Rusty Jones
During my session last week, my therapist pointed out that despite having no positive male role models in my childhood, I’ve managed to carve out a healthy form of masculinity for myself that doesn’t rely on the patriarchal notion of what being a man should look like. I hope she’s right that I’m managing that balance well, but while I certainly didn’t have any men take a healthy interest in me as a child, I do have at least one positive male role model, and I think I stumbled into his classroom just in time.
As far as I’m concerned, Rusty Jones is made of pure magic. Every time I saw that man on campus, I felt like I’d just spotted an omen of good fortune. He isn’t a conventionally attractive man. He isn’t tall or muscle bound. He doesn’t have a full head of hair or strong facial features. There’s something about his eyes, though, and the way he acknowledged every student who smiled or waved at him that made seeing him feel lucky.
I had my first class with Rusty my sophomore year after switching majors. It was History of the English Language. By all rights, that class should have been dull as door nails, and from what I heard from other students, other classes of it was. Not with Rusty, though. He made learning phonemes feel like learning a hidden language, to the point that my friends started passing notes back and forth in the phonetic alphabet on a daily basis. He also encouraged our curiosity about language in a way that changed how I looked at it forever. He had us write essays about words and phrases we’d heard that we didn’t know the origin or evolution of. We’d share what we found in class, and I still remember some of those findings. More importantly, though, Rusty emphasized that language was not a set of rules to be memorized and followed. It was alive and changing constantly. To him, there was no wrong way to use language, no change that wasn’t interesting and needed. While certainly there was a time and a place for formal use and following grammar conventions, no one was wrong for how they spoke or wrote. He explained the great vowel shift and the sound of old English in a way that made me look at modern changes as fascinating, and not a sign of someone’s intelligence. He single-handedly ended my grammar tyrant days and made me hungry to know more about why and how language changes. He was the catalyst for my fascination with internet story telling.
After that first semester with Rusty, I prioritized taking his classes wherever I could. He wasn’t the only professor whose teaching style I fell in love with. There were others who made me feel swept up in their passion, who gave me hope for a future as the weird little literature nerd I was back then. Still, when it came to required English classes and electives, getting into Rusty’s sections was an unmovable block on my schedule. Everything else could wait until next semester.
I took Shakespeare with Rusty both because I was excited for how he presented it and out of self-defense. The other professor was known for covering dozens of texts and a heavy emphasis on memorization, and I knew myself well enough to know that I wouldn’t be successful there. I have no doubt that students of her class walked out with more knowledge of Shakespeare’s work than I’ll ever have, but I don’t have any regrets about choosing not to take it. With Rusty, I learned about the difference between quarto and folio editions of Shakespeare’s work. I learned why Hamlet is so long, and how it would have been played on stage and for whom. I learned about traditional stage setting, the burning of The Black Friar playhouse, and gained a deep hatred for speculation about Shakespeare secretly being some upper society author. When The American Shakespeare Center came to our school, I was enthralled. Everything I’d been taught about Shakespeare in high school, every deep dive, every AP study guide was wrong. Sometimes factually, but often wrong for their presentation of his work as something ancient and difficult, meant only for the educated and devoted. Because of Rusty, I saw that Shakespeare wrote for everyone, with intention. I saw that it was funny, poetic, tragic, and inspiring, often all in the same show.
I had to take two Shakespeare classes as a creative writing major, and instead of opting into the more difficult version of that, I took Shakespeare and Cinema with Rusty. My take away was a lot like what I gained from that first History of the English Language course. Modern versions of Shakespeare weren’t inherently bad. It wasn’t a sin to change the source material. I started to view language and literature as play watching Lion King in a darkened lecture hall with Rusty. Over the course of that class, I realized that what mattered to me was not respect for literature, but presenting it in a way that conveyed what was always there to people who would otherwise have struggled to get through it. What mattered was giving people the opportunity to love it as much as I did on their own terms. I started to ask the same thing of my own writing. It wasn’t enough to write beautifully anymore, it also had to be accessible. I didn’t want to write something lovely but hard to parse. I wanted beauty and clarity in the same breath. Rusty is the reason why.
It was my last class with Rusty that cemented him as my one and only transition goal, though I didn’t know I was trans at the time. I’ll be honest, I don’t remember much of Comedy and Satire. I remember adoring Candide and Gulliver’s Travels. I remember talking about modern satire and having to explain Candy’s teen pregnancy ads in the example I presented. Mostly, though, I remember his concern for his students. When one of my friends stopped showing up to class, he asked about her daily. He wasn’t concerned with her grades, he just wanted to know that she was alright. He was the one professor who asked about my self-harm scars and wanted to know what they were and why they were there. When a student on campus completed suicide, he looked relieved to see me, and then asked if I knew where my absent friend was and if she was okay.
What Rusty showed me during Comedy and Satire was that he cared about us. He wasn’t just a brilliant and passionate teacher, he was also human. Our safety mattered to him, and when things went wrong, when we were clearly not okay, he did everything he could to make sure we would make it through.
When I think about the kind of man I want to be, and who I’m transitioning into, Rusty is the first person who springs to mind. While I understand that transition goals are usually physical, and respect and admire those goals and the dedication is takes to meet them, to me, what my body looks like after a few more years on testosterone and a few surgeries is sort of beside the point. I want to be the kind of man who inspires curiosity. I want to use language in a way that is compassionate and accessible. I want to offer people a window into my experience instead of showing them a door locked with complicated prose. I want to embody clarity, compassion, and a passionate sharing of knowledge. I would never have known that masculinity could be so inspiring and so caring without Rusty, and in many ways, I don’t think my transition would be possible without him. Because of him, this process can be about healing my relationship to my body and to myself enough to be able to grow into the sort of man that Rusty was to me. I know that’s going to take time, but I’m glad my therapist told me I’m on the right path. That feels like a win in and of itself.
