Sophomore Year Living Situation

After camp was over for the summer, I only had a few days before I had to head back to school.  I would be living on the opposite side of campus, in the upper class dorms this year, with a couple of new roommates, and Keith from the year before.  All of them were from Santa Barbara, and therefore frequently went home on weekends.  Lindsay, who I had spent a lot of time with at the end of the previous semester immediately sought me out when she arrived from Washington, and we continued to hang out a lot.  We both arrived at school early that semester, as we had leadership roles in the student congregation that we were supposed to prepare for.  She had become roommates with J, who I had met at the beach the previous year.  All off us worked together on certain events for the church, but I didn't know J as well since we didn't have any classes together.  But she was also from Santa Barbara, and knew my roommates, so we ended up seeing each other quite a bit during that period.

My roommate situation had changed, and I had two new upperclassman in my suite, who were both from Santa Barbara, and knew Keith, but were strangers to me.  Living with Keith hadn't been too bad the previous year, especially compared to my other roommates, so I had opted to live with him again.  That ended up being a mistake, which had a dramatic impact on my whole year.  There had been some rumors about him being gay, but I had never asked him directly, and he never said anything about it.  I wasn't sure if it was true, but I tried to keep an open mind and not be too judgmental.  It wasn't like that was a contagious condition or something, but at a certain level that was none of my business unless he made it my business.

Unfortunately, a few months into the year, that question was cleared up when he introduced us to his new boyfriend.  That would be strange enough for me to deal with, but it was compounded by the fact that he practically moved in.  He didn't go to school at CLU, so he wasn't staying anywhere else, and lived hours away.  He also never had to go to class, or anything else for that matter, so he was just always there.  He basically lived in our living room, and usually he was playing video games all day.  He was a big Samoan guy, and the place really smelled, since our living room was one of the few with no windows or ventilation.  My suitemates initially made friends with him, but that situation got old after a few weeks, and became a source of conflict for the rest of the year.  One of the problems was that the school had few rules to govern that situation.  Officially, members of the opposite gender were not allowed into dorm rooms between 2am and 7am.  That technically didn't apply, although it did in spirit, but then there was the guest policy, which stated that someone couldn't visit for more than three days without special permission.  Since he went home once or twice a week, he was rarely violating that rule either, in a technical sense.

This was an interesting time for a liberal institution, that was opposed to discriminating based on sexuality, but whose rules didn't reflect that.  So basically everyone was afraid to take any official action against them, for fear of appearing intolerant of their lifestyle.  I on the other hand was not afraid of appearing that way, because that is exactly how I felt, and was not ashamed of that.  But I don't like to provoke further conflict unnecessarily, and didn't really want to fight the larger battle at hand.  I just wanted my room back.  But every time I and my other roommates confronted the situation, we were assured by Keith that it would improve.  And they would for a week or two, and it definitely "changed" each time in some way, but it was a constant issue that never totally went away.

The result was that I never went to my room during the day and instead stayed very busy, being involved elsewhere on campus.  I would also crash elsewhere for the night whenever possible.  Shortly before the end of the semester, the Student Body President had lunch with me.  He lived across the hall, and knew about the situation, but so did everyone else on campus, because it was "unique" at the time.  He acknowledged that there was no way the school was going to step in to resolve the larger issue, but offered to try to get me transferred to a new room at the semester.  The dorms were way overcrowded, so there were few openings, and it was common knowledge that the only openings would be from people escaping bad living situations.  I was more afraid of the unknown, than the situation that I had at least become accustomed to, and was surviving.  So I declined his offer, which ended up being stupid, because as it turns out, a decent spot did open up unexpectedly, with some of my other friends, but was taken by someone who became the bad living situation for them.  Ironically that newcomer was my old roommate Alex.