In Memoriam: The HFAC

1st Place- Taylor Rane

We’ll never be the same, once it’s gone. We can’t go on living as though a part of us wasn’t demolished alongside the stone and glass.

“New opportunities,’ they say, “are waiting across campus!”

And I suppose they are. But new opportunities won’t bring back old friends. New spaces won’t bring back the hallowed halls. New resolutions won’t bring back the thousands of pieces of our souls, some volunteered and others ripped from us in the pursuit of “art.”

We will learn in our new places. We will sing new songs, create new masterpieces, perhaps even change the world for someone.

They’ve torn down buildings before. Then surely, new and improved, brick on brick on brick rises over the campus, changing the skyline a little more each year.

I have wondered at how little weeping is done over them. I suppose it’s because math never asks for a piece of your soul.

2nd Place- Anonymous

The HFAC is where my family and my queerness come together, an expansive, sunlit vision of what could be if those two pieces completely fit. There is so much love seeping from these chipped walls, these cramped bathrooms, this cracked foundation. My mother’s voice once rang through the halls I now walk down and feel like singing. Women before me once daydreamed of sticky lipstick kisses in the classrooms I now sit in and do the same. My ancestors, both by blood and by community, found a place in the labyrinth of her crooked basement. So, too, have I.

3rd Place- Brielle Williams
Every summer starting at age 14, I was a junior Young Ambassador. This meant hours of dancing, singing, acting, and everything else I found fun. The only problem was the place: Brigham Young University. The place gay people go to die.

I was never ashamed of being gay, but I was scared the other girls would no longer want to be around me if they knew. If they found out, would I still be powerful and funny and talented Brielle, or would I be scary and mean and lesbian Brielle?

On the day of our first performance, we were getting ready in the basement dressing rooms of the HFAC. A circle formed in the middle of the room, and people started sharing.

I don’t know what it is about the night before theatre performances that makes people open themselves up, but we always end up in a sharing circle.

I’m anorexic.

That sounds really hard, I’m sorry.

My parents are divorcing.

Been there.

I’m bisexual. It’s nice because I never have to change the pronouns in songs.

She said that aloud. Like it was nothing. Like we weren’t surrounded by Mormon teens. Theatre teens, but still Mormon. I felt my eyes widen in shock. I was scared for her. Her position. Her social standing.

Cool.

And then it was someone else’s turn.

And it was okay.

It’s safe in the HFAC basement.