The Mean Girl of Morehouse Returns
By: Aliya S. King
Tags: Race, Gender, Journalism, Culture, LGBTQ

The Mean Girl of Morehouse Returns

Ten years ago, I wrote a story that changed lives forever—including my own. I went back to examine the wreckage

In 2009, I was sifting through press releases and news items, looking for a story. In my office — really an illegal bedroom in a Newark, New Jersey, rooming house — my assistant sat nearby, reading headlines aloud to me.

“Morehouse College has a new dress code,” he said.

I shrugged. Nothing new there. For years, HBCUs had been struggling to keep the Black Ivy League moving into the modern era while trying to stay true to certain standards. When Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Spike Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, and others are among the distinguished alumni, there’s not much room for freshmen wearing sagging jeans and durags on campus.

I quickly read through the press release. It mentioned all the things I expected it to: no sunglasses worn in class, no head coverings inside buildings…

Then my eye skipped to the bottom.

I read it aloud to my assistant.

“No wearing of clothing usually worn by women (dresses, tops, tunics, purses, pumps, etc.) on the Morehouse campus or at college-sponsored events.”

He and I stared at each other, our heads cocked to the side, eyebrows raised as far as they would go.

Why on earth would Morehouse College need to bury this rule at the end of the statement? And who were these students at Morehouse, an institution serving Black men for more than 100 years, who needed to be told not to wear clothing “usually worn by women.”

A few days later, Morehouse College’s president clarified the section of the press release regarding women’s clothes, which also included makeup and handbags. He said it was a very small segment of the population that needed to be addressed.

Oh, really?

I called Jermaine Hall, now the editor-in-chief here at LEVEL — and then the editor in chief of Vibe. I’d worked with Jermaine for more than a decade by that point, and we’d come to trust each other’s instincts. He gave me the green light, and a week later I was on a flight to Atlanta to find those Morehouse students who had found themselves in the president’s crosshairs.

I’ve been doing investigative journalism for my entire career. I take a tiny tidbit of a story and gnaw on it like a bone until I break it apart. I found out who killed Sean “Diddy” Combs’ father after a two-year odyssey. After wondering about the woman who threw grits at Al Green, I found her children and her siblings and uncovered the true story of her life — a several-year process. I looked for young Malcolm Shabazz, grandson of Malcolm X, and ended up spending a year interviewing him. I’ve even been known to go in and work hard to find something as simple as a belt.

If something feels like a story, I dig in and can’t let go. Even when I probably should.

The first step was to find the students. Throughout 2010, I traveled to Atlanta multiple times and made dozens of phone calls, trying to put together the scene. How did a group of kids, some still teenagers, live their truth at a place like Morehouse? All told, it took me more than a year to find and speak with Diamond Poulin, Chanel Hudson, Brian Alston, Michael Leonard, Michael Brewer, and Kevin Webb.

Before we could get a few minutes into our interview, at a steakhouse in Atlanta, she told me she’d recently thought about killing herself. She tossed off that fact like it’s something people think about every single day.

SafeSpace, Morehouse’s advocacy group for on-campus LGBTQ students, put me in touch with a few students. Some were members of a group called The Plastics, gender-bending queer young men whom the dress code seemed to target specifically. There were also other queer students struggling with gender identity and sexuality, some of whom were in the process of transferring out of Morehouse.

While I spent time with several students, it was Chanel — then known as Philip Hudson — who stood out. And not just because Chanel is 6'5", chocolate brown, with wide and expressive eyes. Before we could get a few minutes into our interview, at a steakhouse in Atlanta, she told me she’d recently thought about killing herself. She tossed off that fact like it’s something people think about every single day.

Formerly known as Philip Hudson while a student at Morehouse, Chanel says, “I only went to Morehouse because I wanted to be the traditional man my father wanted me to be.”

Over dinner, Chanel was wounded and raw. Her eye contact was furtive, and she offered tidbits of her life in a rapid-fire staccato. She talked about verbal and sexual abuse in her life. She talked about briefly working as an escort. (“I did not have sex,” she snapped. “Just company.”) She talked about moving from Florida to New York alone while still a teenager. She told me about finding black-market hormones at age 12 to begin to transition. She told me about her parents, both from Jamaica. And her father is a pastor. I winced at the triple whammy of a trans teenager living in the deep South with Caribbean parents who are also religious.

I wondered if sharing her story with a national audience was a good look for Chanel. She was just barely 21 years old. But I folded up that worry and put away. My job was to deliver the story, period. And so, a few days after we met, I pushed Chanel into the spotlight, literally and figuratively.

Looking back, she never should have been a part of the story. She wasn’t in the right space to represent the LGBTQ community. She was just barely able to understand herself and her own identity.

And if I’m honest with myself, I wasn’t in the space to write about her, either.