“You Go, Girl!”
(or, if you prefer, “The Homecoming Queen’s Got A Gun,” a random pagemonkey rant)

A recent headline had me checking the date on my trusty computer and comparing it to the date on my other trusty computer, just to make sure it wasn’t April 1st.

This scurry of date research happened, Gentle Reader, after reading an article beneath the headline “Openly Gay Teen Voted Prom Queen At LA High School.”

I don’t want you to think that I’m poking fun at Sergio Garcia or Fairfax High School. I most certainly am not. The situation is one of what I’ll call quiet courage; in this current climate of right-wing-extremist attack on anything that moves, supporting the decision of the student body at FHS to include an openly gay student on the ballot for prom queen, and then supporting the young man’s win, took balls the size of casaba melons, carefully held in place by an asbestos jockstrap.

Not to mention the courage shown by Sergio himself; his alma mater prides itself on openness, acceptance, and diversity, but there are always a few cranks in every crowd.

Kudos to all involved: Those running, those supporting, those voting, and those who disagreed with the whole thing but chose the path of an elan, a graceful and powerful creature, instead of violent, shrill behavior.

But, Gentle Reader, I must admit to ambivalence.

Not over what kind of message this event broadcasts - it reeks of love and understanding.

Not over the breaking with tradition - high school politics was moldy 30 years ago, and things never go un-moldy.

And certainly not over the implied message that you can be whatever you aspire to be. Far too often, our future - our young men and women in high school and their first years of college - aren’t given that precious message.

My minor dissatisfaction, Gentle Reader, is this: I think Fairfax should have gone one small step farther, and had both straight and gay prom royalty.

In other words, perhaps a Prom King + Prince with a Prom Crown Prince and a Princess, or a King + Queen and a pair of Crown Princes, or whatever - decided by overall vote.

That strikes me as being much more fair. I’m sure there was also a very popular, very attractive young lady available for crowning that night.

My upset is this: We should never have any role in propagating that hateful old “it’s us or them” message that has been used so successfully by rabid right-wing lunatics.

~ pagemonkey

Now that I’m done ranting, I should let on that I did date and sleep with the Homecoming King of my junior year in high school. In fact, I ran away from home to follow him when he moved to his parent’s ranch out of state.

Neither of us was openly gay; then again, neither of us was openly straight. Neither Gary nor I had had a lot of experience with the politics of relationships, other than the standard school dance dating, when we discovered that we liked each other a lot more than we liked everyone else, male or female.

My mother noticed this “enhanced friendship,” and cornered me one evening on the back porch while we were sipping wine as Elton serenaded us from the wonderful old Curtis Mathis console we had out back, and asked me some very to-the-point questions about how close Gary and I were. I answered them honestly - my coming out to her. She promptly called Gary’s mom and suggested “a lot of nice sangria and a serious talk” which happened immediately that night, in Gary’s garage, with both of us present.

Our moms got along famously. They both used each other as an excuse to escape their husbands from time to time, and often klatched up for afternoon shopping or movies. My mom was Swedish, married to the son of a German immigrant who married a Polish woman literally on the dock where the ship was berthed. Gary’s mom was very German herself, and she married a Polish man who had been given a German name to fly under the Nazi radar.

And moms in general are great. Gary’s looked at him, cocked an eyebrow like a good German mother does, and then said something incredible: “That makes perfect sense!” Gary’s older brother had gotten a girl pregnant, and his younger brother was showing the same curfew-breaking behavior, but Gary was always the good boy home on time.

The moms agreed that telling the dads at this point would result in a lot of bad weather, and suggested that we shouldn’t since they wouldn’t.

We finished off that school year happy as the proverbial clams are, and nobody noticed that we had stopped taking girls to dances. By the end of the year, it was odd for us not to show up together at events, dance a few dances, and leave together.

Our reputations preceeded us in other ways, and nobody much thought about it, I guess.

My dad never found out. He was dead by the time my sexuality had become “bullet-proof” enough to share it with him. Gary’s dad found out a few years after our moms conspired, and spent a bad week trying to figure out where he “went wrong” with Gary, but gave up when he couldn’t think back on something that would point to it. He finally accepted it and went back to looking at Gary as the wonderful son he was.