In the fall of 1988, I was an 18-year-old man in my first year of college. I had escaped my small hometown and made it a whopping 80 miles away to Akron, Ohio. I felt trapped and insisted upon going to college come hell or high water, so I’d worked a job at Kmart and finagled every bit of financial aid I could. My mother didn’t understand why I wanted to go to college and asked me several times why I didn’t just go into the military. You know, like the other boys.

One night, I was walking on campus and saw a young man showing every sign of distress. He was unabashedly crying: red face, leaking tears and snot everywhere. The kind of crying that makes the chest convulse, and the words can only escape between sobs. His situation became clearer the closer I got. He was standing in front of the house of a young woman who must have been, until recently, his girlfriend. He was heartbroken. Begging. Shouting up at her window Stanley Kowalski–style for her to take him back. He was also clearly drunk.

As I walked closer still, the young man’s friends, equally drunk, found him in this pitiable state and stopped to help. The help they offered came in the form of calling him names. Pussy. Bitch. As in “Stop being a . . .” and “You’re acting like a little . . .” They chastised him for his tears and repeatedly asked him about the whereabouts of his balls.