New Object

Hi.

I’m Ari Worthman. I’m a sophomore here at Haverford. I guess when I came here last
year, I didn’t really think that people really changed that much in college, or that their
perspectives were really shaped to a large degree by their college experiences. That’s
probably a very typical freshman assumption—I mean, it’s hard to imagine when you
first get here that you may be a very different person when you leave. Yes, I definitely
was and am naive. I always have been. In fact, let me give you a sort of light-hearted
example as to how naive I can be.

Last year I made one or two trips into the city to Woodys. For those of you who don’t
know, it’s a gay club. When I told my mom that I go to a club named Woodys, she
responded with a degree of ambivalence: she thought it was great that I was enjoying
some type of gay scene, but she was very sketched out by the name, Woodys. She told
me that she was sort of sketched out, I probably gave her a puzzled look, and then
shrugged it off of one of those really weird things that parents concern themselves with.
But this past summer, I was visiting my friend Alex Mertens, who lived here in HCA. I
was telling her about this chat with my mom and how perplexed I was that she was
weirded out by the name, Woodys. I mean, I thought the club was named after a person.
You know, like the character, Woody, on the TV show Cheers. I could picture him ~
owning his own bar and naming it Woodys after himself. But Alex was just like, “Ari,
the club is named after the penis—Woodys, erections, get it????” Woooo, the fact that I
enjoyed going to a club named after penises really freaked me out. I later learned that
everyone I knew understood what was implied in the name, Woodys. So, yes, naive I am
and very proud of it.

But anyway, so I live in my little Haverbubble, rowing on the crew team, working in
admissions, tap dancing, and hanging out with all of the cool folks here. I have always
found Haverford to be a very queer-friendly place—a home where I felt comfortable
talking about the guys whom I think are cute and the movie stars whom I wish would
come out of the closet. Yes, it can be very heterosexist, but unintentionally, I think. [
find that if I nicely suggest to someone that he/she made a heterosexist comment, they
take it in good stride. And even before I came to Haverford, when I had been out for
only a couple of months, I spent all my time with a bunch of eighteen year-olds who were
about to head off to college and who happened to have been raised to be very tolerant,
loving and acceptable people. So, being the naive person that I am, I concluded that the
world was filled with some homophobic and heterosexist people, but it wasn’t rampant. I
mean, horrible atrocities such as the murder of Matthew Sheppard occur, but they must
be anomalies. I made what I think is the very typical mistake of projecting my own
experiences onto world perspective. Oh boy, big mistake.

So, anyway. this is my first year hosting and giving tours in admissions. A couple of
weeks ago, I was explaining to one woman how wonderful it is that Bryn Mawr is right
down the road from us—how it broadens our academic and social horizons. She sort of
chuckled, leaned over to my ear, placed her hand on my shoulder, and softly giggled: “Oh
young man, I’m sure I know exactly why you like that Bryn Mawr is down the road...”