On one level, I find this story hilarious. I mean the one about Constance McMillen and the fake prom she was sent to while the rest of the class held its own secret prom. It reads like one of those teen novels, where the unpopular girl gets tricks played on her, but eventually gets even, which ends with the main character making new friends, a moral about being the better person and the popular suitably demonized.
This being real life, there are some differences. For one, there’s not going to be a happy ending, and for another, it wasn’t just McMillen’s peers who played this trick on her. It was also their parents and her school.
Constance McMillen is 18. She’s a senior at Itawamba Agricultural High School in Mississippi. She’s a lesbian. And, if you’ve been paying attention to the news, you’ll also notice that she ó gasp! ó wanted to bring her girlfriend to prom. Oh, and wear a tuxedo. Neither of these requests were deemed acceptable by the school, which has a policy that dates must be of the opposite sex, and girls must wear dresses. Long story short, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) got involved and told the school board that banning the lesbian couple violated civil rights.
So the school canceled the prom. Clearly this would solve the problem and not upset anybody. McMillen filed suit to get the prom reinstated. And then, somewhat surprisingly, parents stepped up to plan a private prom. Problem solved! Or not. At the prom that McMillen and her girlfriend attended, there were seven other people. And two of them had learning disabilities, so we can see that this school clearly had an idea of who they did and didn’t want around, which is just cruel. The real one was outside of the county, at a secret location, and guess who was not invited?
This story is just insane. This isn’t just the school board taking a hard line, this isn’t just run-of-the-mill-teenagers-are-jerks ó this is an entire town getting together to screw over two people. I realize that not everyone is okay with people who are queer; I don’t even really expect them to be. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I decided to take my best male friend to prom instead of even considering asking a girl ó the other being that I didn’t actually have a girlfriend at the time, but details, details. I can even understand canceling the prom instead of having to deal with somebody who doesn’t fit into accepted gender and sexual norms ó it gets rid of the problem, after all, even if it is the coward’s way out.
It’s the secret prom I can’t get my head around. It doesn’t take more than 10 minutes of digging on the internet to find pictures from it. There are also Facebook quotes from people who clearly think they’re clever along the lines of “had tons of fun at ëprom’ last nightÖ:)”. Since when is something like this ever okay? Reorganizing an entire event to exclude two people goes beyond just dislike of an orientation. It’s open discrimination. It’s spiteful, it’s stupid and it shouldn’t be brushed under the carpet.
Oh, and did I mention it’s happened before? In 1965, in Birmingham, Ala., a young black woman named Carolyn King-Miller arrived at her prom to find it empty. With a secret prom held downtown. It was a jerk move then and a jerk move now. Apparently we haven’t come too far in the past 45 years. I know it seems surreal and like it couldn’t actually happen.
But it did. It’s sometimes easy to forget that queer people still face issues like this ó Wooster’s a pretty tolerant place and I’ve often brought girls as dates to college events. And yet this kind of thing happens all the time ó more than we know, or want to.
Grace Hansen is a contributor to the Voice. She can be reached for comment at GHansen10@wooster.edu