This week, The Argus sat down with Spencer Turner ’25, an art studio major and member of the University’s Posse Veterans Program. A lifelong singer, Turner went from singing hymns in church choir as a child to singing the National Anthem at the Aviano Air Force Base in Italy and participating in burlesque shows at Wesleyan. After graduation, Turner will work as an executive assistant for Center for the Arts (CFA) Artist in Residence Anna Deavere Smith Hon. ’97. Turner is still competing in senior assassins, and thus has refused to share pertinent information about his location or daily schedule.
The Argus: Why do you think you were nominated to be a WesCeleb?
Spencer Turner: Honestly, I don’t have the slightest idea. I do a lot of singing, and I’m a veteran, which makes me sort of an anomaly. But celeb?
A: I saw you perform at jazz night once; could you tell me about your musical background?
ST: I have been singing for as long as I can really remember. I’m 38, and I remember being a kid, and doing dishes, and putting a CD from a Cheerios box on and singing with it. And then I was in a choir in church and a choir in elementary school. I’m involved in Black Raspberry, and burlesque, [and Ebony Singers]. It also really felt like it connected me to people.
A: I know that you’re [part of] one of the last Posse Veteran cohorts at Wesleyan. I’m curious how that program has structured your life and community here.
ST: I think initially it was a very safe community, and that’s what Posse desires to do: bring a group of people to universities so that they have a support system, especially as non-traditional students, to rely on and build community. The program does a really good job of preparing you to be a non-traditional student. They have a boot camp where you learn about Gen Z.
A: Like slang?
ST: No, not slang. It’s a transition for a lot of members in the Posse Veterans Program who are coming [into college] directly out of the military, and so [are] trying to figure out the difference between the two institutions. The expectation around work, leisure, [and] relationships [is] totally different. In the military, there’s a very direct way to communicate with people. I think that as a college student, things are a lot less clear, because people are still figuring out how they want to relate to one another, the social expectations, and whether or not they are confident in saying what they want versus what their peers are suggesting. There’s more peer pressure in college.
A: In my mind, I imagine there’s so much institutional pressure in the military.
ST: Yes, but you know exactly what the expectations are. [If you’re] not meeting them, somebody will tell you, “Fix your hat,” and “You’re not standing up straight,” and “You need to say this and not that.” Whereas in college, I think that that’s very unclear. Like in a relationship, you say the wrong thing, and then somebody ghosts you. Or you’re ostracized from a group, and you’re not really sure why. That doesn’t really happen in the military.
A: Your art studio thesis just went up. Could you tell me more about that?
ST: I’m [an art studio major with a concentration in photography], and my thesis was ostensibly about race and performance and archive. Those are things that are essential to me, and I tried to figure out a way to express them. It’s a visual art, so I’m loath to give it an exact verbal language. I think that can detract from allowing someone else to look at it and read whatever they want. Sometimes work needs to have a sort of shibboleth or something that gives you a way to read it, although I would say that’s not true for my work. I don’t want to give too much context.
A: I heard you work as a bike mechanic on campus.
ST: I’ve lived a lot of lives. I didn’t have a car in my late teens, early twenties, so I started riding bikes as a way to get around quickly. Then, if you don’t have money, you have to fix stuff yourself. And that’s another place where I really developed a strong community among bikers. Some of them are mechanics, and I started learning from them, and then I got hired. It’s a pretty direct relationship between my desire to travel around and to not have to pay someone else to do something I could do myself.
A: During one of your other lives, I know you worked as a mental health technician in the Air Force. Can you tell me about that? I imagine it wasn’t your first job in the military.
ST: I started off in the Air Force, trying to work as a pararescueman: a scuba diving, skydiving paramedic. I got injured in that program, and they kicked me out. But they didn’t kick me out of the military. And so, randomly, one day, the person who was responsible for our barracks called me into his office, and he asked me if I had left anything out of my psych evaluation.
A: What did he mean by that?
ST: Exactly. I had no idea. He was like, “Well, you know what? Something came up on your psych evaluation, so you have to go to the psych ward at the hospital. Go pack a 72-hour bag and come back to my office.” And then I returned to his office with my duffel. And he goes, “I’m just fucking with you, Turner! You got a job. You’re gonna be a mental health technician. Pack up all of your things, you’re leaving the base.” So honestly, I had no idea; the military is crazy.
Special Forces are so different from the regular Air Force because they have totally different goals. I never wanted to be in the military proper, so it was a shock to go to the mental health training and to be amongst all these medical trainees. It was really pivotal in helping me learn how to relate to others. It taught me a lot about the power of silence: not needing to fill the space within a conversation.
I had six months of mental health training, which was eight hours a day, five days a week. Then I moved to [the Aviano Air Force Base in Italy], where I worked at a mental health clinic and became a substance abuse counselor.
I kind of became disillusioned with mental health and substance abuse [counseling] in the military, because I saw a lot of hypocrisy around who was required to attend the program, [and in] the way that they applied the rules. But the military was always a means to an end, no matter what. Even if I had managed to get into the pararescueman program, it was just a way for me to leave bartending and bicycle mechanicing.
A: One of the questions I always ask seniors is how they feel they’ve changed at Wesleyan. I know that’s a different question to pose to a 38-year-old than a 22-year-old, so I’m also wondering, when you think about your younger peers, what you feel it means to be young.
ST: What does it mean to be young? I find the student population here to be incredibly ambitious, generally self-assured, [and] hard-working. And you guys are invested in not only the things that you’re learning, but also the results of your learning, both how you’re going to apply it directly to your whatever-happens-next and the grades. And I think that’s maybe not true for me. What I’ve learned here: I’m good at a lot of things, and I shouldn’t be afraid to try new things and use my mentors and teachers [as resources]. I don’t think that’s different from what everybody else is learning here, right?
Thomas Lyons can be reached at tlyons@wesleyan.edu.
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