Bloomington Sociology / ISR / grad life (#0265)

On the south side of campus, in the middle of fraternity/sorority row, the Institute for Social Research. I believe the building started out as a fraternity or sorority but had been converted into office and classroom space long before I arrived at IU. It was the site for the research and other scholarship activities of many of the faculty, as well as the site for the offices of graduate students who either worked on those projects or taught (I did both).

As an older building, it had steam heat with the old-fashioned radiators that were either way too hot or cold. I taught a couple of classes in the building and the old steam heat was a problem – I’m allergic to strong odors and the heat would get so excessive that I’d have to ask students wearing strong perfumes or colognes to move to the back of the room, which is an awkward request!

There were two other unforgettable experiences in that building, one particularly sad, one just remarkable. First the sad one – I was working one night on writing a paper on the computer when the electricity suddenly shut down. Of course I was angry at what I had lost (early computer, not as secure at backing up as now days), and I blamed the outage on some fraternity party creating some overload (that happened). Later, though, we found out that the power outage was due to a suicide.

Re the remarkable event. I was one of the regular ‘hotline operators’ for the gay and lesbian hotline for south central Indiana (I don’t remember the official name of the hotline). The line could be called for free from anywhere in a broad area that went from Bloomington south to the Ohio River. We could transfer the hotline to some convenient location, so the evenings that I worked it, I’d go to my office to work while waiting for calls. The calls we got were a mix of frustrating. Rewarding, and just interesting. Somehow people (both men and women) in rural areas 60 to 100 miles away would find our number and call with questions that would now sound silly (“what’s a gay”) or impossible to answer (“I’m on a farm, nobody in my family knows I’m questioning, how I can I figure out if I’m gay”) – surprisingly, we got very few harassment calls. We did, though, get a surprising number of calls from rural folk who had figured most everything out and just wanted some detail or just to talk. The calls I remember most clearly were from a man who called repeatedly to talk about opera gloves – where he could get some, what they felt like when he wore them. Many of us who worked the lines got the calls (though he mainly wanted to talk with the men who worked the lines) and the conversations could go up to our 15 minute limit for calls. We talked about his calls in our monthly meetings and decided that he probably just needed to talk, since none of us could provide any answers. His calls, and many similar calls, were good lessons in the value of simple listening.