Your vivid story brings back so many memories for me and raises so many feelings. I also attended a very large university where visibly gay students were vanishingly rare. Where marriages of convenience were considered sensible and ordinary.

That was decades ago in the United States, and it's pretty astonishing how much things have changed for the better since then.

I wish I could say I had been as brave as you, but I did not come out to my fellow students, with the exception of two very close friends who kept my secret.

I needed most of a decade before I was out routinely to the world, prodded (or perhaps forced) by anti-gay persecution I experienced as a military officer.

I'm so happy to read your story and connect with human experiences that are similar to my own yet also very different.

Thank you for sharing!