almost all of my Sociology graduate course work was completed, but nowhere near the point of completing my PhD. Why? Part of the reason was the future job market. From what I could see in the mid-80’s, if I finished my PhD in the next couple of years, I would end up having to apply for jobs in parts of the country that were far away from the urban centers where gay life was easier (e.g., in South Dakota). Also, we were at that time at the height of the AIDS crisis AND in the middle of the Reagan presidency, a time when anti-gay fever (due to both AIDS and Reagan’s politics) was sharply increasing across the country (there were even some national discussions of quarantining gays.) It was before gay men could know who would be next with AIDS, so the value of a PhD was questionable when live expectancy was uncertain – that uncertainty, combined with the risk of having to move to a potentially unwelcoming small town in a rural state, was not favorable. I hoped that my new skills could be of some use re AIDS, so I moved back to a town I knew, Boston and then later back to SF. When the prospects of early death became less likely, I decided to finish my PhD. With strong help from faculty at IU and support from my work environment in SF, I finished my PhD in ‘92.

History: bloomingpedia.org/wiki/Ballantine_Hall
Picture: bloomingpedia.org/w/images/6/65/Ballantine.jpg