Parting Glances: Note: it's pronounced 'coom'

I was 23 the year I enrolled at Wayne University, now Wayne State. It took me 14 years to get my B.A. in English, with 12 hours toward an M.A. in teaching Community College Writing.
It took so long because I worked days and (in)attended nights. I had my share of incompletes and two-many-Martinis final exams, but got As and Bs as well. I partied down, lived on campus, and enjoyed lots of extracurricular "perks".
A best friend cajoled, "Child, you've just got to get that piece of paper." He was right. I got my degree just in time to qualify for a teaching position with benefits, and after 28.5 years, believable retirement.
When I started at Wayne registration was in the basement of Old Main, a Gothic Revival building built as a high school in 1893. Sign up wasn't computerized. Forms were carbon-copied. Closed sections were posted, handwritten on cardboard. A credit hour was $12, with 180 semester credits needed for graduation. (You could substitute teach with 90.)
My first class as a Wayne student — English 101 — was held in a Quonset hut behind the present State Hall, a leftover from World War ll days, when soldiers were medically processed there. The huts have long since vanished. I finally read Huck Finn.
My first writing job was theater-and-dance critic for The Wayne Collegian (now The South End), with free aisle comps. Like most gays and lesbians, I was closeted (except to other gays). Gaydar proved a handy tool, not so much for cruising but for social or academic leverage.
If you vibed a professor as gay it was certainly to your advantage to drop "hairpins". [If you made friends with a doctor that was an Ace — actually, better still — a Queen of Clubs — up your sleeve, should you carelessly get a bug.]
I hung out in several on-campus bars, including a popular jock joint, Lou Walker's. Sitting next to an habitu I had been introduced to by a dyke friend, he correctly assumed I was gay. "I feel sorry for you," he said not unsympathetically. "There's not much in the way of a professional or academic career for you guys. Stick to sales."
In the course of my studies I made friends with eight gay professors and the campus journalist/student advisor. Two profs were married (one murdered), and getting to know each — gaily speaking — was a dance, undertaken with cautious takes-two-to-tango steps.
I recall a straight Soc Psych prof discussing sexual deviance, prefacing his "objective" remarks with, "For those who are unfortunately 'gay', etc." Proudly, I later received an A+ on my final paper for Sociology of Deviant Behavior. It was titled, "The Lesbian Subculture in Detroit," based on some weekly madcap visits to the once notorious Palais Bar.
A popular campus spot was Blue Crest, a hangout for suds, sandwiches, seduction, and my sport-of-the-limp-wrist: shuffleboard. It was located on Ferry Street (aptly named). Weekends it was miraculously hyped into a gay spot, with chatty lines for ID check winding around the corner.
It was family owned. There was a tacit understanding: Friday through Sunday are — don't tell the dean of admissions — gay nights. No straights, please. What's remarkable is that this symbiotic accommodation happened long before Stonewall Riots, 1969.
Blue Crest was a great place for coming out by exploring the time-honored Socratic teacher/pupil method — both with and without cap, tassel, or formfitting WS green-and-gold gown. (PS: I did it my way: cum laude — and barefoot on the mall.)