Bloomington Indiana University, introduction (#0243)

Sample Gates, entrance to the historic core of Indiana University. The gates are actually relatively new (built in 1987), but architecturally very consistent with the style of the older buildings. Like most of the older buildings on campus, they’re built of Indiana limestone.

I went to Indiana to work on my PhD in Sociology -- my time in Bloomington was a key point in my life, not only for the PhD, but also Bloomington, and also those particular years. What years? That’s surprisingly hard to pinpoint, mainly because I spent probably the first 40 years of my life experimenting with different directions, getting frustrated and switching to something else, and thus moving around a lot.

The easiest way to determine when I was in Bloomington is to look at the history of AIDS. I moved from San Francisco to Bloomington and it was in my first year in Bloomington that talk of the ‘gay cancer’ was beginning, which would put me as having arrived in Bloomington for the Fall semester of 1980. I left IU to try to put my skills to work on AIDS issues at a time when most gay men thought they had it (the commonly used test didn’t become widely available until about 1988), so working back from other parts of life history, it looks like I left IU after four years of classes, in 1983 – how I finished my PhD is a later story. From what I learned about myself in those years at IU, they were fairly densely packed years.

Note in the previous paragraph that we (a partner and I) moved to Bloomington from San Francisco. When I told people in SF that I was moving to Indiana, they all thought it would be a disaster, that the culture would be terrible and that I wouldn’t be able to find adequate health care. None of that turned out to be true – Bloomington turned out be much more than even I expected. How Bloomington worked out is the story over the many following pictures.

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So what about this picture? As noted above, it’s the Sample Gates constructed in 1987, after I had left. When I was there this was a driveway onto campus, but the buildings on both sides were there, and the thick woods right at the entrance were there. Though I had been at multiple other colleges and universities before IU, those were newer campuses where all or almost all of the buildings were of the ‘university as office park’ construction that was a common theme from about the 1960’s into the 1990’s. IU was my first campus where the physical structure provided a sense of knowledge as a reflective/scholarly activity embedded in a long history – the building on the right is Bryan Hall, built in 1936 and always an administrative building.