Thank you for your submission to The American Life. Your piece “Hoosier Hospitality” stood out to me as having some really good writing and thought provoking moments. Although I enjoyed it very much, I’m writing to say that the piece isn’t quite right for our show at this time.

I would encourage you to keep writing, and if you choose to submit stories or ideas to our show in the future, on thing that may be helpful is to listen to a speech that Ira occasionally gives…*insert (will post this speech in future) 

Please know that we reject a lot of material that’s perfectly good work but that simple doesn’t fit the unique constraints of a radio show or the idiosyncratic needs of TAL. Also know that your work falls in the minority of submissions that we feel merits a detailed response (almost all submissions get a standard form letter).

Again, thanks for sending it, and thanks for your interest in the show.

Good luck,

Kevin Clarke

A Note from the author:

“No matter what I accomplish in life, I will always feel like a failure. This is because my one goal is to be on the radio show “This American Life.” A while ago, I sent them an essay, which earned me the nicest rejection letter I’ve ever received. The piece has hung out in “My Documents” ever since, lonely and unread.”

(Obvious dramatization aside, we’ve all felt this, no?)

                                                 “Hoosier Hospitality”

My worst brush with discrimination was a measure brought before the Lafayette, Indiana city council.

How dry. A city council measure. It’s boring even to look at the phrase. And yet, it was different from all my previous experiences of being harassed.

Not that the other things weren’t really bad. Years before, some boys from my high school class called my house and said “We’ll kill you, dyke, and your dog, Smokey, too.” College, which had promised to be “a witness protection and relocation program for teenagers,” was actually worse than high school. Freshman year, my RA (accompanied by half of the residents of my dorm, a.k.a. “torch-bearing mob”) used her key to open the door to my room in the middle of the night in order to prove that my girlfriend and I slept in the same bed. I moved out of the dorm to avoid further torment, only to have somebody spray paint the words “Kill Fags” on the concrete wall outside of my college apartment. I joined a campus LGBT group and started giving speeches to educate the campus about gay issues (because the bumpkins clearly needed some schoolin’), and at least once we had to be escorted in and out of the building by security guards because of threatened violence. Despite our caution, a little flaming friend of mine got beaten up in a restaurant featuring “Burritos as Big as Your Head.”

But still, I’m going to go with the city council as the worst of the worst. In each of the previous cases, the people attacking me and my friends might have represented the general sentiment of people in our town, but nonetheless, their attacks were rogue, illegal actions that we could report to the authorities.

The city council measure, however, proposed to sanction discrimination against gays and lesbians in the areas of housing and employment. There would be no calling the police, no reporting to anyone. It would be legal. The explanation behind the proposal was something like this (add terrible accent): “We must protect business owners and landlords from the gay agenda, because once the homo-sex-uals infiltrate there will be no recourse.”

Huh? The implication was that the giant real estate machine that owned my dilapidated apartment building was powerless against me and my two roommates. If they only knew what a threat we were: I was long-haired, extremely depressed, and pretty sure that sweater-dresses were a good look; my roommate was a butch Asian rave DJ who spent her days in a darkened room slurping down cans of Ensure and jogging in place to an endless stream of techno beats; my best friend was a black drag queen who had recently been arrested while dressed as Supergirl.

At the time, it had seemed a sure thing that the measure would pass easily in our very conservative town, but the day of the vote, I decided to make a statement anyway. As we entered City Hall, I looked closely at the pro-discrimination camp. Who were these straight people who cared so much about taking away my rights that they would come here on a school night? Small children wore entire outfits that advertised their anti-gay stance. I didn’t even know what “gay” was until the age of 18 when a friend flat-out told me that “gay” was me. “So that’s it!” I thought. Then, pausing, I asked, “What’s that? Like, homo-sexu-al?”

It turned out that the majority of speakers were against the measure and made reasonable arguments about civil rights. I used my moment at the mic to talk about my mom. She had every reason in the world to be proud of me, but instead she was spending her days feeling ashamed of my coming out and her nights worrying that I would be assaulted and left for dead, hanging from a fence post somewhere in Tippecanoe county. I ended with a cheesy statement about the futility of the whole argument in a world with so many other problems. It’s still embarrassing. It’s also still true.

The miracle of the night was that the council heard our pleas. Two of the members switched their votes at the last minute, and the measure was voted down. Much to my mother’s dismay, I was prominently featured on the front cover of the local paper and on the 11 o’clock news not just in Lafayette, but also in Indianapolis, where my parents (and, critically, all of my parents’ friends) live to this day. I wasn’t actually quoted, but there I was, leaping four feet off the ground: long-hair, sweater-dress, unflattering wide-whaled corduroy pants, and an expression of complete joy smeared across my face. My faith in humanity had been temporarily restored by a bunch of conservative Christian Republicans.

Unfortunately, the victory, however beautiful, hasn’t stuck with me as much as the threat. Something about the experience made me more outspoken and, paradoxically, slightly more guarded than I would have been otherwise. I think it’s because I am still not quite positive that my civil rights are a sure thing.