Let me introduce myself ...

I am Damien Malachy, Damien F. Malachy, Professor of Queer Studies at Philip Peabody Horton University in Barona, Illinois, an oddball school in an obscure suburb not too far from the so-called Windy City. More on PPHU later. For now, it is enough for you to know that it was founded with an endowment from a nineteenth-century loner to cater to the academic needs of people like him: young men and women who did not fit in well with their social group. With any social group, for that matter.  The main selling point of PPHU is that all students attend free  of charge, but they gain admission only after being rejected by more usual institutions of higher learning and after convincing the Admission Board with its stringent AntiSocial Certification Process that they belong, if such can be said, at Philip Peabody Horton.

Everything at PPHU, as one would imagine, is odd. That includes my own department of Queer Studies. I realize that the name sounds pretty trendy, yet another of those programs that have proliferated across the American college scene with a focus on some narrowly defined minority and its literature and customs. Queer Studies, sometimes more politically correctly called Sexual Diversity Studies, normally – normally? – deals with issues relating to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, bicurious etc. community, LGBT for short. Or LGBTX for those who want to be as inclusive as possible. I am not opposed to such studies, being GQ myself. And by GQ I mean gay/queer, not Gentlemen’s Quarterly, the men's fashion magazine that has lately been in the news because of an interview with a gentleman who makes duck calls and thinks little of the whole LGBTX crowd. But LGBTX studies are not the purview at PPHU.

Our Queer Studies focus on queer things in the good, old-fashioned sense of queer: unusual, unexpected, eccentric, odd. That may at times overlap things like sexual diversity, but the areas of study are not co-extensive. I suspect some of my LGBTX academic colleagues would insist that they may be queer in the sexual-diversity sense but not in the old-fashioned sense. I confess to being both.

Whatever. Live and let live; may all beings be happy; an it harm none, do what you will, and all that. Certainly the campus culture at PPHU is about as live-and-let-live as it can be.

Daniel Watson, my partner, is a lawyer. He used to work for some powerhouse Chicago firm with its fingers tickling the ivories of justice all over the world. Or maybe just shaking the money out of it’s wealthy clients. Except Daniel mainly tickled real estate transactions. Not simple domestic residences, mind you. More things like entire railroads or mining operations. At any  rate, tiring of the excitement, he retired from that a few years back and now donates his time, expertise and energy to Lambda Legal. We met through mutual friends after he had retired, and we have been together now for nine years. I guess you would say we are engaged, now that marriage equality has come to the Land of Lincoln.

That's seems like enough for now. More about what I hope to do with this blog anon.