Undergraduate / What happened in the men's bathroom - Central to identity [9]

Prompt: Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

I felt sick, disoriented. Repulsion soon plagued my mind and soul. In front of me, a tiny bathroom with only three toilets, each of them occupied by a male friend. There was no curtain, no partition, no wall, no way to escape the revolting proximity. I knew I was cornered.

It was my first SAT test, December 2012. I wished I hadn't drunk that much water. I wish I had taken up some pills for my sore throat. I wished things could have been much easier that I would just saunter through that sardine-packed bathroom and do what all the other boys did. But I didn't. I couldn't, because I was not one of them. Because I didn't belong to the men's room.

Ever since I was conscious of myself, I have learned to fear the men's room. Not much because of the repugnant odor that often accompanies the male sloppiness, but rather the rampant pressure to be male and masculine that is embedded within its structure.

Sharing personal space with another male was what I always hated. And yet, it is only through this exposed communion at the public urinal that the bathroom works its intention - reinforcing male heterosexuality through asexual intimacy.

But I am neither male nor male-indifferent. And that close proximity of bodies is more likely to threaten me with exposure and hatred than build solidarity. Within it, there was no peace. My identity is constantly called to question, rejected, ridiculed and debased, my queerness rendered an Other, merely a disruption to the well-constructed ecology of maleness and masculinity.

That was the reason why I only went to the school's toilet during classes, while it was empty. Partly I fear that someone will spot me going to the wrong places, where being queer isn't allowed, and partly I fear those curious gazes in the boy's room, gazes that might pierce through my soul and unmask my true nature.

And now, yet there I stood before this crowded claustrophobic pigeonhole of a bathroom, torn, bewildered and horrified. One half of me needed it - I had to get on with the test at my best. The other half yet shrank from the gay jokes and the lewd comments that were flying around - it dreaded the place where it was heading. But I was too calculating to care about my wretched self. I knew the test was my future and then made a bargain with life: my identity and privacy turned in for a good score on the test. With a strange fervor, I gathered all my strength and enter the bathroom, ending the internal drama that had been tearing my mind.

In retrospect, I am not sure whether that was a totally bad decision. Since that day I never fear again the prospect of going to the men's bathroom or even using a public urinal. Almost suddenly, I became different, changed by being assimilated, or rather phagocytized, into the masculine sphere. But does it mean that my identity as queer has become more fluid or something else more solid? Should I be raging at this trade-in of self-identity for societal mobility? Whatever the answer may be, the incident has taught me to be more aware of the forces that act upon my queerness, molding and folding it in many ways and directions. And most important of all, it matters that I have grown from it.

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Do you think this is too personal? too sentimental? too depressing? not fit for a college essay? What do you think I should do to improve my essay? Any input is highly appreciated!