about me
@ Adam Dot 2011
I’m used to pasting in a list of professional achievements for speech introductions or conference programs (if you want a CV, look here, or try the Wikipedia page for somebody named Scott Long); but for this, but let me try something different.
I was born in southwestern Virginia in the U.S., to parents who started as Midwestern liberals (from Ohio, specifically), but moved South at the beck of their professions at the Fifties’ sagging end. (My father was an extension agent at Virginia Tech, my mother an elementary school teacher and principal.) My childhood happened during the turmoil of desegregation and the civil rights movement. These impinged on me only
distantly, through the convex moon of the TV screen, but also through my parents’ quiet reaction. Their moral refusal, especially my mother’s, to submit to the racial and cultural attitudes of the region where they found themselves living was a retrospective example, and gave me a sense of displacement that has lasted ever since. I felt at home on my great aunt’s beautiful, disused, decaying farm in Ohio, where I spent every childhood summer in a tangle of green. I had a home in Virginia, and the society would have welcomed me to belong, except I instinctively sensed myself, and was raised to be, at a slight, dislocating angle (to paraphrase E.M. Forster on Cavafy) to its world.
Most of the work of raising me was done by my mother, Ernestine Long, and her aunt, Leila Wilson. What good I’ve done in this messy life is generally a legacy from them.
I rushed through school hastily for various reasons, graduating from high school at 12, from college at 18. This was much better than going through a Southern school system at the normal age would have been, as a gay kid in the 70s. At least nobody expected me to drug the cheerleaders’ Cokes or play football. As I departed childhood, three great transitions happened. My mother died, far too young, when I was seventeen, my great aunt two years later.
In between, I left for graduate study at Harvard. Over the years I came out, made friends, and finished a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov. I found had no particular desire to become an English professor in an American university, at least at that juncture. William James, drugged on laughing gas once, called for pen and foolscap and wrote down, with the belief he was committing to paper thoughts of Hegelian profundity: “Harvard medical school; law school; divinity school, school!
SCHOOL! Oh my God, oh God; oh God!” That was about how I felt by the time I staggered up to join (as the President of Harvard tells the new-minted Ph.D.s at every graduation) the ancient and honorable company of scholars.
This raised, however, the question of what else to do. I also found that I had no discernible qualifications for any other employment, aside from reading books fast and having a jet-powered typing speed. I thus became an English professor outside America; this seemed the most promising way of putting my residue of skill to use in an unexpected context. I wanted something different . (As William James also scrawled while on laughing gas, “There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.”)
For almost seven years after the revolutions of ’89, I lived in Eastern Europe — for more than four years in Hungary, where I taught literature at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. For two years in the middle, I was a senior Fulbright professor at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania.
In devastated Romania, I started doing human rights work. It happened quite unexpectedly, almost without my knowing that was what it was. Together with a few Romanian friends, in the weeks after I first moved there I started visiting prisons, documenting and defending people imprisoned under the country’s Ceaușescu-era sodomy law. We had very little idea of human rights law, norms, precedents, or standards; we were, in a sense, making it up as we went along. We produced some of the first human rights information ever about abuses based on sexual orientation. We were responsible for Amnesty International taking up one of its first gay cases as a prisoner of conscience, and helped bring about Human Rights Watch’s policy change to act against such violations. We also saw appalling conditions in overpacked, filthy prison cells, and for the first time in my bourgeois life I talked to survivors of torture. We started a process that, nine years later, in 2001, led to the repeal of the Romanian law.
Midway through Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara, scrabbling in a barren field, holds up a turnip and swears, “As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again.”
@ Adam Dot 2011
My grandparents, dirt farmers all, never traveled further from their Ohio home than Texas. My parents were the first ever in their families to go to college; my father visited Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and China before he died, and my mother flew to Puerto Rico once. I went to Harvard, and I’ve worked in some forty countries so far. It has been a privileged life, product and exemplar of the last century’s vast changes. It all feels like exponentially more freedom than anything my ancestors were
offered, and at the same time, the final grace note is one of displacement. As I grow older, a farm in Ohio and a remembered skein of green leaves seem an appealing prospect.
All the opinions on these pages (except for the comments, or any guest contributors) are my own, and you shouldn’t blame any of my employers, parents, teachers, landlords, dogs, or lovers for them. The same is true of whatever mistakes turn up. If you find the latter, or disagree with the former, please let me know. (Also let me know if you would like to become my employer, parent, teacher, landlord, dog, or lover. Probably something can be worked out.)
— September 2011