Semua Kabar

When Anna Dhody was growing up in Philadelphia, in the nineteen-eighties, her mother used the city’s museums as a kind of babysitter. “She would just drop me off at the Penn Museum and be, like, ‘Don’t touch anything, I’ll meet you at the totem poles in an hour,’ ” Dhody told me. One day, when she was in elementary school, her mother took her to the Mütter Museum. “I don’t think she knew what she was getting into,” Dhody said.

The Mütter, a museum of medical history, is stranger and less clinical than that description implies. Its dimly lit rooms are crowded with specimens of physical anomalies and pathologies: stillborn fetuses in jars, slices of faces suspended in an alcoholic solution, a wall of nineteenth-century skulls. One display case features the livers of Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins who were widely exhibited as curiosities during the nineteenth century; in another is the corpse of a woman whose fat transformed after death in an unusual form of natural preservation called saponification. The Soap Lady, as she is known at the Mütter, has rough, blackened skin, and her mouth is open, as if in a scream. A banner outside the museum, which was founded more than a hundred and sixty years ago, reads “Disturbingly informative.” Every so often, a visitor faints.

Dhody is fifty, with a mobile, expressive face that she uses to comic effect. When she talks about her early visits to the Mütter, her eyes widen in wonder. “It was just so . . . interesting,” she said. On a trip to Belize as an undergraduate studying archeology, she excavated her first grave and was hooked: “You could read the bones, and it was like reading another language.” She went on to get a master’s degree in forensic science, intending to become a crime-scene investigator, but then the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, at Harvard, hired her to help it comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which requires institutions to return Indigenous human remains and other culturally significant items to tribal nations. In her late twenties, she interviewed for a short-term position at the Mütter. She ended up working there for nearly twenty years, most recently as the museum’s curator. “I was there before we had security cameras, and I would walk around in the mornings and talk to the babies in the jars and ask them how they were doing,” she said. “It’s not for a lot of people. But if it’s for you it’s really for you.”

During Dhody’s tenure, staff and invited guests often ate lunch at a communal table in the basement, under a large inflatable pteranodon. “It became a thing you didn’t want to miss,” Robert Hicks, a former director of the museum, said. They made Monty Python references and discussed the news or the reproductive systems of fish. People drawn to the Mütter often share a frank, forensic fascination with the human body and the stranger aspects of science. When the writer Mary Roach went to visit the Mütter offices, Hicks greeted her with one of his pet leeches hanging from his arm. “I asked what its name was, and he told me that it depended on the week, because apparently leeches change genders,” Roach recalled. “I just thought, This is my kind of place.”

Dhody was proud of her work cultivating people willing to donate their own skeletons or other body parts to supplement the museum’s core collections, which mostly date from the nineteenth century. One of them, Robert Pendarvis, is a goateed man in his early sixties with a no-bullshit air. When Pendarvis was a young man, his ring size expanded from ten to fourteen, and his forearms got so beefy that his fellow construction workers called him Popeye. He went to see a former high-school classmate who had become a cardiologist. “Everyone else from high school looks the same, just older,” his friend told him. “But your face looks completely different from how it does in the yearbook.” Pendarvis was eventually diagnosed with acromegaly, a rare endocrine condition in which a pituitary tumor produces growth hormone into adulthood—“the gift that keeps on giving,” as Pendarvis put it.

Pendarvis learned that the Mütter had a skeleton of someone with acromegaly on display. After visiting it, he decided that he wanted to donate his own. It seemed like a fitting tribute to his extraordinary body and the ways it had shaped his life. When he looked into the idea, though, it sounded complicated. “There’s a whole process—you gotta find someone that’ll boil the skin off your bones, yada yada yada,” he said. A few years later, he was preparing for a heart transplant. When he asked Dhody if the museum would be interested in his original heart, “she just freaked,” he said. By the time the surgery took place, Pendarvis’s heart was roughly the size of a football, more than twice the average. When the heart was delivered to the Mütter via FedEx, Dhody filmed an unboxing video and posted it on YouTube. She told me, “There’s no other place like the Mütter is—or was.”

It’s well understood among museum professionals that people like to look at bodies. “We did a mummy exhibit in San Diego and attendance tripled,” Trish Biers, a former associate curator at the San Diego Museum of Us, told me. She now manages a human-remains collection at the University of Cambridge, where the skeleton of a Roman woman, on display in a lead-lined coffin, is one of the most popular attractions.

But such exhibits are coming under increased scrutiny. A recent wave of institutional reëxaminations, accelerated by George Floyd’s murder, in 2020, has had a “seismic” impact on museums holding human remains, according to the anthropologist Valerie DeLeon. It’s increasingly acknowledged that racism, colonialism, and eugenics have played a role in whose bodies end up on display. High-profile news stories have exposed the ugly provenance of items in élite institutions. The Smithsonian held a “racial brain collection,” amassed by a curator in the early twentieth century, purporting to prove the superiority of white people; the University of Pennsylvania owned hundreds of skulls collected by a man who came to be known as “the father of scientific racism.” Ethically questionable behavior isn’t just an artifact of the past: as recently as 2019, an anthropologist at Penn was using the remains of someone killed in the 1985 police bombing of theMOVEheadquarters as a teaching tool, without the consent of the family. (The anthropologist has said that the bones had not been conclusively identified.)

A new movement called for taking human remains that had not been obtained with explicit consent out of public view. In the past few years, the Rhode Island School of Design has returned a mummy to its sarcophagus, and the Hunterian, a medical museum in London, has replaced the seven-foot-seven skeleton of Charles Byrne, “the Irish Giant,” with an artwork. After consulting with native groups, Chile’s National Museum of Natural History has substituted realistic 3-D reconstructions for mummified bodies. Repatriation, which used to be confined largely to Indigenous communities, is now being considered more broadly; the Smithsonian’s Human Remains Task Force recently recommended that any of the collection’s tens of thousands of remains that were taken without permission—which is to say, the vast majority of them—should be offered “to their descendants and descendant communities, organizations, and institutions.”

In 2023, Dhody was on medical leave for a shoulder injury when she heard from colleagues that things were changing at the Mütter, too. Many specimens in the museum were obtained during surgeries and autopsies at almshouses, prison wards, and military field hospitals; few were collected with a contemporary understanding of consent. The museum had a new C.E.O., Mira Irons, and a new executive director, Kate Quinn, who told interviewers that she wanted the Mütter to focus more on well-being and public health. She instructed the staff to avoid “any possible perception of spectacle, oddities, or disrespect of any type.”

By the time that Dhody returned from leave, the museum’s leadership was midway through an ethical review of the collection’s provenance. But Dhody had already anticipated a different kind of risk. “In my opinion, one of our greatest threats is our own fan base if they feel the museum is being somehow threatened,” she cautioned in an internal memo she sent her bosses. “I don’t think it has been properly articulated how passionate these individuals are.”

In 1831, a recent University of Pennsylvania medical-school graduate named Thomas Mutter travelled to Paris, which was then a center of the emerging field of plastic surgery. When he returned to Philadelphia, a year later, he added an umlaut to his name and irritated his colleagues with his incessant chatter about the superiority of French surgeons.

In the early nineteenth century, surgery was performative and brutal. “Time me, gentlemen, time me!” a British surgeon bellowed to his students before amputations. (Once, during a hasty operation, he accidentally cut off an assistant’s fingers.) At the University of Pennsylvania, the nation’s first medical school, patients who agreed to be operated on in public could get their care for free, and physicians sometimes traded insults with their colleagues during operations, according to a biography of Mütter, by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz. Mütter was known for his colorful silk suits and for his skill in treating patients deemed “monsters”: people with proliferating tumors, say, or severe facial burns. The theatrical nature of the work suited him but, perhaps because of his own ailments—he was ill for much of his life and died in his late forties—he “appeared at operations to be painfully sympathetic with the suffering of the patient,” a fellow-physician noted. When anesthesia came into vogue in this country, in the eighteen-forties, he was the first surgeon in Philadelphia to use it.

Like many physicians of his time, Mütter amassed specimens for use in teaching, including realistic wax and plaster models and preserved human tissue and bones. After his death, in 1859, he left his collection—some two thousand objects—to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a fellowship organization for doctors, with the stipulation that it be presented as a museum. Mütter’s bequest was eventually supplemented by donations from other physicians and scientists. One otolaryngologist provided thousands of objects that he had extracted from patients’ throats and lungs: toys, coins, keys, and a medallion that read “Carry me for good luck.” Joseph Leidy, a paleontologist and an early enthusiast of forensics—he was reportedly the first person to help solve a murder using a microscope—was a prominent contributor. In the eighteen-seventies, he obtained the skeleton of a seven-foot-six man and the corpse of the saponified woman, which he acquired, as he noted on the receipt, via “connivance.” (Leidy donated his own brain to the American Anthropometric Society, as did Walt Whitman.) The Mütter collection came to include Grover Cleveland’s jaw tumor, a piece of one of John Wilkes Booth’s vertebrae, and slides of Albert Einstein’s brain.

This spring, I visited the Mütter, situated inside the grand Beaux-Arts headquarters of the College of Physicians, which still owns the museum. Erin McLeary, who was hired as the senior director of collections and research last year, met me in the lobby. We walked past high-ceilinged reception rooms toward the entrance to the Mütter, which was marked by a disclaimer. “You are about to enter a gallery containing human remains,” it cautioned. “If you wish to avoid this, please do not enter.”

McLeary wore a silk scarf tied around her neck and had an air of scholarly flutter. “Specimens are the ways in which physicians in the nineteenth century were communicating ideas,” she told me. “There’s a repeated phrase they use—that these are ‘nature’s books.’ As in, they can be read, they reveal information.” Around the nineteen-thirties, as the science of pathology evolved, such collections began to fall out of favor. “People are looking less at gross pathology—the big specimens—and more at microscopic changes. And there are different techniques for preservation,” McLeary said. We paused in front of a pale, fleshy object in a glass jar blurry with condensation. “Like this—this has lost some fidelity, right?” McLeary leaned in to read the label more closely; it was a foot.

Many institutions got rid of their specimens, likely disposing of them as medical waste or, in some cases, passing them on to the Mütter. Collections of pathological specimens came to be associated more with P. T. Barnum-style sideshows than with medical scholarship, although the two categories hadn’t always been clearly delineated. “There’s been a lot of resistance to the idea that medical schools even had collections like this,” McLeary said. “Someone at Penn was, like, ‘I don’t believe we ever had a collection like the Mütter’s.’ ” (They did.) “I think they’ve been memory-holed.”

The Mütter might have become an obscure collection, of interest mostly to historians, if not for a woman named Gretchen Worden. In 1974, Worden wrote to the Mütter’s curator asking for a job. She had a degree in anthropology from Temple University and no full-time work experience. “As for vital statistics, I was born in Shanghai, China, on September 26, 1947. I have since grown to a height of five feet, eight and three-quarters inches and can get things down from a seven-foot shelf. I am fairly proficient in English, barely proficient in French, and have forgotten most of my Russian,” she wrote. In lieu of a résumé, she included her college transcript. Worden was hired, and spent the rest of her life at the museum.

Anatomical collections like the Mütter’s had long inspired feelings of fascination and shame about the human body. In Victorian London, the proprietors of anatomical displays were sometimes prosecuted for indecency. For many years, the Hunterian museum was open only to medical professionals, “learned men,” or “respectably dressed persons.” But Worden, who became the Mütter’s director, promoted the museum through multiple appearances on David Letterman’s late-night talk show, where she showed off objects that made the audience groan or erupt in shocked laughter. (“GoodLord,” you can hear someone say, after she shows Letterman a photograph of a wax model with gnarly facial lesions.) She and the publisher Laura Lindgren invited artists, including William Wegman, to photograph the collection for a calendar distributed in bookstores around the country. Worden also cultivated the museum’s distinctive Victorian atmosphere: heavy velvet drapes, red carpets, wooden cases packed with specimens. As some institutions got rid of their anatomical collections, Worden snapped them up. “I am almost totally fulfilled here in this job. It’s everything. It’s art, it’s science, it’s bones, it’s anatomy, pathology, it’s contemporary medicine. I just couldn’t be happier,” she once told the PhiladelphiaDaily News.

Regal and unapologetically odd, Worden shaped the museum in her image. Questions of spectacle and propriety circled the Mütter even then, but Worden’s ample charisma, her confidence in the validity of her own fascination, seemed largely able to keep them at bay. She saw the museum as a place for “humans looking at humans,” somewhere that “treats people as if they’re grown up enough to take a look at what’s under the hood.” By the end of her tenure, attendance had grown more than tenfold.

Worden died in 2004, at fifty-six, after a brief illness. An article in theTimesnoted the “motley crowd” that gathered for her memorial service at the museum, which included “dignified-looking surgeons,” “Philadelphia society matrons,” and “a couple of sideshow impresarios.” The mourners sang “Babies in Jars,” a song composed to the tune of “My Favorite Things.”

Valerie DeLeon, the anthropologist, began a two-year stint as the president of the American Association for Anatomy in 2021, as her field was coming under intense scrutiny for its treatment of human remains. DeLeon convened a task force to devise best practices for institutions with historical collections of remains, an area with hardly any regulatory guidance. She felt that it was important to move quickly. “The members that I represent needed helpnow,” she told me. (The University of Florida, where she is a professor, was weighing how to handle its own anatomical teaching collections.) The task force included anthropologists, anatomists, and museum professionals. They agreed that it was important to treat human specimens with dignity and respect, but they disagreed about what that meant in practice. Some argued that, given the presumptive unethical taint of such collections, human remains should be buried or otherwise respectfully disposed of. Another faction argued that the societal benefits of continuing to research, teach with, and display human remains outweighed the harms to people who were, after all, long dead.

Human tissues “hold an ethically intermediary place between inanimate property and living beings,” the members of the task force wrote in a report, which was published inThe Anatomical Recordlast year. First, the group had some thorny discussions, DeLeon said. Just how much of a body counted as a person? Did a bone shard have the same level of personhood as a full skeleton? What about teeth, or tumor cells? Should fetal remains be considered part of the mother or a separate person? Did the long dead occupy a different status from those who had died more recently?

In the report, the group laid out its guidelines, which recommend taking cultural context into account when determining how to display or dispose of remains, given that practices such as cremation or postmortem display may be considered traditional by one culture and taboo by another. Whenever possible, the A.A.A. recommends consulting with “communities of care”—descendants or others with an interest in and a connection to the remains. But it’s not always clear who is best positioned to speak for the dead. “For many remains, even within my own institution, we literally have no idea where they came from,” DeLeon said. “So what do you do with those?”

In Philadelphia, I met Kate Quinn, the Mütter’s executive director, in one of the College of Physicians’ anterooms, whose walls were lined with mahogany bookshelves and oil paintings of eminent physicians. Quinn had an air of guarded professionalism, and for most of the interview she was flanked by both a P.R. representative and her new boss, Larry Kaiser, a thoracic surgeon who had recently been named the president and C.E.O. of the College of Physicians.

After Quinn’s hiring, in 2022, she quickly moved to professionalize the Mütter, helping to establish policies for ethics and beginning the process of applying for accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums. She sometimes received calls from people who had been told by Dhody that the Mütter might acquire their body parts; Quinn told them that the museum wasn’t doing that at the moment. She oversaw an audit of the collection, the first in more than eighty years. “I had the expectation that we would find that maybe two or three per cent of the collection had been given to us with consent,” she told me. “But we’re finding it’s much, much less than that.”

Stacey Mann, a consultant who was brought in by Quinn, told me it seemed that the collection was haphazardly catalogued, with some things apparently acquired because of their value as curiosities rather than as medically informative specimens. “They found two of these baby skulls in the library that were linked to this woman who was, I guess, a murderess,” Mann said. (The bodies were discovered in a trunk after the woman, Stella Williamson, died, in 1980; the exact circumstances of their deaths are unclear. The museum is helping to arrange a reburial.) “Every month, there’d be another thing that was, like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”

Quinn also spearheaded something called the Postmortem project, an example of the kind of institutional self-critique that has become popular in the museum world in the past few years. At the Mütter, this has meant providing visitors with visual annotations to the existing collection in the form of green signs. Near the entrance, for example, a sepia-tinged photograph shows the back of a woman’s head. A matted lock of hair trails down her back in calligraphic spirals, an example of plica, a rare disorder. Like many objects in the Mütter’s collection, it is unsettlingly compelling, the distance of time imbuing the pathology with a kind of poetry. “This photo comes from a book of hair samples doctors took from patients with different ethnic backgrounds,” the Postmortem sign affixed to the display reads. “Is this just a picture of hair when you know that it was used to perpetuate racism?” One of the museum’s temporary galleries is devoted to the Postmortem project, and its atmosphere—white painted walls; bright, clean light; exhibits with clear, legible signage—feels like a portal into an entirely different institution. Next to a display about power and consent, visitors are invited to contribute their responses on butcher paper: “SCARY PEOPLE,” “acknowledge the ugly past,” “Wokeness destroys truth.”

Quinn walked me through an exhibit that had been on display for more than a decade, and which linked items in the collection to Grimms’ Fairy Tales. In a broad wooden case, a small, brownish object that resembled a piece of ginger root rested on a shelf. “That’s the bound foot of a Chinese woman,” Quinn said. “It’s on display to talk about Cinderella. And it’s a question, you know—is that something we should be doing more or less of? Whose story is being prioritized there? It’s not her story. Her background is not even part of the display at all—it’s all about Cinderella, and foot-binding, and it’s next to a book with illustrations of shoes. This doesn’t mean that we don’t share that specimen moving forward, but maybe we’re telling a different story about it.”

Under Quinn and Irons’s leadership, the museum cancelled its annual Halloween party and stopped hosting a popular goth-tinged craft bazaar. Then, in early 2023, the museum removed hundreds of videos from its YouTube channel and took down a digital exhibit featuring images of human remains. The videos, most of which were made by Dhody, were often irreverent and sometimes involved staff members goofing around in the museum. The YouTube channel was popular, with more than a hundred thousand subscribers. Dhody, sounding wounded, told me that Quinn had characterized it, disparagingly, as “edutainment.” According to Quinn, the museum planned to review the videos for accuracy and tone. (Eventually, about a third of them were reposted, although none that included human remains.) But some of the museum’s fans saw their sudden disappearance as a harbinger of worse things to come. Online, rumors spread that the new leadership planned to remove the fetal remains, or to close the museum to the public altogether.

A half-dozen or so of the Mütter’s most ardent enthusiasts—members of the “weird little parasocial network attached to the museum,” as one described it to me—formed a group called Protect the Mütter, to protest the changes. They handed out flyers around town, sold T-shirts that read “Censorship is the enemy of science,” and kept up a regular cadence of outraged social-media posts “looking out for the well being of our deceased friends” and criticizing the new leadership’s “sweeping, judgmental, reactive moves.” More than a dozen employees departed, including Dhody, who resigned last year, saying that she felt “shuttled off to the sidelines.” A woman who had donated her uterine fibroid to the Mütter demanded it back, saying that she had lost confidence in the institution’s leadership. Robert Hicks, the former director, accused Quinn and Irons of being “elitist and exclusionary,” and removed the Mütter from his will.

Protect the Mütter was run by a self-described “scrappy group of neurodivergent queers” who posted land acknowledgments on the organization’s Instagram page. Their campaign attracted some unexpected allies. In an op-ed for theWall Street Journal, a former trustee of the College of Physicians blamed “cancel culture” and “a handful of woke elites” for jeopardizing the museum’s future. “Two women put in charge ofTOTALLY COOLmuseum of oddities, The Mütter Museum, think the exhibits are icky and plan to destroy it,” the conservative pundit Ann Coulter posted on Twitter. “Is there anything women can’t wreck?” Pendarvis, who had donated his heart, told me that he was disgusted by the new leadership’s “wokeness and the bullshit about D.E.I.”; he, too, asked for his specimen back. “When I saw that Ann Coulter thought I was on the right track, I sat there and said, ‘My God, what is happening?’ ” the Protect the Mütter member told me. “But you know how a broken clock is right two times a day.”

Protect the Mütter created a petition—signed by more than thirty thousand people, including Roach, the magician Penn Jillette, and the novelist Neil Gaiman—that called for the dismissal of Irons and Quinn, among other measures. Irons resigned in September, 2023. When I met with Quinn, she spoke of that period with a kind of brittle diplomacy. “It was a solid year of recognizing that there are a lot of folks who have strong passions for this place, and rightly so,” she said. She was eager to “facilitate the discussions” and “get folks engaged in the conversation.” The one moment when Quinn’s composure wavered was when I asked her if she thought gender had played a role in the ire directed against her. “I do, I do think that,” she said with surprising vehemence. “I had a lot of attacks on the way that I look. Someone called me a bland blond normie. Someone said that I must be conservative and anti-abortion because I would roll up the sleeves on my blazer. And someone else said that I wore minimalistic 2011 makeup.” Then she seemed to catch herself. “But we carry on and continue forward.”

McLeary has been leading the effort to learn more about the people whose bodies and body parts have ended up at the Mütter. Non-experts often assume that DNA analysis can provide the solution to all mysteries, supplying a name and a family tree. But such testing is often prohibitively expensive and, when dealing with historic specimens, not consistently precise. Instead, the Mütter has relied largely on archival research. Last year, after McLeary was hired, she went looking for the nineteenth-century collection catalogue, which she found in the College of Physicians’ library. “Maybe it was when Gretchen died, I don’t know, but at some point staff just ceased knowing about this,” she told me. She set the book on a stand and began to page through it with me. It was dense with notes, some typewritten and some in tiny, precise handwriting: “skull of a typical mouth breather,” “a Chinese skull,” “a heavy skull.” Many of the listings included lengthy case reports from the physicians who had donated the specimens. Owing in part to prevailing nineteenth-century ideas about how certain diseases tracked with race, class, and life style, the entries are often rich in sociological detail, which—when cross-referenced with newly digitized historical archives—has helped McLeary and her team attach context, and in some cases a name, to hundreds of specimens.

This research is just the first step in a process that may eventually involve contacting descendants, a project that would have its own set of complications. McLeary paused at an entry describing the skull of a man sentenced to death for murder. “You think about these what-ifs—what if you contacted these descendants? The crimes he committed were horrible,” she said. “ ‘Did you know that your great-great-grandfather might have sexually assaulted his daughter and then killed her? Do you want his skull back?’ ”

I followed McLeary into the museum’s main room, past a group of teen-age girls transfixed by an exhibit on teratology, the study of congenital abnormalities. We stopped in front of a child’s skeleton, about three feet tall, with an enlarged skull and bones blackened with age. “Hydrocephalus has caused this child’s head to grow to a circumference of over 27 inches,” the label read. “After six years of expanding rapidly, the skull has numerous wormian bones—small, irregular bones between the bones normally present in the skull.” The child’s name, McLeary had determined, was Thomas Jeff, and he had died of complications from the condition in 1882, when he was six or seven years old. He had lived with his family in a low-income neighborhood in Philadelphia. During his lifetime, he’d occasionally been put on display for money. After his death, his mother sold the body to a doctor, for some six hundred dollars in today’s money. “There’s a short newspaper article about his sale, in which his mother says, If we buried him, he would just be grave-robbed—it was going to happen either way,” McLeary said. She said that focussing on contemporary notions of consent could risk reading the present into the past—essentially looking for “something that simply didn’t exist,” as she put it—but that archival work could build a better understanding of individuals’ agency and bodily autonomy, both during life and afterward, and that this understanding could help guide the museum’s decisions.

With that in mind, the research team had selected Jeff as a case study; they were seeing how much of his life they could piece together beyond his name. McLeary found that Jeff’s mother, Letitia, died not long after her son; records list her place of burial as Jefferson Medical College, which means that her body may have been used to teach dissection. With help from the African American Genealogy Group, in Philadelphia, the team was able to trace the path of Jeff’s two younger brothers to a Quaker orphanage. Afterward, one brother was placed in indenture at a farm in Delaware and the other was sent to a residential school for Black and Native children, where he was second in his class, according to a report card that a researcher at Haverford College tracked down. I glanced at the small skeleton, now freighted with a name and a history. It seemed to demand a different kind of looking. “You know, Thomas Jeff’s father voted in 1870, as a newly enfranchised Black man,” McLeary said. “There’s a whole history of the American Black experience that we can tell, and to me that’s a far more interesting thing to think about than hydrocephaly.”

In the past two years, the Mütter’s attendance numbers and gift-shop sales have declined, and the College of Physicians, which relies in part on the museum’s income, is running a deficit. Kaiser, who became the College’s C.E.O. earlier this year, told me that he has a “broader view” of the ethics of display. “Look, from the business perspective, I depend on admissions to the museum and the gift shop,” he said. “I like people coming here for whatever reason, whether it’s morbid fascination or education or simply entertainment. I’m O.K. with that.” Kaiser spent most of my interview with Quinn looking at his phone. He spoke up when I asked her if visiting the museum should be fun. “Yes!” he said emphatically, before she could reply.

A week later, I heard that Quinn’s position had been eliminated. On Instagram, Protect the Mütter declared victory and posted an image of two skeletal hands, their bony fingers pressed together to make a heart shape. The museum will now be run by McLeary and Sara Ray, a historian of science. Both women stressed to me their love of the institution, as well as their understanding that it needed to evolve. Ray mentioned that she’d been a volunteer tour guide a decade ago. “When I came back in January, I was shadowing a docent, and I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, this docent is giving the same—literally the same—tour,’ ” she said. “For all of the talk about changes to the collection, really there’s not that much in the core gallery that has changed.” The turmoil surrounding the museum’s direction ultimately seemed to be less about major alterations to the space than about a shift in emotional tone, a movement away from celebration and toward something like penance.

McLeary and Ray see the research into the collection’s origins as a form of appreciation; what is the Mütter, after all, if not a place where people go to be disturbed? “The way this controversy has been depicted is that you either need to commit yourself to ethics or you need to commit yourself to being a place of morbid fascination,” Ray said. “We think there’s a secret third way, which is that you can actually do both of those things.”

One of the Mütter’s most ambivalent defenders is the Chicago artist, writer, and disability activist Riva Lehrer. “I have a really deep love of the variance of anatomy—all the ways you can be human, all the different ways you can live in a body,” Lehrer, who has spina bifida, told me. She has taught anatomy and has been a visiting artist in a cadaver lab, where she donned scrubs and observed as medical students wielded their scalpels. “And, then, I’ve had quite a few surgeries, so I’ve done a lot of medical research on my own,” she added.

On Lehrer’s first visit to the museum, in 2006, she found it “immediately fascinating,” but the moody lighting and sideshow atmospherics struck her as both offensive and trite. “I was feeling sniffy about the whole thing,” she said. Downstairs, she entered the exhibit devoted to teratology. Preserved fetuses hung submerged in jars, swollen from preservation fluid and bleached to a uniform, milky white. “I know people with a vast amount of variance, so I’m looking at all these bodies and thinking, Oh, this reminds me of John, this reminds me of Mary Lou, but I wasn’t thinking about myself. You find out how defended you are when you can’t be anymore. And then I turned the corner—I mean literally and figuratively,” she said. “It was like my armor fell off.” On display was a small, pale body that appeared to have spina bifida lipomyelomeningocele, the rare variation that Lehrer has. She felt as if she were encountering herself. She longed to slip the jar in her pocket. “Nature does all this stuff—it’s such a bag of chaos, you know?” she said. “We’re born into this chaos, and we grow up, and then we’re, like, Well, now what do I do in this body I landed in?” she said. “What am I supposed to do with this?” ♦

On a blustery spring Thursday, just after midterms, I went out for noodles with Alex and Eugene, two undergraduates at New York University, to talk about how they use artificial intelligence in their schoolwork. When I first met Alex, last year, he was interested in a career in the arts, and he devoted a lot of his free time to photo shoots with his friends. But he had recently decided on a more practical path: he wanted to become a C.P.A. His Thursdays were busy, and he had forty-five minutes until a study session for an accounting class. He stowed his skateboard under a bench in the restaurant and shook his laptop out of his bag, connecting to the internet before we sat down.

Alex has wavy hair and speaks with the chill, singsong cadence of someone who has spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. He and Eugene scanned the menu, and Alex said that they should get clear broth, rather than spicy, “so we can both lock in our skin care.” Weeks earlier, when I’d messaged Alex, he had said that everyone he knew used ChatGPT in some fashion, but that he used it only for organizing his notes. In person, he admitted that this wasn’t remotely accurate. “Any type of writing in life, I use A.I.,” he said. He relied on Claude for research, DeepSeek for reasoning and explanation, and Gemini for image generation. ChatGPT served more general needs. “I need A.I. to text girls,” he joked, imagining an A.I.-enhanced version of Hinge. I asked if he had used A.I. when setting up our meeting. He laughed, and then replied, “Honestly, yeah. I’m not tryin’ to type all that. Could you tell?”

OpenAI released ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. Six days later, Sam Altman, the C.E.O., announced that it had reached a million users. Large language models like ChatGPT don’t “think” in the human sense—when you ask ChatGPT a question, it draws from the data sets it has been trained on and builds an answer based on predictable word patterns. Companies had experimented with A.I.-driven chatbots for years, but most sputtered upon release; Microsoft’s 2016 experiment with a bot named Tay was shut down after sixteen hours because it began spouting racist rhetoric and denying the Holocaust. But ChatGPT seemed different. It could hold a conversation and break complex ideas down into easy-to-follow steps. Within a month, Google’s management, fearful that A.I. would have an impact on its search-engine business, declared a “code red.”

Among educators, an even greater panic arose. It was too deep into the school term to implement a coherent policy for what seemed like a homework killer: in seconds, ChatGPT could collect and summarize research and draft a full essay. Many large campuses tried to regulate ChatGPT and its eventual competitors, mostly in vain. I asked Alex to show me an example of an A.I.-produced paper. Eugene wanted to see it, too. He used a different A.I. app to help with computations for his business classes, but he had never gotten the hang of using it for writing. “I got you,” Alex told him. (All the students I spoke with are identified by pseudonyms.)

He opened Claude on his laptop. I noticed a chat that mentioned abolition. “We had to read Robert Wedderburn for a class,” he explained, referring to the nineteenth-century Jamaican abolitionist. “But, obviously, I wasn’t tryin’ to read that.” He had prompted Claude for a summary, but it was too long for him to read in the ten minutes he had before class started. He told me, “I said, ‘Turn it into concise bullet points.’ ” He then transcribed Claude’s points in his notebook, since his professor ran a screen-free classroom.

Alex searched until he found a paper for an art-history class, about a museum exhibition. He had gone to the show, taken photographs of the images and the accompanying wall text, and then uploaded them to Claude, asking it to generate a paper according to the professor’s instructions. “I’m trying to do the least work possible, because this is a class I’m not hella fucking with,” he said. After skimming the essay, he felt that the A.I. hadn’t sufficiently addressed the professor’s questions, so he refined the prompt and told it to try again. In the end, Alex’s submission received the equivalent of an A-minus. He said that he had a basic grasp of the paper’s argument, but that if the professor had asked him for specifics he’d have been “so fucked.” I read the paper over Alex’s shoulder; it was a solid imitation of how an undergraduate might describe a set of images. If this had been 2007, I wouldn’t have made much of its generic tone, or of the precise, box-ticking quality of its critical observations.

Eugene, serious and somewhat solemn, had been listening with bemusement. “I would not cut and paste like he did, because I’m a lot more paranoid,” he said. He’s a couple of years younger than Alex and was in high school when ChatGPT was released. At the time, he experimented with A.I. for essays but noticed that it made easily noticed errors. “This passed the A.I. detector?” he asked Alex.

When ChatGPT launched, instructors adopted various measures to insure that students’ work was their own. These included requiring them to share time-stamped version histories of their Google documents, and designing written assignments that had to be completed in person, over multiple sessions. But most detective work occurs after submission. Services like GPTZero, Copyleaks, and Originality.ai analyze the structure and syntax of a piece of writing and assess the likelihood that it was produced by a machine. Alex said that his art-history professor was “hella old,” and therefore probably didn’t know about such programs. We fed the paper into a few different A.I.-detection websites. One said there was a twenty-eight-per-cent chance that the paper was A.I.-generated; another put the odds at sixty-one per cent. “That’s better than I expected,” Eugene said.

I asked if he thought what his friend had done was cheating, and Alex interrupted: “Of course. Are you fucking kidding me?”

As we looked at Alex’s laptop, I noticed that he had recently asked ChatGPT whether it was O.K. to go running in Nike Dunks. He had concluded that ChatGPT made for the best confidant. He consulted it as one might a therapist, asking for tips on dating and on how to stay motivated during dark times. His ChatGPT sidebar was an index of the highs and lows of being a young person. He admitted to me and Eugene that he’d used ChatGPT to draft his application to N.Y.U.—our lunch might never have happened had it not been for A.I. “I guess it’s really dishonest, but, fuck it, I’m here,” he said.

“It’s cheating, but I don’t think it’s, like,cheating,” Eugene said. He saw Alex’s art-history essay as a victimless crime. He was just fulfilling requirements, not training to become a literary scholar.

Alex had to rush off to his study session. I told Eugene that our conversation had made me wonder about my function as a professor. He asked if I taught English, and I nodded.

“Mm, O.K.,” he said, and laughed. “So you’re, like, majorly affected.”

I teach at a small liberal-arts college, and I often joke that a student is more likely to hand in a big paper a year late (as recently happened) than to take a dishonorable shortcut. My classes are small and intimate, driven by processes and pedagogical modes, like letting awkward silences linger, that are difficult to scale. As a result, I have always had a vague sense that my students are learningsomething, even when it is hard to quantify. In the past, if I was worried that a paper had been plagiarized, I would enter a few phrases from it into a search engine and call it due diligence. But I recently began noticing that some students’ writing seemed out of synch with how they expressed themselves in the classroom. One essay felt stitched together from two minds—half of it was polished and rote, the other intimate and unfiltered. Having never articulated a policy for A.I., I took the easy way out. The student had had enough shame to write half of the essay, and I focussed my feedback on improving that part.

It’s easy to get hung up on stories of academic dishonesty. Late last year, in a survey of college and university leaders, fifty-nine per cent reported an increase in cheating, a figure that feels conservative when you talk to students. A.I. has returned us to the question of what the point of higher education is. Until we’re eighteen, we go to school because we have to, studying the Second World War and reducing fractions while undergoing a process of socialization. We’re essentially learning how to follow rules. College, however, is a choice, and it has always involved the tacit agreement that students will fulfill a set of tasks, sometimes pertaining to subjects they find pointless or impractical, and then receive some kind of credential. But even for the most mercenary of students, the pursuit of a grade or a diploma has come with an ancillary benefit. You’re being taught how to do something difficult, and maybe, along the way, you come to appreciate the process of learning. But the arrival of A.I. means that you can now bypass the process, and the difficulty, altogether.

There are no reliable figures for how many American students use A.I., just stories about how everyone is doing it. A 2024 Pew Research Center survey of students between the ages of thirteen and seventeen suggests that a quarter of teens currently use ChatGPT for schoolwork, double the figure from 2023. OpenAI recently released a report claiming that one in three college students uses its products. There’s good reason to believe that these are low estimates. If you grew up Googling everything or using Grammarly to give your prose a professional gloss, it isn’t far-fetched to regard A.I. as just another productivity tool. “I see it as no different from Google,” Eugene said. “I use it for the same kind of purpose.”

Being a student is about testing boundaries and staying one step ahead of the rules. While administrators and educators have been debating new definitions for cheating and discussing the mechanics of surveillance, students have been embracing the possibilities of A.I. A few months after the release of ChatGPT, a Harvard undergraduate got approval to conduct an experiment in which it wrote papers that had been assigned in seven courses. The A.I. skated by with a 3.57 G.P.A., a little below the school’s average. Upstart companies introduced products that specialized in “humanizing” A.I.-generated writing, and TikTok influencers began coaching their audiences on how to avoid detection.

Unable to keep pace, academic administrations largely stopped trying to control students’ use of artificial intelligence and adopted an attitude of hopeful resignation, encouraging teachers to explore the practical, pedagogical applications of A.I. In certain fields, this wasn’t a huge stretch. Studies show that A.I. is particularly effective in helping non-native speakers acclimate to college-level writing in English. In someSTEMclasses, using generative A.I. as a tool is acceptable. Alex and Eugene told me that their accounting professor encouraged them to take advantage of free offers on new A.I. products available only to undergraduates, as companies competed for student loyalty throughout the spring. In May, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Edu, a product specifically marketed for educational use, after schools including Oxford University, Arizona State University, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business experimented with incorporating A.I. into their curricula. This month, the company detailed plans to integrate ChatGPT into every dimension of campus life, with students receiving “personalized” A.I. accounts to accompany them throughout their years in college.

But for English departments, and for college writing in general, the arrival of A.I. has been more vexed. Why bother teaching writing now? The future of the midterm essay may be a quaint worry compared with larger questions about the ramifications of artificial intelligence, such as its effect on the environment, or the automation of jobs. And yet has there ever been a time in human history when writing was so important to the average person? E-mails, texts, social-media posts, angry missives in comments sections, customer-service chats—let alone one’s actual work. The way we write shapes our thinking. We process the world through the composition of text dozens of times a day, in what the literary scholar Deborah Brandt calls our era of “mass writing.” It’s possible that the ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same A.I. assistants.

Corey Robin, a writer and a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, read the early stories about ChatGPT with skepticism. Then his daughter, a sophomore in high school at the time, used it to produce an essay that was about as good as those his undergraduates wrote after a semester of work. He decided to stop assigning take-home essays. For the first time in his thirty years of teaching, he administered in-class exams.

Robin told me he finds many of the steps that universities have taken to combat A.I. essays to be “hand-holding that’s not leading people anywhere.” He has become a believer in the passage-identification blue-book exam, in which students name and contextualize excerpts of what they’ve read for class. “Know the text and write about it intelligently,” he said. “That was a way of honoring their autonomy without being a cop.”

His daughter, who is now a senior, complains that her teachers rarely assign full books. And Robin has noticed that college students are more comfortable with excerpts than with entire articles, and prefer short stories to novels. “I don’t get the sense they have the kind of literary or cultural mastery that used to be the assumption upon which we assigned papers,” he said. One study, published last year, found that fifty-eight per cent of students at two Midwestern universities had so much trouble interpreting the opening paragraphs of “Bleak House,” by Charles Dickens, that “they would not be able to read the novel on their own.” And these were English majors.

The return to pen and paper has been a common response to A.I. among professors, with sales of blue books rising significantly at certain universities in the past two years. Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, grew dispirited after some students submitted what he suspected was A.I.-generated work for an assignment on how the school’s honor code should view A.I.-generated work. He, too, has decided to return to blue books, and is pondering the logistics of oral exams. “Maybe we go all the way back to 450 B.C.,” he told me.

But other professors have renewed their emphasis on getting students to see the value of process. Dan Melzer, the director of the first-year composition program at the University of California, Davis, recalled that “everyone was in a panic” when ChatGPT first hit. Melzer’s job is to think about how writing functions across the curriculum so that all students, from prospective scientists to future lawyers, get a chance to hone their prose. Consequently, he has an accommodating view of how norms around communication have changed, especially in the internet age. He was sympathetic to kids who viewed some of their assignments as dull and mechanical and turned to ChatGPT to expedite the process. He called the five-paragraph essay—the classic “hamburger” structure, consisting of an introduction, three supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion—“outdated,” having descended from élitist traditions.

Melzer believes that some students loathe writing because of how it’s been taught, particularly in the past twenty-five years. The No Child Left Behind Act, from 2002, instituted standards-based reforms across all public schools, resulting in generations of students being taught to write according to rigid testing rubrics. As one teacher wrote in the WashingtonPostin 2013, students excelled when they mastered a form of “bad writing.” Melzer has designed workshops that treat writing as a deliberative, iterative process involving drafting, feedback (from peers and also from ChatGPT), and revision.

“If you assign a generic essay topic and don’t engage in any process, and you just collect it a month later, it’s almost like you’re creating an environment tailored to crime,” he said. “You’re encouraging crime in your community!”

I found Melzer’s pedagogical approach inspiring; I instantly felt bad for routinely breaking my class into small groups so that they could “workshop” their essays, as though the meaning of this verb were intuitively clear. But, as a student, I’d have found Melzer’s focus on process tedious—it requires a measure of faith that all the work will pay off in the end. Writing is hard, regardless of whether it’s a five-paragraph essay or a haiku, and it’s natural, especially when you’re a college student, to want to avoid hard work—this is why classes like Melzer’s are compulsory. “You can imagine that students really want to be there,” he joked.

College is all about opportunity costs. One way of viewing A.I. is as an intervention in how people choose to spend their time. In the early nineteen-sixties, college students spent an estimated twenty-four hours a week on schoolwork. Today, that figure is about fifteen, a sign, to critics of contemporary higher education, that young people are beneficiaries of grade inflation—in a survey conducted by theHarvardCrimson, nearly eighty per cent of the class of 2024 reported a G.P.A. of 3.7 or higher—and lack the diligence of their forebears. I don’t know how many hours I spent on schoolwork in the late nineties, when I was in college, but I recall feeling that there was never enough time. I suspect that, even if today’s students spend less time studying, they don’t feel significantly less stressed. It’s the nature of campus life that everyone assimilates into a culture of busyness, and a lot of that anxiety has been shifted to extracurricular or pre-professional pursuits. A dean at Harvard remarked that students feel compelled to find distinction outside the classroom because they are largely indistinguishable within it.

Eddie, a sociology major at Long Beach State, is older than most of his classmates. He graduated high school in 2010, and worked full time while attending a community college. “I’ve gone through a lot to be at school,” he told me. “I want to learn as much as I can.” ChatGPT, which his therapist recommended to him, was ubiquitous at Long Beach even before the California State University system, which Long Beach is a part of, announced a partnership with OpenAI, giving its four hundred and sixty thousand students access to ChatGPT Edu. “I was a little suspicious of how convenient it was,” Eddie said. “It seemed to know a lot, in a way that seemed sohuman.”

He told me that he used A.I. “as a brainstorm” but never for writing itself. “I limit myself, for sure.” Eddie works for Los Angeles County, and he was talking to me during a break. He admitted that, when he was pressed for time, he would sometimes use ChatGPT for quizzes. “I don’t know if I’m telling myself a lie,” he said. “I’ve given myself opportunities to do things ethically, but if I’m rushing to work I don’t feel bad about that,” particularly for courses outside his major.

I recognized Eddie’s conflict. I’ve used ChatGPT a handful of times, and on one occasion it accomplished a scheduling task so quickly that I began to understand the intoxication of hyper-efficiency. I’ve felt the need to stop myself from indulging in idle queries. Almost all the students I interviewed in the past few months described the same trajectory: from using A.I. to assist with organizing their thoughts to off-loading their thinking altogether. For some, it became something akin to social media, constantly open in the corner of the screen, a portal for distraction. This wasn’t like paying someone to write a paper for you—there was no social friction, no aura of illicit activity. Nor did it feel like sharing notes, or like passing off what you’d read in CliffsNotes or SparkNotes as your own analysis. There was no real time to reflect on questions of originality or honesty—the student basically became a project manager. And for students who use it the way Eddie did, as a kind of sounding board, there’s no clear threshold where the work ceases to be an original piece of thinking. In April, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, released a report drawn from a million anonymized student conversations with its chatbots. It suggested that more than half of user interactions could be classified as “collaborative,” involving a dialogue between student and A.I. (Presumably, the rest of the interactions were more extractive.)

May, a sophomore at Georgetown, was initially resistant to using ChatGPT. “I don’t know if it was an ethics thing,” she said. “I just thought I could do the assignment better, and it wasn’t worth the time being saved.” But she began using it to proofread her essays, and then to generate cover letters, and now she uses it for “pretty much all” her classes. “I don’t think it’s made me a worse writer,” she said. “It’s perhaps made me a less patient writer. I used to spend hours writing essays, nitpicking over my wording, really thinking about how to phrase things.” College had made her reflect on her experience at an extremely competitive high school, where she had received top grades but retained very little knowledge. As a result, she was the rare student who found college somewhat relaxed. ChatGPT helped her breeze through busywork and deepen her engagement with the courses she felt passionate about. “I was trying to think, Where’s all this time going?” she said. I had never envied a college student until she told me the answer: “I sleep more now.”

Harry Stecopoulos oversees the University of Iowa’s English department, which has more than eight hundred majors. On the first day of his introductory course, he asks students to write by hand a two-hundred-word analysis of the opening paragraph of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” There are always a few grumbles, and students have occasionally walked out. “I like the exercise as a tone-setter, because it stresses their writing,” he told me.

The return of blue-book exams might disadvantage students who were encouraged to master typing at a young age. Once you’ve grown accustomed to the smooth rhythms of typing, reverting to a pen and paper can feel stifling. But neuroscientists have found that the “embodied experience” of writing by hand taps into parts of the brain that typing does not. Being able to write one way—even if it’s more efficient—doesn’t make the other way obsolete. There’s something lofty about Stecopoulos’s opening-day exercise. But there’s another reason for it: the handwritten paragraph also begins a paper trail, attesting to voice and style, that a teaching assistant can consult if a suspicious paper is submitted.

Kevin, a third-year student at Syracuse University, recalled that, on the first day of a class, the professor had asked everyone to compose some thoughts by hand. “That brought a smile to my face,” Kevin said. “The other kids are scratching their necks and sweating, and I’m, like, This is kind of nice.”

Kevin had worked as a teaching assistant for a mandatory course that first-year students take to acclimate to campus life. Writing assignments involved basic questions about students’ backgrounds, he told me, but they often used A.I. anyway. “I was very disturbed,” he said. He occasionally uses A.I. to help with translations for his advanced Arabic course, but he’s come to look down on those who rely heavily on it. “They almost forget that they have the ability to think,” he said. Like many former holdouts, Kevin felt that his judicious use of A.I. was more defensible than his peers’ use of it.

As ChatGPT begins to sound more human, will we reconsider what it means to sound like ourselves? Kevin and some of his friends pride themselves on having an ear attuned to A.I.-generated text. The hallmarks, he said, include a preponderance of em dashes and a voice that feels blandly objective. An acquaintance had run an essay that she had written herself through a detector, because she worried that she was starting to phrase things like ChatGPT did. He read her essay: “I realized, like, It does kind of sound like ChatGPT. It was freaking me out a little bit.”

A particularly disarming aspect of ChatGPT is that, if you point out a mistake, it communicates in the backpedalling tone of a contrite student. (“Apologies for the earlier confusion. . . .”) Its mistakes are often referred to as hallucinations, a description that seems to anthropomorphize A.I., conjuring a vision of a sleep-deprived assistant. Some professors told me that they had students fact-check ChatGPT’s work, as a way of discussing the importance of original research and of showing the machine’s fallibility. Hallucination rates have grown worse for most A.I.s, with no single reason for the increase. As a researcher told theTimes, “We still don’t know how these models work exactly.”

But many students claim to be unbothered by A.I.’s mistakes. They appear nonchalant about the question of achievement, and even dissociated from their work, since it is only notionally theirs. Joseph, a Division I athlete at a Big Ten school, told me that he saw no issue with using ChatGPT for his classes, but he did make one exception: he wanted to experience his African-literature course “authentically,” because it involved his heritage. Alex, the N.Y.U. student, said that if one of his A.I. papers received a subpar grade his disappointment would be focussed on the fact that he’d spent twenty dollars on his subscription. August, a sophomore at Columbia studying computer science, told me about a class where she was required to compose a short lecture on a topic of her choosing. “It was a class where everyone was guaranteed an A, so I just put it in and I maybe edited like two words and submitted it,” she said. Her professor identified her essay as exemplary work, and she was asked to read from it to a class of two hundred students. “I was a little nervous,” she said. But then she realized, “If they don’t like it, it wasn’t me who wrote it, you know?”

Kevin, by contrast, desired a more general kind of moral distinction. I asked if he would be bothered to receive a lower grade on an essay than a classmate who’d used ChatGPT. “Part of me is able to compartmentalize and not be pissed about it,” he said. “I developed myself as a human. I can have a superiority complex about it. I learned more.” He smiled. But then he continued, “Part of me can also be, like, This is so unfair. I would have loved to hang out with my friends more. What did I gain? I made my life harder for all that time.”

In my conversations, just as college students invariably thought of ChatGPT as merely another tool, people older than forty focussed on its effects, drawing a comparison to G.P.S. and the erosion of our relationship to space. The London cabdrivers rigorously trained in “the knowledge” famously developed abnormally large posterior hippocampi, the part of the brain crucial for long-term memory and spatial awareness. And yet, in the end, most people would probably rather have swifter travel than sharper memories. What is worth preserving, and what do we feel comfortable off-loading in the name of efficiency?

What if we take seriously the idea that A.I. assistance can accelerate learning—that students today are arriving at their destinations faster? In 2023, researchers at Harvard introduced a self-paced A.I. tutor in a popular physics course. Students who used the A.I. tutor reported higher levels of engagement and motivation and did better on a test than those who were learning from a professor. May, the Georgetown student, told me that she often has ChatGPT produce extra practice questions when she’s studying for a test. Could A.I. be here not to destroy education but to revolutionize it? Barry Lam teaches in the philosophy department at the University of California, Riverside, and hosts a popular podcast, Hi-Phi Nation, which applies philosophical modes of inquiry to everyday topics. He began wondering what it would mean for A.I. to actually be a productivity tool. He spoke to me from the podcast studio he built in his shed. “Now students are able to generate in thirty seconds what used to take me a week,” he said. He compared education to carpentry, one of his many hobbies. Could you skip to using power tools without learning how to saw by hand? If students were learning things faster, then it stood to reason that Lam could assign them “something very hard.” He wanted to test this theory, so for final exams he gave his undergraduates a Ph.D.-level question involving denotative language and the German logician Gottlob Frege which was, frankly, beyond me.

“They fucking failed it miserably,” he said. He adjusted his grading curve accordingly.

Lam doesn’t find the use of A.I. morally indefensible. “It’s not plagiarism in the cut-and-paste sense,” he argued, because there’s technically no original version. Rather, he finds it a potential waste of everyone’s time. At the start of the semester, he has told students, “If you’re gonna just turn in a paper that’s ChatGPT-generated, then I will grade all your work by ChatGPT and we can all go to the beach.”

Nobody gets into teaching because he loves grading papers. I talked to one professor who rhapsodized about how much more his students were learning now that he’d replaced essays with short exams. I asked if he missed marking up essays. He laughed and said, “No comment.” An undergraduate at Northeastern University recently accused a professor of using A.I. to create course materials; she filed a formal complaint with the school, requesting a refund for some of her tuition. The dustup laid bare the tension between why many people go to college and why professors teach. Students are raised to understand achievement as something discrete and measurable, but when they arrive at college there are people like me, imploring them to wrestle with difficulty and abstraction. Worse yet, they are told that grades don’t matter as much as they did when they were trying to get into college—only, by this point, students are wired to find the most efficient path possible to good marks.

As the craft of writing is degraded by A.I., original writing has become a valuable resource for training language models. Earlier this year, a company called Catalyst Research Alliance advertised “academic speech data and student papers” from two research studies run in the late nineties and mid-two-thousands at the University of Michigan. The school asked the company to halt its work—the data was available for free to academics anyway—and a university spokesperson said that student data “was not and has never been for sale.” But the situation did lead many people to wonder whether institutions would begin viewing original student work as a potential revenue stream.

According to a recent study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, human intellect has declined since 2012. An assessment of tens of thousands of adults in nearly thirty countries showed an over-all decade-long drop in test scores for math and for reading comprehension. Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the O.E.C.D., hypothesized that the way we consume information today—often through short social-media posts—has something to do with the decline in literacy. (One of Europe’s top performers in the assessment was Estonia, which recently announced that it will bring A.I. to some high-school students in the next few years, sidelining written essays and rote homework exercises in favor of self-directed learning and oral exams.)

Lam, the philosophy professor, used to be a colleague of mine, and for a brief time we were also neighbors. I’d occasionally look out the window and see him building a fence, or gardening. He’s an avid amateur cook, guitarist, and carpenter, and he remains convinced that there is value to learning how to do things the annoying, old-fashioned, and—as he puts it—“artisanal” way. He told me that his wife, Shanna Andrawis, who has been a high-school teacher since 2008, frequently disagreed with his cavalier methods for dealing with large learning models. Andrawis argues that dishonesty has always been an issue. “We are trying to mass educate,” she said, meaning there’s less room to be precious about the pedagogical process. “I don’t have conversations with students about ‘artisanal’ writing. But I have conversations with them about our relationship. Respect me enough to give me your authentic voice, even if you don’t think it’s that great. It’s O.K. I want to meet you where you’re at.”

Ultimately, Andrawis was less fearful of ChatGPT than of the broader conditions of being young these days. Her students have grown increasingly introverted, staring at their phones with little desire to “practice getting over that awkwardness” that defines teen life, as she put it. A.I. might contribute to this deterioration, but it isn’t solely to blame. It’s “a little cherry on top of an already really bad ice-cream sundae,” she said.

When the school year began, my feelings about ChatGPT were somewhere between disappointment and disdain, focussed mainly on students. But, as the weeks went by, my sense of what should be done and who was at fault grew hazier. Eliminating core requirements, rethinking G.P.A., teaching A.I. skepticism—none of the potential fixes could turn back the preconditions of American youth. Professors can reconceive of the classroom, but there is only so much we control. I lacked faith that educational institutions would ever regard new technologies as anything but inevitable. Colleges and universities, many of which had tried to curb A.I. use just a few semesters ago, rushed to partner with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, deeming a product that didn’t exist four years ago essential to the future of school.

Except for a year spent bumming around my home town, I’ve basically been on a campus for the past thirty years. Students these days view college as consumers, in ways that never would have occurred to me when I was their age. They’ve grown up at a time when society values high-speed takes, not the slow deliberation of critical thinking. Although I’ve empathized with my students’ various mini-dramas, I rarely project myself into their lives. I notice them noticing one another, and I let the mysteries of their lives go. Their pressures are so different from the ones I felt as a student. Although I envy their metabolisms, I would not wish for their sense of horizons.

Education, particularly in the humanities, rests on a belief that, alongside the practical things students might retain, some arcane idea mentioned in passing might take root in their mind, blossoming years in the future. A.I. allows any of us to feel like an expert, but it is risk, doubt, and failure that make us human. I often tell my students that this is the last time in their lives that someone will have to read something they write, so they might as well tell me what they actually think.

Despite all the current hysteria around students cheating, they aren’t the ones to blame. They did not lobby for the introduction of laptops when they were in elementary school, and it’s not their fault that they had to go to school on Zoom during the pandemic. They didn’t create the A.I. tools, nor were they at the forefront of hyping technological innovation. They were just early adopters, trying to outwit the system at a time when doing so has never been so easy. And they have no more control than the rest of us. Perhaps they sense this powerlessness even more acutely than I do. One moment, they are being told to learn to code; the next, it turns out employers are looking for the kind of “soft skills” one might learn as an English or a philosophy major. In February, a labor report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that computer-science majors had a higher unemployment rate than ethnic-studies majors did—the result, some believed, of A.I. automating entry-level coding jobs.

None of the students I spoke with seemed lazy or passive. Alex and Eugene, the N.Y.U. students, worked hard—but part of their effort went to editing out anything in their college experiences that felt extraneous. They were radically resourceful.

When classes were over and students were moving into their summer housing, I e-mailed with Alex, who was settling in in the East Village. He’d just finished his finals, and estimated that he’d spent between thirty minutes and an hour composing two papers for his humanities classes. Without the assistance of Claude, it might have taken him around eight or nine hours. “I didn’t retain anything,” he wrote. “I couldn’t tell you the thesis for either paper hahhahaha.” He received an A-minus and a B-plus. ♦

In 1981, I was a student of art history at Columbia University. I was twenty-one and worked to support myself at a variety of jobs. Columbia was an all-boys school then. Old oak desks and a million cigarettes. (You could smoke in class.) I didn’t know much about the university—not even that it was an all-boys university—until I got there. It was a new world for me. I had lived most of my life until then in a family of girls. Now there was a family of boys.

I didn’t live on campus. I lived with my aunt, my uncle, and an adored older female cousin in Brooklyn. At around that time, Our Ma, inspired by her sister and eldest daughter, was planning on moving from Brooklyn, where I grew up, to Atlanta. A new start. She was just over fifty then. She made it clear that there were certain rules I had to follow if I was going to stay with my aunt’s family. I had to pay rent, twenty dollars a week. “Nobody lives for free,” Our Ma said.

At first, my aunt objected to the mandate: I was just a schoolkid. But Our Ma was adamant; it was either that or I would come and live with her and my little brother in Georgia. There were several reasons that my mother put her foot down. One was Daddy. As long as she’d known him, he’d lived rent-free with his mother, whose economic smarts my mother revered. “Mrs. Williams could throw a handful of peas in a pot and feed a whole army,” Our Ma said. Mrs. Williams had a husband and two other children—two girls—but, for her, Daddy always came first.

Our Ma did not want me to be some version of my father, a guy who could love women less and get more from them because of that—not if she had anything to do with it. And she did have something to do with it, with everything. She was raised in a society—a West Indian society—that did not put much of a premium on women’s bodies, where any kind of intimacy was a joke. People made fun of you for expressing longing, or, if you were a man, for being involved with just one woman, or for showing affection to your children.

For a long stretch of his life, Daddy had two women to nurture him—Mrs. Williams and my mother—but Our Ma had only one enormous love: others. She believed in community, and wanted us all to belong to it, even Daddy, despite the fact that he was living at his mother’s house and had been born into a family that laughed at her goodness.

Our Ma may have had a devalued body, in the world she came from, but she fought for and retained her right to put her foot down. And, when she put it down, the world was different. After she put her foot down, I went to school and went to work. Every week I paid my aunt rent. In my room in her house, I had a desk, piles of books, and a typewriter. I tried to write. I was going to write.

Life at Columbia was strange. All those boys. I could smell them. So many of them in their bodies, careless with their scent. They lifted their arms up and, kingdom come, the air was different. The gay ones were less apt to reek. That would be impolite, and already life had proved to be impolite, having produced queer bodies in 1981, for instance. We gay boys were only a decade or so removed from Stonewall and two decades removed from being blackmailed or jailed for “solicitation,” so caution and madness were in our bones. Sometimes we committed great acts of love or rage in private, while the only public trespass we allowed ourselves was to throw glittering hard words into the air, hoping they would not rebound and chop us off at the knees.

I had never seen so many rich, or rich to me, people in one place before. I was amazed, first, by their hair. For years, Our Ma had made her, and our, living as a hairdresser. Her clients were all Black women. So many words and worries in their hair. The Columbia boys’ hair was so lustrous and well nourished. They had good teeth and healthy bodies and strong nipples that were on display on sunny days when, sitting on the campus steps, they removed their shirts, and not one of them, among the straight ones, at least, looked ashamed. They’d grown up playing tennis or squash in Connecticut, or Rhode Island, or farther north. In the summer, they went to the Cape. Their families knew one another and this was a source of casual pride among them, not of bitter jokes or distancing resentments.

Manhattan had always belonged to my father. He used to take me and my little brother to foreign movies and then to eat foreign food. He was deeply unconcerned about the staring white people wondering what we were doing in a tearoom, say, on the Upper East Side. We ate blintzes in Germantown, and caught Liv Ullmann in “The Emigrants.” Then Daddy took us home to Crown Heights, and, for a while, it felt like Sweden.

At Columbia, I didn’t have to pretend that I was somewhere else; Iwassomewhere else. All of it—the grand buildings, the wave upon wave of stone steps—was like a stage set for becoming. But becoming what? Daddy had given me Manhattan, and now I took to it without him. He had no active role in this New York—in my New York—and perhaps that in itself was an act of becoming for me.

Everything was so queer, or I wanted it to be. I don’t mean queer like camp—a loyal adherence to the artificial—but queer like my mind, which was interested in all that was misshapen. In this new, unfamiliar place, I felt freer to go on about the things that excited me, just as I had with my older sisters when I was a boy, before they put an end to all that—because what was I turning into, some kind of faggot?

In my family, I never answered the what-are-you-some-kind-of-faggot question, because I couldn’t trust anyone with the answer. There’s not a fag who grew up in East New York or Crown Heights in the nineteen-sixties and seventies who would have trusted the inhabitants of those worlds with the knowledge that he was gay.

In the West Indian community, Our Ma knew one sort-of-out guy. He never said that he was gay, but he communicated it through his fastidious love of women and the fact that he lived in Manhattan. He loved my mother—they were distant cousins, I think—and when he came to visit I heard family members, neighbors, and the like refer to him as an “auntie man.” To them, he wasn’t just a queen. He was every queen they had ever known and despised, been disgusted and amused by, secretly had and then spat upon, dismissed and jeered at. Because that’s how prejudice works: you are one thing that represents all bad things to others. Didn’t the elders describe racism that way? But gay was not a skin color. It was a state of being, a consciousness that took your race—or anything else that life had given you—and made it different. My ability, as an auntie man, to love those who considered me a pariah, or some kind of wicked novelty act, told me that fags were made of different stuff—but what stuff?

It happened the way love happens—while you’re least expecting it though wanting everything. I had been at Columbia for a semester or so when I fell in with a small group of guys, most of whom, like me, were studying art history. The most interesting of them was from Orange County, California, the son of a single mother who worked as a nurse at Disneyland. He had pale skin that flushed easily, curly dark-blond hair, and beautiful hands—thick Daddy hands, but gestural, femme like that. He was a brilliant reader of philosophy, and made me want to read more seriously and widely.

Roland Bartheshad landed with a boom on Columbia’s academic planet years before and he was beloved by that group of guys. My smart friend read him and imitated his aphoristic style—a new way of being an “author.” But, for me, Barthes’s writing was like the finest embroidery stitched in the air: only the author could see it. And what did all this talk about the “other” actually mean?

One reason those queens loved Barthes, I think, without entirely understanding structuralism as a discipline, was that he was so elusive about being queer. They were, too. Despite Stonewall and other political advances, my new friends were barely out of the closet (and some never left it). They had grown up in parts of America that, in 1981, were still ideologically 1956.

We had an intense philological relationship, my blond friend and I. I remember how delicately he handled the paperback copy ofToni Morrison’s“Sula” I lent him, and how interested he was to hear about my father and how he had been spoiled by his mother, just as Milkman Dead had in Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.”

We passed books back and forth, back and forth, and the words in them made the ground more solid beneath our feet. I kept trying with Barthes because I loved my friend and found something I recognized in the emotional language in “Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes” and “A Lover’s Discourse.” Actually, in the former book, it was really just a photograph and the line introducing it that got me. The picture, black-and-white, showed a young Barthes being held in his mother’s arms. He was too big to be carried, but his mother managed him with no sign of complaint or surprise. The four words—“The demand for love”—expressed a world: this was me, and all of us, with Our Mas. What soul doesn’t want to be carried, held, well past the carrying age?

In “A Lover’s Discourse,” I was taken by Barthes’s interpretation of the “cry of love”: “I want to understand myself, to make myself understood, make myself known, be embraced; I want someone to take me with him.” Indeed, I wanted my bookish friend to take me into his mind, to discover stories with me, to elevate me with his thought, and to join me in my disco of community. In that imagined disco, there was a select crowd, largely queer. The hall was small, and honestly what it looked like was a home. At my disco of community, the d.j. played Chaka Khan,Prince,Philip Glass’s“Einstein on the Beach,” Jane Olivor singing “Some Enchanted Evening,” the Voices of East Harlem declaring, “Right On Be Free,”Dionne Warwickasking us to take a “Message to Michael,”Bowie, of course, singing “Station to Station,” Labelle describing how ‘‘Going Down Makes Me Shiver,” and Elton, Elton singing so many things. All these songs were, of course, one song—a song of wishing—and they filled the room so mightily it was as if God were stepping tall around our dance hall. God could be your own queer self, too, and you could even do the Latin hustle with Her, surrounded by all the other folks and things you loved that made you feel panic-stricken because wasn’t love a panic?

My book buddy had a boyfriend. Let’s call him LES. He had grown up in a block of buildings known as “affordable housing” on the Lower East Side, with his white single mother, a social worker. LES did not know his father, who was Black. He was the only other person of color in that group of gay boys at Columbia, and, given the cultural loneliness I presumed he felt and Our Ma’s fidelity to spiritual strays, I felt obliged to love him. For a long time I thought I did because I thought I should.

We were not attracted to each other sexually. From the first, our connection and uneasiness were familial, not romantic. LES was interested in class, not as a way of eradicating his race but as a way of catapulting himself out of his background. At Columbia, he wanted not to be his origin story; he was all about the arrival myth. He outdid the white boys at being a white boy. Brusque in manner, he embraced capitalism’s lack of charity: there was room for only one class, and that class was acquisitive and brutal in its grab for the world—more was more. This was in the era of Lacoste shirts, chinos, and L. L. Bean leather bags and boots. Somehow, LES’s Lacoste shirt collars stood up straighter and stiffer than any of those other guys’.

Like Daddy, LES had been coddled for most of his life. His mother gave her son what she had and more than she had. He lived in one of the nice dorms on the newly built East Campus, and one of the signs of his wealth, or his performance of wealth, was the beauty of his space. I remember his dark, calming room, his elegant pillowcases. I had grown up getting scolded if I had the temerity to answer anyone with “What?,” but LES quarrelled openly with his mother and his female friends. He wanted to break through softness, which he associated with women. We sometimes went together to parties at St. A’s, a largely rich-boy frat, whose members had good hair and all sorts of permission. LES, tall, tawny-riny, as Our Ma would describe him, stood out at those parties, not so much to the guys in blue blazers, white shirts, and chinos who were horsing around and drinking too much, but to me. Because of his joy. He was genuinely happy there, in a world he aspired to, and when you aspire does the quality of what you’re reaching for matter? The dream is the point.

I valued LES’s generosity, his taking me to parties where I could eat, but I couldn’t share his aspirations. Still, I understood why people were attracted to him. LES was brilliant at playing the man. He took choice away from you. When I was spending too much time with my inner girl, mooning over a boy who’d left me sitting alone in a bar with melting ice cubes, LES would drag me off to another bar or to a gay party held in one of the great halls at Columbia. At those parties: loads of talk; nothing would happen. Then LES and I would jump in a cab and head to Uncle Charlie’s or one of the other white gay bars downtown, where the air was full of patchouli and synth.

LES’s attractiveness had everything to do with action. Before you could say, “Shall we do this?” or “Should we consider that?,” he was holding your arm and leading you into the Spike. He had an enviable right to himself and what he wanted, like any free white man but in a colored person’s body. And the guys who were drawn to him were drawn to both aspects of him, or to what he projected about both: the presumed authority of one, and theWhat is he?Who is he? of the other.

LES had drifted apart from my book buddy. His new love worked with him at the reserves desk at Butler Library. I met LES after his shift one day—it was spring, early spring—and, as we walked down the path that led from the library toward the Alma Mater statue, he told me about his co-worker.

Columbia was like a small town within a city then. Even if you didn’t know someone by name, you knew him by sight. Days after LES told me of his love, I met him. I was on my way to the library when LES and he were leaving. I recognized him at once. Or I recognized the back of his neck. We were both enrolled in a class on Italian Renaissance painting. A lecture course, it started at some ungodly hour, which meant that I got there very late. Although I wanted to do well, I didn’t care about doing well in the things I didn’t care about much—that would have felt like a lie, and wasn’t this moment in life, making Manhattan my home, building a family of my own, about telling the truth for once, and at last? Still, I took the Italian Renaissance painting class because I was my mother’s son and what would it mean to the world if I shirked my responsibilities?

To be honest, I had a lot of Daddy in me, too. Remember those times when Daddy took me and my brother to Yorkville to eat cabbage soup or any other place where people were puzzled by our presence and Daddy paid those pale question marks no never mind? I saw that and it went straight into my blood: I wanted to be like that, a man who paid no never mind to other minds. I had no business being in an Italian Renaissance painting class, but fuck that: Italian Renaissance painting was mine, if only I could get there on time.

I never did. And, when I search my mind now, first I hear things, especially theclick click clickof the slides in the projector, and then there are images flashing, showing us Mantegna, scrolling through history; I can see, too, how one boy always looked up at me when I made my entrance; maybe he couldn’t help it, since I had to pass the screen to get to my seat, casting a shadow on Masaccio’s Jesus and all that perspective.

I couldn’t tell if I was bothering him; he looked intrigued by the fact that I could be so late and appear not to be worried about it. I sat behind him and got settled. His neck was long and erect; he sat upright. Looking over his shoulder, I could see that he had three newly sharpened pencils and a pen lined up by his notebook. His notebook was filled with his strong, clear handwriting.

My envy of his orderliness was an old feeling, my irreverence turned on its ear. The truth is, I have always admired people who seem to get it right. In elementary school, I knew a girl named Edna. She was thin and wore glasses. I admired everything about her. I loved looking at the dark hair on her skinny yellow arms and her clean homework pages. When we ate our homemade lunches together, she had such restraint: she’d eat half her sandwich and save the rest for later. At Columbia, sitting in that class on Italian Renaissance painting, I could tell that that boy was a version of Edna. Despite my defiance, I wished that I wasn’t always late for class, that I wasn’t still the guy who was sloppy with his homework and gobbled up his lunch in two bites.

On the afternoon that LES introduced us, the boy from Italian Renaissance painting was wearing a cotton button-down shirt, jeans, and loafers without socks. (He rarely wore socks, no matter the weather.) He had an angular face, and light-colored eyes that were framed by tortoiseshell glasses. He had dark hair and his eyelids slanted a little. He didn’t smile. I was smoking a cigarette. He asked for one. I said, “If you’re nice!,” and he said, “I’m nice!” His slight body—we all weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds then—shivered a little at my implication.

I suppose other things happened after I gave him a cigarette, but I don’t remember what. I doubt we talked about Italian Renaissance painting as we walked down the gravel path away from the library—that would have meant leaving LES out—but surely there was talk, miles of it in an instant, like a fast train that kept picking up speed, passing scene after blurry scene as we raced toward a destination we didn’t know, couldn’t know, on that first day, a day that contained all our days together and the days after that, because your soul knows everything about a new love before you do.

I do remember how taken I was by his mind, which didn’t so much impose order on things as see the order that was already there. Raised in Connecticut in a Catholic household, he had faith—and perhaps that faith would extend to me beyond this moment of possibility? Let me tell you more about this moment, and moments that preceded it, because they all live together: First, you are standing by yourself in the world, and it’s fine. Then you blink and find yourself sitting in the palm of someone’s hand. That person peers down at you with the look of a connoisseur gazing at a curiosity, until suddenly a shy surprise fills both of you and alters the world as you know it. This might be too much to put on one meeting, but it’s all true.

We parted. Spring gave way to the end of the semester and exams and all that. I failed Italian Renaissance painting. By the time the school year ended, LES and my new friend were romantically and sexually involved, and life was turning, turning.

He contacted me first. In the upper left-hand corner of the envelope his letter came in, he’d written his name above the logo and return address of the yacht club he was working for that summer, in Niantic. The letter was written in his strong hand and I won’t quote it verbatim. If I did, I’d have to stop and put my pen down and let hope fly across the page—the hope that this will matter to you, and to others who know nothing of this kind of science fiction, of first a letter filled with anticipation and then, a decade later, no more letters except the one that I am writing here to the living who want to hear about ourAIDSdead, the better to understand who they were. I’m reluctant to give you his name. To name anything is to limit it, and for now I want him still to be limitless and alive, alive, alive.

In any case, his letter said that he was very happy, that he had waited a long time to have a friend like LES, and that was part of his happiness. At the end, he said how much he looked forward to getting to know me in the future, and how we could or should meet when he came down to the city to see LES sometime that summer. I remember that I was twenty-one when I received his note. I’d be twenty-two that August.

I was still living in Brooklyn with my aunt and uncle when I got his note. I was as thin as any man over six feet tall should be. But the truth is that I don’t really remember my body. In “I Remember,”Joe Brainardwrites quite a bit about his cock—looking at it, touching it, trying to make it appear bigger in his trousers—but I don’t remember looking at my cock in those years. When would I have had a chance to be alone with it? I had always lived with women in small spaces. There is no privacy in poverty.

Which is to say that I don’t remember when my body was first looked upon not as a problem, when someone’s desire moved him to hold those parts of me that gave him pleasure and presumably gave me pleasure, too. I don’t remember because, by the time any of that occurred, too much had already happened.

Still, I remember his letter. The way it took my weekend loneliness away. It weighed whatever a single piece of semi-heavy-stock paper with ink on it would weigh. That was one weight. The other was the weight, the beautiful gravitas, of his sense of responsibility and his hope: he looked forward to getting to know me in the future. The future.

During my first semester at Columbia, I’d taken Introduction to Religion, taught by the esteemed religious historianElaine Pagels. It was a big class, and packed. One day, after class, Professor Pagels asked Mr. Als to come and see her in her office. (In those days, professors addressed you by your surname.) In her office, Professor Pagels said that she liked a paper I’d written, and that she wanted to pass on two books she thought might be especially interesting to me:Simone Weil’s“Waiting for God” and James Cone’s “God of the Oppressed.” Weil and Cone, Professor Pagels said, were real writers, too.

Real writers. In the weeks that followed, I read everything I could by and about Weil, a Parisian anorexic who was raised as an agnostic Jew and became a practicing Catholic but would not be baptized, in part because she didn’t feel worthy of the sacrament, and then I read Cone, who had grown up in a small segregated town in Arkansas. Painful things had happened to both of these writers because of illness or racism. And yet, in their writing, both had a profound interest in connecting, or at least in the idea of connecting, which, of course, lies at the heart of friendship and is the beginning of community.

That boy’s letter affected me as much as Weil’s and Cone’s writing did, because, basically, he was asking the same questions they were asking: How do we make a friendship? How do we make a family? Do you believe in love, and know how to honor it? I read his letter once, and then twenty times. I wrote my own questions alongside every one of his: Was it possible to be gay and be together? Be Israelites together and refuse the sacrament, just because we were so joyful at having found each other? If we were gay and together with LES or whomever else, would that make us a gay community, and what would that mean in the world?

I remember him coming down from Connecticut to see LES. I remember the smell of the August night in New York when we met up at LES’s mother’s apartment. Trees shaded the paths as I entered a maze of high-rises whose short windows had bars over them. Nearby, there was a pool, and I could smell the chlorine. Night swimmers glistened in the dim light. Manhattan was so different from Brooklyn. One of my sisters lived in a version of these buildings in Brownsville, but there they were called “the projects,” and at the pool that was near my sister’s place I had found shit in the water.

LES opened the door. I don’t remember if the friend from Connecticut was standing beside LES, but I remember the feeling of parents. The sense that people who were together, as LES and he were now, were parents. I had seen that in the street, in the movies, and so on—couples doing things together!—but I didn’t know what that felt like; the idea cowed me.

We had a good gay conversation piece to start things off with: my hair. Before I arrived, I’d described to LES on the phone how a barber, ignoring what I had asked for, had fucked my head up to such a degree that I’d had him shave everything off. This was in the days when only lunatics or scary white punks had shaved heads. But it’s not so bad, the Connecticut boy said, after I took my cap off. He looked at me again. Honestly, it’s not bad.

He didn’t laugh, or even smile. He just stood by what he said, in his white cotton shirt. Also: he didn’t touch my head. He didn’t even make a gesture toward it. I had seen the seemingly in-a-trance eyes of the white person extending a hand to touch what you would never dream of touching on them, since it was not yours. Later, I would tell him the story of how, on a trip to visit family in Barbados, I had seen a white girl, a preadolescent child with Bo Derek braids, complain to her mother that a Black Bajan girl with cornrows she had spotted on the beach had stolen her hairdo. I don’t remember what he said about that story, and I don’t know if he ever read Joe Brainard’s “I Remember,” in which Brainard says, “I remember feeling sorry for black people, not because I thought they were persecuted, but because I thought they were ugly.”

What got into people? What compelled Brainard to say that? What made that girl in Barbados assume she could claim ownership when she was the appropriator? Those are the kinds of questions, rhetorical and otherwise, that I felt comfortable posing with the boy from Connecticut once we began to spend real time together, because he hadn’t started our relationship by touching my head. He was a human who understood that I was one, too.

The funny thing is, he didn’t have to be human, given the way he looked; he resembled the youngMontgomery Clift, especially in the 1951 movie “A Place in the Sun.” You’d think he would have plopped himself down on a stool in a gay bar, held out for the highest bidder, and called it a day. But he didn’t. I don’t know why he didn’t. Don’t know why he made good on the promise in his letter to get to know me better when he returned to Columbia in the fall. Don’t know many things where he’s concerned.

The summer he was away, I spent a fair amount of time on the Lower East Side, some of it with LES, who still wore his Lacoste collars high. Preppy chic wasn’t much of a thing in that neighborhood, though. The dominant style in the East Village that summer had a lot to do with disavowing labels, and opting for the black-and-white New Wave or No Wave look that Patti Smith served on the cover of her first album, “Horses,” or the sunglasses and rude-boy hats some of the Specials donned on the cover of their 1979 album, the one with “A Message to You, Rudy,” which I loved because a girl I knew swore it was one of the best songs ever.

The girls I admired as they walked along Third Street, Eighth Street, and sometimes even as far north as Fourteenth Street lived in shitty hot apartments with brick walls, but what did that matter when they slipped on a “nothing” black dress like the ones the beautiful but solitary post-neorealist Monica Vitti wore in the movies? These girls had come to New York to be New Yorkers: thin and angry and creative and loving. They filled the world with potential heartache or fun as they walked up Second Avenue in their spike heels, their black purses containing more money than boys ever had, because boys couldn’t hold on to a dime. Later, after the clubs closed, and they were done with men for the night, they sometimes ended up at Kiev, on the corner of Seventh Street, pulling off their gloves and eating split-pea soup together—hold the bread—and ignoring the bums at the next table. I saw them from the other side of the window as I walked south to take the subway home to Brooklyn, where, the next morning, I was greeted by derisive Black-girl laughter and gossip about where I’d been, and how white I was getting to be in the white world.

I’ve heard that laughter my whole life. It’s in my body and has never found a way out. It would like to kill me, and, at times, has made me want to die, if only to escape the feeling of powerlessness, abandonment, and despair it engenders. The best description of that laughter I’ve ever read is in Henri Bergson’s 1900 essay collection, “Laughter”:

Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity.

Maybe the Black girls back in Brooklyn wanted to pity me, but that would only have detracted from the disdain for “faggots” that bonded them. Speaking of which,James Baldwinheard a similar laughter, in a different key, in 1949, which he wrote about in an essay titled “Equal in Paris.” Baldwin had been in Paris for a little over a year when an American acquaintance moved into the grim hotel where he was living. When the American friend had left his previous residence, another grim hotel, he’d taken with him, in a fit of pique, a bedsheet, which he presented to Baldwin. The young writer, disgusted by the condition of his own sheets, placed the relatively clean linen on his bed. For this “theft,” Baldwin was arrested and spent eight days in jail. I’ve read this essay a number of times, and, while I never remember, precisely, how Baldwin gets out of jail, I always remember the ending of the piece, because I understand it:

On the 27th I went again to trial and, as had been predicted, the case against us was dismissed. The story of thedrap de lit, finally told, caused great merriment in the courtroom. . . . I was chilled by their merriment. . . . It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled.

That laughter helped shape Baldwin, just as the laughter I experienced at home and, later, in some gay bars in New York shaped me, but I could barely stand the shape: when a female relative asked, rhetorically, if I was white, or directly or indirectly called me a faggot, or laughed at me, my heart broke a million times over. I could not bear the derision I heard in the world, or at home, when something interested me or made me feel tender or curious. In retrospect, I can see that whenever I talked excitedly, openly, about those things my interlocutor was, more often than not, just waiting to jump on my vulnerability, like a kid jumping in a puddle.

That summer, before the boy from Connecticut came back, I worked as a telemarketer for a company in midtown. A friend from my years at LaGuardia High School had got me the job. I don’t remember what we sold, but I do remember that my friend and I—we’d done improv together in school, and were as clever as any Nichols and May—treated the experience as a kind of acting exercise. On different days we assumed different identities. One day, I might be a relentlessly cheerful American with lots of blond in my voice; the next, a laid-back European ne’er-do-well. On Fridays, when we got paid, we’d go to a hamburger joint near Grand Central and order up a storm: burgers and onion rings and one lemonade after another. Sometimes we’d go downtown together after work and fuck around on Astor Place or go to Azuma, a Japanese emporium filled with delectable junk. It was around that time that I saw the shirt.

It was in the window at Cheap Jack’s, an East Village thrift store. The shirt had three-quarter sleeves and a button-down collar. Its main design was a version ofMondrian’s“Broadway Boogie Woogie”—all geometric lines and primary colors. Buying that shirt and tucking it into the black flared high-waters I wore with black lace-ups and white socks made me feel that I was the artist I hadn’t yet become. My outfit also made me feel that I was part of something, and I think that “something” was the whole queer world I saw and loved in downtown Manhattan, including the girls in their dresses carrying the kind of old-timey gloves my sisters wore for real. This new world was real to me, too.

When I returned to my neighborhood by train after a late night out, my shirt reeked of cigarette smoke and was sticky with dance sweat. I was foul—at last!—with experience. I always carried a book on the train. Sometimes, on my way from the subway to my aunt’s apartment, I’d stop by an all-night diner for breakfast: toast soaked in butter, the fattiest bacon, greasiest eggs—delicious. The lady who waited on me at the diner didn’t laugh at me. While I sipped a glass of her delicious sweetened iced tea and struggled with “Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes,” she’d ask me what I was reading. When I tried to explain, she’d cut me off sweetly with “Baby, tell me the story part.”

Let me tell you the story of the dress. I wore it years before I bought that shirt. I was fourteen, and I had been invited to a Halloween party by a high-school friend who lived in Manhattan. I decided to go as the bearded lady. By then, I already knew I was a lady, but I needed something to hide that. With a beard as camouflage, I could get away with wearing my stage makeup, which I enjoyed—the girlish fact of it.

I remember my mother making a long skirt out of some tulle, and then attaching the skirt to a green bodice with gold straps. She designed the whole thing. I suppose Our Ma could justify making the dress—which I put on over a thick sweater, to further butch it up—because it was connected to my education. I was going to school to be an actor, which was a kind of artist, a profession she revered.

Our Ma was an artist who wasn’t given half a chance to become one. She was aLinda Ronstadtwho didn’t sing, aPaule Marshallwho hadn’t written a novel, anAlice Neelwho hadn’t picked up a brush—she was all of those women to me. She had whatRilkecalled an “infinite capacity” to be herself through other people’s needs. That was how it seemed to me.To me:a selfish claim that doesn’t allow for who she was to herself. I want her to own herself, just as I want all the dead to own themselves. My mother, the unrealized artist who loved artists because artists expressed themselves, was making my dress in the name of art, which is to say, also in my name.

But, before we get to the dress specifically, let me just say that for years now I’ve carried around in my head the enormous weight, I mean the powerful reality—same difference—that the feminist writerTillie Olsendiscusses in her 1965 essay “Silences in Literature.” Olsen talks about how the grind of having to earn a living, the drag of figuring out home care for young kids, has worn female writers down. Silenced them after one book or two. Just as racism and degradation have silenced a number of writers of color. Olsen describes her own workdays, raising four children while dreaming of writing, and watching that dream die. “What demanded to be written,” Olsen writes, “seethed, bubbled, clamored, peopled me . . . always denied.”

My mother stitching away in the other room—what had been denied her in this life? As a girl, she’d loved to dance; maybe she’d dreamedMaria Tallchiefdreams, and maybe now I was her Maria Tallchief in that tulle, her chance to be a prima ballerina, instead of a member of the withholding cadre of women she’d been born into, women whose job it was to disapprove.

I don’t remember when my father arrived at our place that day, but I do remember the air changing when he did. He took off his great peacoat and hat without saying anything, and put his ever-present newspaper on a chair in the hallway. I remember overhearing him say to my mother, angrily, “Well, why can’t he go as the bearded man?” I remember Our Ma defending my costume, and I remember putting on the longest coat I had to cover that dress up before we hit the streets. Then my father put his jacket and hat back on, and walked me to the subway, because my mother said that he should, to protect me from hooligans. I remember walking along with my father, and the world between us was silent.

As I rode the subway, I experienced the loneliness I sometimes felt when going from one part of my life to another. I remember expecting something to happen. I was on the lookout for a potential ambush of violent men. When I got to the party, I missed everything I’d left behind, including my mother. I remember smoking pot for the first time, and waves of paranoia squeezing me in my dress. I remember taking off the dress and wiping off my makeup, and putting on my jeans so that I could get on the subway in the cold, black air. But what I feel now most of all is that I’ve never taken that dress off, never left behind me the way my mother helped me to create myself and herself. Nor can I forget my father’s constant drama of aggrievement, his implication that the world would have been a better place for him if his son, and the boy’s mother, and their dress, weren’t part of it.

“There is speech and there are verbal symbols.” That’s fromTennessee Williams’s1944 story “Oriflamme.” In it, the female protagonist, Anna, struggles to express her inner life. At one point, she puts on a red dress, which is a kind of flag—a declaration of being. Society at large is not ready for Anna in her red dress; they don’t want to see her, but she’s there. I admired the story, because it said so much—indirectly—about being an artist: you put that dress on, and people either laugh at you or ignore you, but you put the dress on anyway, and you live. When I wore my dress or, later, my Mondrian shirt, people told me I wasn’t a man, but no one could tell me I wasn’t an artist. This was my flag. And I hoisted it in Brooklyn and in the East Village, so that other artists would find me, and love me as much as I loved them. I had so much ambition for togetherness, and so much drive to be an artist and be alone.

It wasn’t too long after we returned to Columbia that fall that LES broke up with the boy from Connecticut. I don’t recall there being a reason, but the steadfastness of love can be as crushing to some souls as its absence. Steadfast love sits in a corner and enjoys the daily things, a cup of tea in the afternoon, a cigarette it shouldn’t indulge in before lunch or dinner. It likes to look at you. And LES didn’t always like to be seen. It was too much for him. Where was all that lovely distance, scented with yearning? The white space, fortified by letters and phone calls and I-can’t-waits? Now love was an imposition, irritating and enormous in its demands, because it could not be controlled, lied to, or otherwise manipulated so that LES could win whatever he assumed the rest of the boys were winning.

I remember the anguish on the Connecticut boy’s face as he told me that, a month or two after we returned to school that fall, LES had stopped returning his calls, and that when he did manage to reach LES on the phone he was always on his way out, and said he’d call him back, but didn’t.

That fall, the Connecticut boy and I talked about LES, of course, but not for long; I could only get so close to his despair. He wouldn’t allow me to become a version of my mother, listening and listening and trying to effect change at my own expense. Because, to him, I wasn’t my mother (or his); I was a man, and that was what he wanted me to be.

I remember our first excursion in the city, or nearly our first. We met on St. Marks Place; he wanted to buy some records. That afternoon, he had on chinos with a sharp crease, a pressed button-down shirt—he ironed all his clothes carefully; of course he did—and black loafers. There were his pale ankles as he walked up the stairs to the record store. That straight back and neck I knew from Italian Renaissance painting looked different now as he flipped through used or discounted albums. “Let It Bleed.”Nico.Donna Summer.Lou Reed.Bob Dylan’sfirst Jesus record. Lots ofElvis Costello. He loved voices. I don’t remember what he ended up buying that afternoon, but I remember how proud he was of his brown-paper-bagged purchases as we walked west. My sidelong glance as we walked, talking about nothing, or a great many things, was a physical manifestation of what I felt: sidelong, about new love. If he loved me back, then what? Could I love him more than I loved his letter and the things it did to my imagination?

I said that I wanted him to meet a woman I was becoming friends with. She worked at McGregor’s (later it became Boy Bar), between Second and Third Avenues, across the street from the St. Marks Baths, and even though I averted my gaze from the Baths every time I passed it—all those men going in and out, my fear of them and my interest in going in and out with them—I tried to appear cooler and more authoritative than I was, as my friend from Connecticut and I sat down at an outside table. We were in my gay Manhattan now, and I wanted to show him the ropes. So many ropes in New York then, all trying to hold together a crumbling, economically depressed, drug-filled, violent world.

My woman friend came out of the bar’s open doors. She was carrying a tray of drinks, and she looked as she always looked whenever she did anything: flawless and annoyed. (She didn’t like to do anything.) I’d called her Mrs. Vreeland from the first because she was always immaculate and she made pronouncements like “Europe stinks. I am depressed. Bye,” which was what she wrote to me from abroad once. A Latvian American woman from New Jersey, she heightened things, in the way a born star can, and she could just as easily ruin things—a day, an event—simply by switching her mood from elation to dissatisfaction. A big component of her charm was her essential don’t-care-ness, with a lipstick touch.

Drinks and introductions all around. And across the street those men were coming and going, coming and going, just as—it’s clear to me now—I was both coming and going with my friend from Connecticut, because look at what I’d engineered on our first date: I’d interrupted the flow of my getting to know him, and his getting to know me, by introducing him to another person. Hadn’t he written me a letter, and telephoned me, and met me downtown, and showed an interest in me? And I had broken our covenant by shifting the scene away from any potential intimacy.

Daddy did the same thing to me. All those weekends in the city, and the bliss of walking down Fifth Avenue with my hand in his, my little brother on the other side of him, the joy of being together, only to be disrupted by his tics, his violence, and left hoping for a better time next time. Once the visit was done and Daddy had let go of my hand and deposited me at my mother’s door and walked away, anxious, no doubt, to be in his own room, alone but catered to, reading his newspapers and finding disasters in every one of them—once all that had happened, I burned with want. Burned and burned in the void. We are all the people who came before us, those whom we can never seem to turn away from, even if they have turned us away.

Still, when my friend and I had finished our drinks outside, I followed him onto the dark, empty dance floor inside. I don’t remember what songs were played, but I remember that, as we danced, coming together and then apart, he was still holding on to his records.

That semester, at school, we took another course together, over at Barnard—Brian O’Doherty’s The Art Film. The course focussed on artists whose work included short films—Joseph Cornell,Maya Deren, and others. We also saw documentaries made by visual poets like the Maysles brothers, their “Grey Gardens.” My new friend loved the class; he was a big movie buff. Our first assignment was to write a scenario about an artist; my script was called “The Trouble with Saskia,” and it began with a scene in whichRembrandtis trying to paint his wife, Saskia. Saskia fidgets. Finally, Rembrandt puts his brush down, walks over to Saskia, and slaps her. The day that my script was discussed was one of the rare occasions when my friend wasn’t in class; he had a cold. Later, he telephoned to find out what he had missed. When I told him that I’d got an A on my piece, he said, “I knew it!” I have never forgotten the sound of his voice in that instant: excitement tinged with envy and the feeling that I was a writer, and he wasn’t, and that was just one of the ways that we were learning that we were different together.

My new friend, my first true and truly beloved. His feeling about life was, basically, Why burn down the house before you’ve built it? He wanted to live in that house every day. To build a house and put his records in it. From what he told me during our first days, months, and then a year, his folks were not a couple whose relationship took place on the phone, like Daddy and Our Ma. His mother didn’t hold the receiver as if it were a quarrelsome baby squirming to break free of her love. His folks, in fact, lived in the same house, and it was their house, not welfare’s, or somebody else’s. His father, a quiet Wasp from Indiana, was an engineer, and his mother was an Irish Catholic who, in addition to working in the Connecticut school system, kept house and raised her good-looking children in the faith.

When I was ten or so, I lived in an apartment building in Flatbush. I had a next-door friend, a white girl who read books, like me. One day, she took me on a tour of her home, and when I saw her parents’ bedroom I said, “That’s nice. Where does your father sleep?” The girl looked at me quizzically. She said, “Here.” After that, I wondered about families. That is, how did they make a home that was real? How did parents make a bed together? Sometimes, on special nights, my brother and I slept with our mother, but the closeness, the promise and reality of love in that sleepy warmth, evaporated during the day. Being solely responsible for her children’s well-being, Our Ma had to leave the bed and get on with the business of living and listening to our father, on the other end of the line, whining and carping, wondering when she might turn up to make his bed.

And here my friend was, saying, Why burn the house down? And, What’s up with your imagination? Love can be real. Real love in a potentially real house. One way he got me to approach the door of that house was by not pointing it out: he just built the house and left the door open. He walked around the house first. As I remember it, he was hard on his shoes—he walked like the Taurean that he was: with a sense of purpose, and inevitability. When he walked through his house of love, the floors shook. He wanted that house to know he was in it.Come and share, come and share.

Here’s what I found by standing on the threshold of the house he built, window by window, and the chimney flue, too: a man who could be with me in silence. A man who could be and wanted to be by my side and not say a word as I explored this new world of trust. Silence was trust that didn’t have to explain itself; it was also knowing someone. I had spent so much time lying. Lying to everyone I knew in Brooklyn about who I was or wanted to be. I lied to survive all those people.

Then life got fuller and bigger, with rainbows! rainbows! rainbows! everywhere, even as we walked toward his death. Our language, our love of it, the talking and laughter, the shared books and gorgeous and petty observations I offered up about people I didn’t like (my bitchery amused him but he never joined in—he was focussed on me) were the whole world that first year and a half or two years while we were at Columbia together.

He had a scar on one of his knees, the result of a car accident in high school. He told me that story when I finally went to Connecticut to visit; one of his lovely, funny sisters was getting married, and I was his date. We were finished with college by then. It must have been 1984, or 1985, who can remember. We had been friends for several years. At that point, he was in love and living with a man in an apartment on the Upper East Side, near where the train tracks emerge from under Park Avenue. I spent some time in that apartment. We’d all go out, and instead of going home without him I’d go to his home and sleep in the living room, sleep fitfully, because of their closed door.

He picked me up at the train. We were delighted to see each other. His sister’s wedding would take place in a nearly completely white town. There are many ways to come out. Before he took me to meet his parents in their nice, modest home, he took me on a drive and showed me a number of things: his high school, the shore where he and his friends sometimes hung out, other places. I remember night rolling in and his legs in his bluejeans and his loafered foot on the car’s accelerator. I remember being turned on by his confidence behind the wheel.

He had told me a story about how once, when he was little, his mother drove him and his siblings to pick up their brother from his paper route. This was around 1969, when there was much strife and mayhem in the Connecticut branches of theBlack Panther Party. His mother told her children to make sure to lock their car doors, because “those Panthers were loose.” And he remembered thinking then,Oh, let them in, let them in.

The point was his smile. The point was that here was a human, and this human was saying, Press your smile and all else against me, and this human was saying, I’m glad I’m from Connecticut and you’re from Brooklyn, and isn’t it amazing that we can drink Manhattans in Manhattan? The point was that he was interested in my interest inProustand in the accuracy of William Gass’s observations. The point was that he wanted to be a living presence in my imagination, was intent on making room for himself in my thoughts. I remember him saying once—God, this is just coming back to me now—I remember him saying once after he got sick, in 1989 or 1990, I was with him in the hospital and I was trying to take his clothes so that I could wash them at my place, and he exclaimed, “You’re a young man!” He saw in my posture all the women he would never know, including my mother, who was dead by then, and my sisters, but what he also saw and was calling me out on was a fact: I was a man, and I turned him on just as I was.

Love had teeth. They grabbed me by the modified Afro and wouldn’t let me go. I didn’t want him to let me go, not then, and not now. I want to say that one of those teeth was chipped in the front, but I can’t remember. What I do know is that, Yankee stoic until the end, he had his four wisdom teeth pulled in one go. His former lover presented them to me in a Tiffany watch box at his funeral. (When the West Indian elders dreamed of teeth—“Dem teet fall out dem head”—it meant that somebody would die, or was dead. He’s already dead, but he comes back, he comes back.)

For some time after he died, I kept those teeth on a little altar I made for him, in my first real New York apartment. A careless rich Black girl was staying with me the fall after he died; she was between apartments, having just left her female lover. Back then, I thought it was my job to take in every Black girl in the world, especially those who seemed in distress. One night, as this woman talked about her tiresome ex-lover, she lit a cigarette off one of the candles I had burning by the altar. Then, distractedly, since she was interested only in her own story, she put her cigarette out on the box that contained his teeth. I remember saying nothing, because I didn’t feel I had a right to, because who was I? Plus, I wanted to believe that she wouldn’t do such a thing; I wanted to believe that she was family, and with family you can forgive anything, even having the teeth you love singed by carelessness, all in the hope that your silence will result in togetherness. ♦