campbell mccormack
At my high school, seniors participate in whole-grade seminars called “Life Issues,” meant to introduce us to the basics of being an adult before we’re flung off to college and away from our parents’ loving arms. Topics like taxes, mental health, living with roommates, and, of course, safe sex, are all covered in the form of forty-minute-long lessons from our exasperated health teacher.
Health class was mandatory in tenth grade, but back then we were all split into classroom-sized cohorts and made to witness the awkward fumblings of only some of our colleagues. Now, in Life Issues, the many-headed monster that is our entire senior class is herded into a lecture hall and forced to breathe the same air as we are reminded of how to use a condom.
I like to consider myself mature. As a lesbian, I am awarded a comfortable layer of insulation between myself and the concept of a penis, but that doesn’t mean I zone out when condoms come into play. So, I proudly volunteered to help unscramble and reorder the twelve (twelve!!) steps of condom usage. I raised my hand to discuss combining various methods of birth control. I did not laugh when my health teacher displayed a slide that listed various sex acts. Because, sure, talking about sex can be uncomfortable, but it certainly isn’t funny, and I’m far too old to laugh when I don’t know what to say.
The boys, though. Young men in my grade — seventeen year olds, eighteen year olds, legal adults who will be going to college and functioning independently in the year of our lord 2025 — began laughing. They whispered. When asked to answer a question, they cringed and went silent. They never stopped making noise, never paid their full attention to the topic of stopping unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, knowing full well that many of their girlfriends were in the room with them.
Imagine that. Imagine looking over at the guy you’ve been hooking up with, or talking to, or seriously dating, and knowing that he thinks sexual safety is a joke — or, maybe worse, that he can’t take himself seriously enough to talk about it. That must feel supremely shitty.
Those boys didn’t spare a single thought for their sexual partners — past, present, or future — when they chose to laugh like cowards instead of soldiering through their discomfort. I’m sure they went home that night and slept without a care in the world, but I lay awake and I was ashamed for them. I still am.
*
In the spring of ninth grade, I met Eliza for the first time.
I had never — and maybe have never — met anyone like them. In April of 2022, they had shoulder length hair with the sides shaved and wore a cut off tshirt and jeans. Feet clad in heavy black boots, they perched atop an ancient wooden desk with their legs swinging and started talking about ACT UP. I had been taking a queer history and culture elective since September and I knew my Eleanor Roosevelt and my Sappho and my Dickinson, but it was Eliza who taught me about AIDS. They pulled up a slideshow and said things like t-cells and immunodeficiency and I felt like I was coming to life all over again.
I had been hearing whispers of Eliza for weeks. A queer sex educator. Nonbinary. Laying eyes on them was a revelation. Eliza had a way of making any room feel like it was lit with early morning sun. They weren’t exactly a mirror of my future self, but more like a window or a portal — this is what you could be.
I knew trans adults, but no one that used they/them pronouns. You hear people telling you that it’s just a phase for long enough and you start to believe it, especially when the only other people like you are fellow teenagers; meeting Eliza, knowing Eliza, was proof that I was real and my identity was tangible, and I wasn’t going to slowly fade away when I reached adulthood.
Eliza was a part time employee of the health department at my high school. They had a second job somewhere in the city, but they always did their best to co-teach tenth grade health classes and be present at lunchtime meetings of the Sexuality and Gender Alliance (SAGA). They would wear short sleeve button-ups with fun patterns and they let their partner cut their hair, which meant that the sides of their head were always freshly shorn and the swoosh on the top was always vacillating between lengths. The awe that I felt when I looked at Eliza wasn’t born of envy or aspiration, but rather of something religious: I was a pilgrim, and Eliza was righteous evidence of my god’s existence. When I looked at them, I felt like my insistence on my transness, my activism, all of it, was worthwhile.
*
The last day that Eliza worked at my school, the two of us ran a workshop in the middle school called “Queer Your World.” We introduced students to queer theory and zine making, and it was all markers and overlapping voices and standing on chairs, and it was with those kids tucked away in that windowless workroom that I realized just how much I was going to feel Eliza’s loss. Middle school Campbell would never have dreamed of queering their world — the amount of growth I had undergone in just a few short years suddenly felt momentous and periled, as though Eliza would disappear and I would be fifteen again, learning about AIDS for the first time. There would be no filling the gaps once they moved on, there would only be the gaps themselves, cavernous wounds that spiralled down forever.
I know that this sounds overly dramatic. But it just felt so real. Losing our elders has been a plague upon the queer community for generations on generations, and I know that Eliza isn’t truly lost — they’re someone else’s mentor now, changing other lives in a different state — but their exit from my life was pivotal. In a way, my pain connected me to all the queers before me who had mourned those that lit the way. In another way, my health teacher had gotten a new job with better benefits and I needed to get over myself.
And so I did.
*
That day we spent teaching together wasn’t our official farewell. Around a month later, Eliza came to the opening night of my high school play. They found me after the performance, sweaty and freshly out of costume, and they gave me a hug. I don’t remember the words that we exchanged, but I’d like to think that they said they were proud of me. I know we both said “goodbye.”
In November of this year, the day after the presidential election, a middle school teacher found me in the dining hall. She put her hand on my arm and said, “I was talking to Eliza recently, and they said they’ve been thinking of you. I thought you should know.”
And so, in the face of utter darkness, queer love prevailed. And so, Eliza never really left. Something like that.
*
I’ve been thinking about Eliza a lot recently because of a comment made during the most recent Life Issues seminar. Our health teacher clicked onto a new slide and explained that the image displayed was a screenshot from the website Bedsider — “Eliza must have made this one,” she said, mostly to herself. But I heard.
Two years ago, I went into tenth grade health class with the same immature mindset as everybody else — I already know about sex, and drugs, and alcohol, and mental heath, I don’t need to take this stupid class — until Eliza thoroughly changed that. Their very presence in that classroom forced me to care, because I felt like if I paid attention to them, I was ensuring that students would do the same to me, twenty years down the line. Sex ed has become something I care deeply about. Keeping queer history and culture alive is one of my driving passions. It was Eliza who taught me to foster those things.
I can have some pity for those boys in my grade who can’t take their own dicks seriously, because they likely never had an Eliza to screw their heads on straight. At the same time, I can recognize with growing horror that they need to get their acts together, ASAP. Eliza is no longer our health teacher, but that doesn’t mean that the impact they had on me and my larger school community has vanished. I’m not about to get behind a podium and start rhapsodizing about condoms, but I’ll happily raise my hand and participate during Life Issues. Maybe if they see a peer embracing sex ed like the serious topic it is, my classmates will feel a little less ashamed about having a body and all of the desires that come along with it.
Because that’s the crux of it all, really. When I met Eliza, I was barely even out as trans, buried beneath the weight of puberty and unsure of the security of my own skin. Their presence in my life allowed me to acknowledge my transness as a beautiful, permanent, true fact about my body; their adult existence proved to me that I was real and valid. Only after acknowledging my physicality and my future could I begin to take my body — and all of its fine print — seriously.
So to all the young people out there: you’re not a joke. Your body is not a joke, and neither is safe sex. Don’t laugh. You’re better than that.