The payphone was gone, but its mark remained.
Decades earlier, inside Archuleta Hall at New Mexico Highlands University, Dr. PJ Sedillo had used that phone to call his mother and cry. He wanted to leave Las Vegas, New Mexico. He had already come out to her, but here he believed he had to return to the closet to stay safe. His mother told him to finish his degree. Once he had it, she said, he could be whoever he wanted.
Before the dormitory was torn down, PJ returned. Two police officers and a locksmith helped him enter his former room. He revisited the game room, the spot where the payphone had been, and the restroom where another gay student had been assaulted while PJ stayed silent, afraid for his own life.
Then he crossed the campus and led safe zone training for eight new faculty members.
That walk captures a truth of PJ's life: coming out is not one declaration after which fear disappears. It requires repeated calculations about safety, risk, disclosure, and belonging. The room that taught him to hide eventually gave him a reason to create safer rooms for others.
The room that taught him to hide eventually gave him a reason to create safer rooms for others.
At Highlands, hiding was a matter of safety
New Mexico Highlands University gave PJ unusual academic freedom. After losing his presidential scholarship at the University of New Mexico, he arrived at Highlands still determined to become a teacher. He moved quickly, taking 27 credit hours in his last semester with special permission from the university president. He graduated in three years and began teaching at 20 years old, turning 21 in 1989.
Yet the same place that allowed his gifted mind to move at its own pace required him to conceal another part of himself. PJ believed it was unsafe to be openly gay in Las Vegas, New Mexico. A lesbian friend sometimes posed as his fiancée so no one would question him. On weekends, he returned to Albuquerque to be with his boyfriend and live more openly. Then he went back to Highlands and resumed the double life.
The emotional cost of hiding is sometimes described too gently, as if concealment were simply a preference for privacy. PJ's calls from the payphone tell a different story. He was not calmly deciding what to share. He was crying to his mother because living as two versions of himself had become unbearable.
Then came the memory he could not leave behind. A group of men ganged up on another gay student in Archuleta Hall, took him into the restroom, shoved his head into a toilet, and urinated on him. PJ knew the student was gay. He had seen him at bars, but on campus he deliberately kept his distance because even an association felt dangerous.
PJ did not speak up during the assault. He has never pretended otherwise. He connects that silence to the advocacy that followed, not to erase what happened, but to acknowledge what fear can make a person do. When speaking puts your own safety at risk, silence can feel protective. It can also remain with you for decades.
A Pride rally gave fear a public name
At PJ's first Albuquerque Pride in 1989, he hid behind buildings at Yale Park. Television cameras were present, and being seen could carry consequences. Could he be fired from his teaching job? What would happen if relatives or friends who did not know he was gay saw him on the news?
Pride was meant to offer public belonging, yet PJ experienced it from the edge, using buildings as cover. The contradiction forced him to confront his fear. He went home, cried, and reached a realization that changed his relationship with it: God loved him as he was. He changed his name from Paul James to PJ because he no longer saw himself as the same person.
The next day, he went to Common Bond, Albuquerque's local gay and lesbian community center. He began organizing Friday board-game nights. Within the next year, he was president of Albuquerque Pride, an organization he would lead for 21 years. The man who had hidden from cameras was not suddenly safe from danger. He had decided that fear would no longer make every decision for him.
He had decided that fear would no longer make every decision for him.
Neil Ibsen, PJ's mentor and a parade organizer, helped turn that decision into institutional change. When PJ asked whether Albuquerque Public Schools could fire him for being gay, Neil investigated and came back with an answer: yes. There was no nondiscrimination provision covering sexual orientation.
Neil told PJ to wear his best suit and tie and tell his story. PJ described his fear to the Albuquerque Public Schools board. Neil then asked the board to vote immediately on a nondiscrimination provision for sexual orientation for APS teachers. It passed that evening.
That vote established what would become PJ's method of advocacy: name the risk, expose the hidden cost, and require the institution to answer. A private fear can be dismissed as one person's problem. Public testimony makes everyone in the room decide whether that fear should remain embedded in policy.
He kept asking APS until a marriage license changed the answer
One successful vote did not open every door. From about 1989 to about 2010, PJ returned to Albuquerque Public Schools each year to request domestic partnership benefits. Each year, the answer was no. He was told the system could not provide them, would not provide them, or did not have the money.
He kept asking.
PJ also knew that a secret can become leverage if someone else reveals it first. So he disclosed more of himself on his own terms. While teaching gifted education at Emerson Elementary School in Albuquerque's International District, he appeared on Channel 13 News as both an elementary gifted education teacher and Fontana Divine, his drag persona.
This was a refusal to let other people present his identity as evidence against him. Parents defended the teacher they knew. One noted that PJ had worn more makeup as a Winkie Guard in The Wizard of Oz at Popejoy than he did as a drag queen. Their response returned the discussion to the relevant question: Was he a good teacher? They said he was fantastic.
In 2010, PJ and his husband married in Canada because their marriage was not yet legal in the United States. When PJ returned during open enrollment and was again told that APS could not provide domestic partnership benefits, he corrected the premise. He was not requesting domestic partnership benefits. He wanted full spousal benefits, and he had a marriage license.
APS asked for time to consult its legal advisers. PJ went to the media. When the school system later told him to come in immediately and sign the paperwork, he made it wait while, he said, he consulted his own legal support. He and his husband then signed. PJ says they became the first couple in the United States to receive full spousal benefits through a public school for a school teacher.
Institutional change can look inevitable after the fact. This was not.
Institutional change can look inevitable after the fact. This was not. It required years of hearing no, a willingness to disclose what others might use against him, and a marriage license placed in front of a system that had grown accustomed to refusing his requests.
Coming out is a phase you may have to enter again
The familiar account of coming out is deceptively simple: first a person hides, then tells the truth, and finally lives openly. PJ's eight phases of identity reject that straight line. A person may move forward when met with support, skip phases when safety is strong, or move backward after trauma. Identity may remain constant even as the conditions around disclosure change.
Across the phases, the question remains the same: "Who am I?" The process begins with discovering difference and self-denial. Stress and social isolation follow, along with hiding, anger, and uncertainty about giftedness or sexual orientation. For a gifted person, those questions may become especially intense. PJ's research found that gifted individuals had a more difficult time with their intelligence than with their sexual orientation or gender identity.
Phase four carries particular risk because this is when someone reveals who they are to another person. The disclosure may look brief from the outside, perhaps only a sentence, but it can follow years of internal conflict. PJ had already become more open before attending Highlands, yet the danger he perceived there pushed him back into concealment. Coming out in one place did not make another place safe.
In phase six, a person consciously seeks others with a similar identity. In phase seven, that identity becomes more publicly known through relationships, education, work, or participation in Pride. Advocacy may follow when someone recognizes that visibility can help another person find connection.
This is why "Why didn't you tell me sooner?" can be such a painful response. It centers the listener's surprise rather than the speaker's risk. It assumes someone was entitled to another person's truth before that person felt safe enough to share it.
A more honest response recognizes the courage required to disclose. Every time an LGBTQ plus person comes out to a relative, colleague, employer, stranger, or someone on the other end of a telephone call, they must assess what that person might do with the truth. Will they honor it, reject it, expose it, or use it to threaten work, housing, family, or safety? The declaration may be familiar. The risk is new each time.
He returned to the dorm as the person he once needed
When PJ asked the president of New Mexico Highlands University for permission to revisit Archuleta Hall, the building was no longer in use. Two police officers and a locksmith accompanied him. When the door to his old room would not open, the locksmith broke a window, reached inside, and unlocked it.
PJ stood again in the room where he had lived a divided life. He remembered the ladder outside his window that allowed people to enter after the dorm rooms were locked at night. A locksmith told him the ladder had remained there and people had continued to use it. There had been laughter and parties in this place too. Closure did not require him to recast every memory as pain.
But he needed to face some places directly. PJ went to the game room and the restroom where the gay student had been abused. He saw the mark where the payphone once stood, the phone from which he had begged his mother to let him come home. His fear now had an address, a hallway, a missing fixture, and a room he could finally leave by choice.
Afterward, he sat in his car and saw a yellow butterfly, the sign he associates with letting go of his father. His mother had died the previous April, and PJ told her that she had done the best she could. He released the anger he was still holding and cried.
Then he walked across campus to conduct safe zone training for eight new faculty members. Safe zone training and safe space training identify a room where someone can go for assistance or simply to feel safe. They can collect themselves there. They may choose to speak about what happened, but they do not have to disclose their full story before receiving shelter.
As a student, PJ needed a protected room at Highlands and could not find one.
The reversal is nearly exact. As a student, PJ needed a protected room at Highlands and could not find one. As a professor and department chair, he now prepares faculty members to provide it. The silence he once carried has become a practical system: a placard outside a door, a trained person inside, and a place where safety does not have to be earned through immediate disclosure.
Closure is not a perfect ending. PJ still does not know what happened to the student assaulted in Archuleta Hall. He does not know whether that man is alive. What he can do is make it less likely that another student will stand alone in a restroom, a hallway, or a moment of crisis while everyone else calculates the cost of speaking.