Queering the Academic Field: John Brock’s Journey From Kentucky to Western N.C.
Eli Styles | April 11, 2024
Warren Wilson College (WWC) is constantly described as a sort of queer mecca, one that is especially attractive to those who have lacked access to a positive queer community in the past. This is exemplified not only by the extensive queer student population at WWC, but also through the outwardly queer professors that have been shaping this school since its creation.
One of these professors is John Brock, an openly gay man who taught at WWC from 2001 to 2015.
Brock was born and raised in Kentucky (Ky.) by “a long line of unsuccessful farmers.” He is a first-generation high school and college graduate. He obtained his Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Kentucky Wesleyan College in 1981 and did work in Louisville, Ky. to develop robotic systems that would automate laboratories.
He moved to Westchester County, N.Y. in 1981. Brock described his timing as “bad”, considering that 1981 was the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and would bring multitudes of death and horror to the queer community.
I found out about Brock’s time at WWC through an article he wrote for The Echo Newspaper during his time here, entitled “ACT UP….Silence is Death”.
The first paragraph was intense and impossible to ignore. I have inserted it below:
“One evening in the early 1980s, while living in New York, I hosted a dinner party for about 12 friends. We ate a wonderful dinner, laughed and drank wine. Over dessert, I brought out some articles I had been reading. The articles were about a group of gay men in San Francisco who were dying from routine infections the body usually staves off. After the initial awkward moments of everyone waiting for me to say it was all a practical joke, we began to really talk. The articles made the hypothesis that the “syndrome” was sexually transmitted and was destroying the immune system of its victims. After lively discussion, about half of us decided that we were worried enough to be celibate for what we hoped would be a short time. The others did not agree and decided to continue as before. In the next four years, the half that decided not to change their sexual habits contracted what we now call AIDS and died. My biggest loss was my best friend, Brad Nance. He went from being a vibrant 25-year-old man to what amounted to a 70-year-old in about six months. He lived about two years with the disease and passed into that darkest night.”
This moment of described discovery stuck out to me. To sit around with friends and speak of an illness that would soon be the death of half of them due to lack of governmental and medical care is horrifying, but it is a truth that has been repeated over and over again — most recently through the COVID-19 pandemic.
During his years in N.Y., Brock had to find a way to split his time between acting on his anger with the government by attending Aids Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) protests and taking care of his friends who were dying from AIDS. While Brock was not an official member of ACT UP, he had friends who were heavily involved in protesting, planning and finding any way possible to make the queer community seen by the government and pharmaceutical companies.
During those years, Brock focused on keeping himself afloat and caring for his friends. Life at the time required striking a hard balance, but Brock persevered.
After N.Y., Brock moved to Atlanta, Ga. to earn his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry and neuroscience from Emory University. While there, he began playing in a men’s volleyball league and became a commissioner of gay volleyball. He also completed an internship with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“It was really nice,” Brock said. “It was a really good outlet for gay men — a lot of gay men — who didn’t get to do sports in high school, for various reasons, to do that.”
After earning his degree, Brock moved to Colorado to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Boulder. Afterward, a position at the CDC opened up for a new research lab. Brock took the position of senior research scientist and started a research lab to study breast cancer and birth defects.
Before joining the CDC staff, Brock had some ideas about how the institution functioned, largely in relation to Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
“The Surgeon General at the time was Charles Everett Koop, and Ronald Reagan actually pushed [Koop] to quarantine all the gay men in the country at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic,” Brock said. “Koop told Reagan he wasn’t going to do that because it wasn’t good public health. Reagan tried to get him fired, but a bunch of senators stood up for Koop and kept [that from happening]. So I felt like I wanted to work for an organization that was going to be making rational decisions based on public health.”
The similarities between AIDS and COVID-19 are seemingly never-ending, both in disease makeup and how the CDC chose to handle them.
“I think the CDC does a good job of getting the information out, but that doesn’t mean people will use it,” Brock said. “Public health has some ability to change perception over the long term, but it certainly can’t stop individual behavior. I think the CDC makes mistakes, but a lot of times mistakes are made because we have limited information. So the CDC makes the best available decision, and sometimes those decisions are wrong.”
Being part of the CDC opened Brock up to more opportunities. During his time there he discovered new compounds that no one had found before. Due to this, he spent time traveling around the world giving presentations and educating people on his findings.
He received a voicemail around 2001 from a friend at WWC asking him to take a leave of absence from the CDC to teach at the college. His partner at the time wanted them to settle down somewhere concrete so they could adopt a child, and WWC ended up being the perfect place to do it.
Brock left the CDC after his initial year at WWC to take on a full-time position as a professor and settle down with his family. The queer community at WWC accepted them with open arms.
“My partner and I lived on campus, we were out, we threw the big Halloween party on campus,” Brock said. “We never felt like we had to hide. Then we became foster parents, and we had great support around that.”
During his time at WWC, Brock taught an epidemiology class that did a study on sexually transmitted infections (STIs) on campus. The results allowed better education and preventative measures to be provided to students on campus. The only obstacle faced was a concern about students’ information being released to the public. Luckily, this did not happen and a second study was able to be done, which allowed the school to fund contraceptives and STI testing.
Brock won the Teaching Excellence Award at WWC in 2005. He left WWC in 2015 due to discomfort with the president at the time and a job offer from the University of North Carolina at Asheville (UNCA).
Despite the struggle Brock has faced, he still has a positive outlook on his situation and the work that he does.
“[On a tour of UNCA], a student slowed me down and asked, ‘Will I be safe here?’” Brock said. “And I said, ‘What do you mean?’, and he said, ‘I’m a gay man. Will I be safe here?’, and I said, “Yes, you will be safe here.’ [At UNCA] we have three openly gay and lesbian faculty in the chemistry department, which is unusual in the chemistry department anywhere.”
Unfortunately, tragedy still strikes. Brock lost two family members to COVID-19 because they refused to get vaccinated and recently lost two friends to side effects from the HIV/AIDS treatment cocktail.
Brock’s time at WWC had an incredibly valuable impact on the college community is incredibly valuable. Without the work of him and his students, much of the change that has happened to combat the spread of STIs and other diseases on campus would not have happened.
“I relish being a part of the Warren Wilson community,” Brock said. “We worked together pretty well, most of the time, and we cared about each other. And that’s unusual; there aren’t a lot of communities that work that well.”