Jonathan Capehart ’89 begins his memoir, Yet Here I Am (Grand Central Publishing, 2025), with an epigraph by Cary Grant: “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I finally became that person. Or he became me.”
Chronicling his life from a childhood spent shuttling between New Jersey and rural North Carolina to a career in New York City and Washington, D.C., where today his many media roles include co-hosting MSNBC’s The Weekend, the book shares how pivotal the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist’s years at Carleton were in this process of becoming. It was in Northfield, as he recounts in the following excerpt, that he learned to embrace his identity as a gay Black man.
Heeding the advice I received during my Today show internships, I majored in political science and took as many history classes as I could. The study of political science and history is one of cold, hard facts. This happened on this date for this or that reason and here were the consequences of said action or actions. After three years of classes in that style of instruction, at first my brain could not handle the squishiness of an art history class I had signed up for my senior year. Everything was open to interpretation. But then a light switch went off—literally.
Professor Alison Kettering had a captivating way of lecturing. Her instruction always started slowly, her soft voice guiding us through the paintings or sculptures displayed on the screen. As the lesson went on, her pace increased. The urgency built during her lecture as she tied seemingly disparate ideas into a coherent and mind-blowing lesson, hitting the last word of her talk like a soprano reaching an aria-ending high-C. And after a beat, a click of the light switch. That moment—the lesson, the performance of that lesson, the theater of it all—hooked me.
Professor Kettering helped me to see a world of beauty in things all around me, and everything came alive. I started looking at pictures with an eye for composition and light, for what is seen and not seen in the frame. I saw architecture where I had once simply seen buildings. How many times had I looked out that bathroom window in [my hometown of] Newark and not even really noticed the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in the distance? During my senior winter break, I raced across town to see the Gothic architecture that made Chartres and Notre Dame famous, replicated on a grand church in my own backyard.
Another unforeseen passion found during college was ballroom dancing, something I discovered while looking for a way to fulfill the physical education requirement that didn’t involve taking off my clothes in a locker room filled with other men. I’d always loved dancing. The R & B, disco, and soul music of my childhood demanded it. To not move while “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” is playing is a crime against the race. Soon, I was tearing up the dance floor in the Cowling Gymnasium with Sara, a native of Gainesville, Florida, who had lived in my dorm freshman year and loved the glamour of old movies like Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Ignoring the instructor’s command to change partners, Sara and I mastered the foxtrot, waltz, polka, and Lindy Hop. For years, we were a team. So it made sense that I would ask her to be my girlfriend. It also made sense that she said no. Not out of any lack of love. We were great friends, and it was our friendship she wanted to preserve. And perhaps my motive for making such an ask was transparent. The ask was my last-ditch effort to be straight.
All in all, I was a mediocre student in college. I loved going to class, but my grades never matched my enthusiasm. If anything, they reflected my enthusiasm for what I was doing outside of the classroom. That is, being a journalist, which kicked into high gear in the winter term of my junior year when I was the news editor of the Carletonian, and news director of KRLX. The paper was in a room at the top of Sayles-Hill Campus Center. I spent many a night there running printed copy through the glue machine and then laying out the lines of text on the page for final printing. That was before my classmate Becky Loraas fired me after I helped start a rival one-sheet publication called the COW, the Carleton Observer Weekly, which scooped the Carletonian by publishing the night before. She was right.
The radio station was in the basement of Sayles-Hill, a time capsule filled with vinyl records and a teletype machine rushing in news from United Press International. With all the local, state, and national news I gathered and the PSAs to break up the content, I would walk into the studio, put on the headphones, adjust the levels, and get to work. The theme music for KRLX News at Six was the urgent opening instrumental of Gloria Estefan’s “Rhythm Is Going to Get You.” How very 1980s. Sir Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 4 in G Major, the music for my Sunday affairs show called Sunday Review, was not.
My GPA might have suffered, but my personal satisfaction was off the charts. I couldn’t wait to get out into the real world and do it all for a living. Harry Goldstein, a hyper and brilliant guy from Louisville, Kentucky, reminiscent of a young Dustin Hoffman, was my journalism soul mate. He was Carl Bernstein to my Bob Woodward. He smoked clove cigarettes and listened to jazz. His favorite album, Francis Albert Sinatra & Antônio Carlos Jobim, became the soundtrack of my junior year and remains one of my favorite albums today. I loved chasing stories on campus for the newspaper. Honing my skills. Learning to be observant, to notice patterns and how changes in these patterns could be the result of news. Most importantly, I learned to listen. I relished the knowledge that would come from another person, their expertise, their opinion, their experience. And I put that curiosity to the test my sophomore year with a full-front-page story that had as its graphic a cinder block wall with what looked like spray-painted words that served as the headline: “Homosexuals at Carleton.”
If college is a journey of self-discovery, then mine began in earnest earlier that year upon meeting Matthew Brooks. He was a freshman from Santa Fe, whose good looks and five o’clock shadow pegged him as a doppelgänger of the singer George Michael. He was gay. He didn’t lead with it. He didn’t hide it. It was inherently who he was. His eyes, smile, and deep dimples all conspired to make you fall in love with him. That’s what happened to anyone who met Matthew. That’s what happened to me.
We lived on the same floor of Goodhue Hall, and from the moment we met, we were inseparable. We both loved classical music. He introduced me to Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, which led me to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. Bombastic works that I still listen to, especially when I’m writing. Matthew played piano beautifully and rehearsed all the time. In the winter of 1987, I sat next to him on a piano bench in the Music Hall and came out.
Matthew wasn’t the only gay person on campus. But he was the one I most wanted to be like. He was comfortable in his own skin more than a decade before Will & Grace taught America they had Matthews in their lives, if they’d only see and accept them. He had a quiet swagger about him as he walked around campus in cowboy boots and a leather jacket. He was gracious and charming. He became my best friend. My first conversation in the morning. My last conversation at night. We spent so much time together that we could finish each other’s sentences. Better still, we could sit with each other, say nary a word, and still have a full conversation in the silence. He made me want to be better as a person, do better. Ours was never a romantic relationship. It was a deeply emotional one, a friendship where I felt genuine love for him and from him. A bond that remains today. Even when he started dating Mark, an upperclassman who was the epitome of the sexy nerd, our friendship didn’t change. Mark became a good friend of mine, too.
The confidence and leadership Matthew exhibited while being his true self made him a role model for me and others on campus. He moved the meetings of what was called the LGBC—Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual at Carleton—from the basement of the chapel to a big meeting room on the second floor of Sayles-Hill. The hiddenness of the former location perpetuated shame. The openness of the latter location connoted self-respect and pride. At a time when folks were hiding they were gay, Matthew spent his junior year increasing the LGBC’s visibility, including going to every dorm during freshman orientation week to talk about the group and what it did. As a result, anyone who came out at Carleton between 1988 and 1990 most likely talked to Matthew first. Carleton was not without its problems. When someone scrawled “fag” on a painting of Matthew’s in an art studio classroom his junior year, he organized a campus-wide vigil that was backed by college president Steve Lewis. It was a turning point for the LGBC community.
It took me a while to follow his example, even after coming out to him. I was more than happy to hide behind his leadership and confidence, to let people draw their own conclusions about me because of our friendship. But my hiding in plain sight was akin to ducking behind a sapling in the middle of an open field. “Homosexuals at Carleton” was my initial way of trying to understand who I was. I wasn’t an opinion writer then. I was a dispassionate news reporter. Asking questions. Getting answers. And consequently, learning about myself. I spent three weeks talking with twelve gay men and six lesbians about life on campus. I changed their names to protect their privacy. Matthew was one of them. Contrary to what I learned some people thought at the time, I was not. But I did see myself reflected in their words and their stories. I saw with more clarity that I wasn’t alone.
I certainly had Black friends at Carleton, but by my junior year, the scant number of African Americans spiked. There were so many new faces on campus, I quipped excitedly to another, “Where’d all these Black people come from?” The Black students of the incoming class of 1991 were smart and lively, and very active in campus life. That incoming class contributed to discourse on race and politics by being loud voices for Carleton to divest from South Africa and increased diversity at the college. And because some of them were members of the LGBC, they helped make the group an even more visible part of campus life. My two identities were in harmony.
Leslie Barlow is a visual artist, educator, and cultural worker from Minneapolis.