High School Reunion

This weekend is my ten-year high school reunion. I’ve been psyched about it for the last two weeks. Until recently, everything I knew about high school reunions came from TV sitcoms. But this is for real!

I went to high school in Tokyo, Japan, but it was an American school, and when we voted on the reunion location, New York City won. Obviously that makes it easy for me to attend. My graduating class was about 100 people, and I think about 25 are showing up; it’s going to be a pretty informal, weekend-long affair. Friday evening we’re meeting up at a bar; Saturday afternoon is a picnic in Central Park; Saturday night is the big dinner, and then Sunday morning are the goodbyes.

I’m excited about it, and at the same time I’m feeling very self-conscious about how I come across. I’m not worried so much as just really curious to see what people will think of me.

When I was in high school my big activity was theater. I was always acting in a show. My social crowd was a strange combination of theater people and computer geeks. Junior year was the highlight — there were probably about 20 of us that ate lunch and hung out together, an equal number of guys and girls, some of whom were dating, and it was just so much fun. But a couple of the “cool” people referred to us as the “nerd herd.” So what did we do? A couple of us made up blue t-shirts that said “ASIJ Nerd Herd,” listing all of our names, in two columns, one in English and the other in Japanese. And I actually wore this thing sometimes. Jeez, what a dork.

Things got worse at the beginning of senior year. Most of the females and romantic couples in our group had graduated, so we were mostly left with a bunch of computer geeks and just a few random theater folks. The computer people included two guys who ran around all day in gray trenchcoats. (This was pre-Columbine, of course.)

To top it off, after two years of being cast in every show, including some major parts, in the fall of my senior year my friend Rob and I didn’t get cast in the fall play. So I couldn’t even balance my geeky social circle by interacting with those theater people who happened to be outside that circle. The fall of my senior year really sucked ass. I wasn’t that much of a computer geek, but these people were my friends, so I had to hang out with them. I just wasn’t as enthusiastic about D&D as they were.

Secretly I always wanted to hang out with the cool people. The “cool people” were actually a combination of intelligent sports players and fashionable smart people — sort of similar to the “preppy” group you always see in those 1980’s high school movies. They were all pretty social and had fashion sense. Being a smart person, I could connect with some of them; we knew each other and we seemed to like each other, and had in common both intelligence and a strong work ethic. We could talk about the latest calculus test, but then we’d go back to our own social groups. I never actually socialized with them. And yet paradoxically, some of my geeky friends were more comfortable talking with them than I was.

I really wanted the cool people to notice me and to like me. I wasn’t comfortable hanging out with the geeky people, and I didn’t want the cool people to think I was comfortable with it, so I tried to cast myself as this independent-minded eclectic guy who wasn’t beholden to any particular social group. But that didn’t work too well, because I still had more in common with the geeky people and I could never pass as one of the cool types. Yet at the same time, I didn’t fully enjoy hanging out with the geeky people. I worried that they were holding me back. I didn’t want to be typecast. I was so conscious of how I appeared to others.

I was voted Most Intellectual of my high school graduating class. I was president of the Thespian Society and I was the head of the yearbook’s writing staff. And I had my geeky social crowd. Did people typecast me? I don’t know. I don’t really know what people thought of me back then.

Anyway, here I am in June 2001. Today I have a goatee and a sharp pair of glasses and a little bit better fashion sense than I used to. And I’m an uncloseted gay man. When I graduated, in June 1991, I hadn’t told a single person about my sexual attraction to guys or about my numerous male crushes and obsessions. Not a single person. After I came out a few years ago, I decided to out myself in the annual class newsletter. Each year you send in a little blurb about yourself, and two years ago I finally decided it was time to say something.

I may still be intellectual, but I don’t really feel like a success (which is okay, because I didn’t get voted Most Likely to Succeed). I’m really really curious to see what people will think of me. I’m hoping that the gayness and the goatee will make me seem more interesting than I used to feel. I still have these lingering social insecurities from high school. I still want the cool people to like me. This weekend I want to be able to socialize with them as equals. I want people to see me as relaxed. I want people to see me holding a bottle of beer. And I’m curious to see if Mr. Attractive Jockboy, who now works in Manhattan as an investment banker or something, will notice me, not that it’s likely and not that it matters.

There will be plenty of people there, of course, and everyone’s going to be curious about everyone else. It’s not like I’m going to be special. Also, as my dad once said to me, “People don’t care about you as much as you think they do.” I think he meant that in a good way. People will probably be wondering too much about how they’re coming across themselves to notice all the subtle changes in my personality and demeanor over the past ten years.

If there are any. I hope there are. Yet at the same time, I see that these fears and insecurities and desires and this deep consciousness of how I’m being perceived — these things I had back in high school — seem to be coming back in full force as the weekend approaches. And yet I’m probably just chasing ghosts.