Posted on 12/15/2002 3:26:29 PM PST by ewing
Huh?
I must be getting old and senile, though. I can recall when the schools/kids/parents used to preach, not so long ago, about just saying no to sex, abstinence, and all that. Did it all change in the past few months???
If it hasn't changed, then WHY are these kids/school on a 'it's OK to have sex in childhood/school years' kick ? (isn't the choice of sex partners what makes one gay?)
I must be getting old and senile, though. I can recall when the schools/kids/parents used to preach, not so long ago, about just saying no to sex, abstinence, and all that. Did it all change in the past few months???
If it hasn't changed, then WHY are these kids/school on a 'it's OK to have sex in childhood/school years' kick ? (isn't the choice of sex partners what makes one gay?)
 |
|||||||||
| Vol 11 No. 34, May 9 - May 15 2002 |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
| REMEMBER THE LESBIAN PROM KING? by Trisha Ready
Last May, Krystal Bennett was the world-famous lesbian prom king of Ferndale, Washington. Looking back, it's clear the media missed the much bigger Ferndale story. I I was drawn to the "lesbian prom king" story last spring. Krystal Bennett, the only out lesbian senior at her small-town high school, was elected "king" at her senior prom on April 28, 2001. Bennett's victory at Ferndale High's prom caused a big stink in Ferndale, Washington, a disproportionately Christian town near Bellingham, in Whatcom County. Bennett was everywhere last spring--TV news, daily papers, gay magazines--and Ferndale, Washington briefly found itself in the national spotlight. At first glance, 18-year-old Bennett's story appeared to be a retelling of a modern classic: "Young Queer Victim in the Backward Christian Town." Her tale echoed the Matthew Shepard murder (small-town bigotry) and the Oscar-winning movie Boys Don't Cry (gender non-conformity). Only in Bennett's case, nobody was martyred. She was, however, the unlucky target of mindless cruelty and threats. I tried to write about Bennett's story last year, but I found myself clinging to superficial details, queer dogma, and murky platitudes. I couldn't get at the deeper issues that nagged me. What made it worse is that I liked Bennett immediately when we met for lunch at a Denny's near the SeaTac Doubletree Inn, two weeks after Ferndale's prom. Bennett was attending a conference on gender, and was clearly enjoying her instant "Mack Daddy" celebrity status. The recently victimized baby-faced dyke with the bleached-blond flattop told me she wanted to grow up to be an ACLU lawyer. And that played to my fatal flaw. I'm a knee-jerk social worker. My automatic response when I meet a teenager is to protect her--that goes double if she's been oppressed. My instinct to protect Bennett overshadowed my instinct to get at some semblance of truth. I wrote draft after draft from May to September of last year--about what a great kid Bennett was, how smart Bennett was, and the lousy way Bennett had been treated by the people of Ferndale. All the while I was secretly obsessed with how Bennett's story intersected with the energy crisis, of all things, but somehow I couldn't get there. I couldn't tell the story that needed to be told because it would take the spotlight off Bennett. My editor rejected all my early drafts, and I got pissed and put away the story. But now, on the one-year anniversary of Bennett's prom king coup, I think I finally have enough distance. So I decided to look at her story again, from the very beginning. II The lesbian prom king story started in a whimsical way. One of Krystal Bennett's friends, a straight girl, thought up the scheme. "You should be prom king," Bennett remembers her friend telling her. "That would be awesome." Ferndale High School selects its prom king and queen on prom night. Ballots are handed out at the door. Bennett and her friends passed the word on the dance floor: Vote for Bennett. Bennett's victory was greeted with applause and cheering from her classmates--they were in on the prank, after all, having elected her--and the popular prom queen hugged Bennett onstage. It was inevitable, given the school's rural setting and the surprise nature of the prom court coup, that a backlash would come. In fact, the negative reaction started on prom night. School officials at the prom claimed they couldn't find the gold "prom king" crown matching the crown that had already been placed on the prom queen's head. Instead, they fetched Bennett a cardboard Burger King crown. Bennett should have received the same costume crown all Ferndale prom kings and queens are awarded, but school officials at the prom refused to produce the traditional crown in an effort to either humiliate Bennett or somehow delegitimize her election. Bennett must have known in the back of her mind that running for prom king might provoke a response--especially if she won. Bennett was a political person, after all. She pushed the school library to carry the Advocate and to purchase queer books including Am I Blue? and Annie on My Mind. Bennett would often reprimand her peers for using racial slurs or saying "that's so gay" when they meant "weird" or "messed-up." "I like dialogue and to get people talking," Bennett told me in an interview. Before her friend nominated her, however, Bennett didn't ponder the potential consequences or political aspects of running for prom king. It wasn't a calculated move, like her request for the school library to carry the Advocate. She was just goofing around, like all adolescents do--only Bennett was goofing around with sex and gender roles. I don't believe Bennett had any idea how big and chaotic the dialogue she started would ultimately get. When word got out in Ferndale about Bennett's victory, upset parents of other Ferndale High School students began to call school officials. They wanted the school to prevent anything similar from happening in the future. Local churches denounced Bennett, saying that it was sinful and illogical for a girl to be a king--particularly a butch lesbian girl who lived with her girlfriend. Taking a cue from their parents and pastors, students who cheered for Bennett on prom night began snubbing and chastising her in school hallways. Teachers told Bennett that the ballots should have been tossed, and the school administration pressured the student government to make all future prom court elections gender-specific--from now on only boy kings and girl queens would reign over Ferndale High's proms. III Word wasn't only getting out in Ferndale about Bennett. The Bellingham Herald picked up the story, that story went out on the newswires, and pretty soon Bennett was getting calls from USA Today and 20/20. She was also getting vulgar hate mail from nutcases. At this point, the B-movie versions of Bennett's story congealed. In the conservative version, Bennett represents the decline of Western civilization because she dresses like a boy, is queer, and has transgressed a sacred rite of heterosexual passage. In the liberal version, Bennett represents the wide-eyed innocent victimized by a gaggle of ignorant rural types too unevolved to explore gender roles and too "un-postmodern" to reject religion. Both stories are predictable and boring. Once it was clear that there was mainstream interest in Bennett's story, queer media and political groups jumped on the bandwagon. In the queer version, Bennett was a standard-issue victim/hero, a brave girl fighting for justice in a world of good and evil. Bennett was suddenly, if temporarily, a very important person in the gay and lesbian community. As gays and lesbians are increasingly embraced by the mainstream, the value of "our" victims grows. We score political points off of our victims, off of our Shepards and, more metaphorically, our Bennetts. In this way, the cause of gay and lesbian civil rights only seems to be advanced when we can produce a photogenic victim with a harrowing story. Deep down, though, American gays and lesbians know that we are less victimized now than at perhaps any other time in the last 1,800 years. The increasing scarcity of gay victims increases the value, as a commodity, of a single queer person like Bennett who gets victimized in a compelling, picturesque way. Okay, here's where we peel back the first layer by asking, "Is this really a political story?"--or is it instead a story about everyday superficiality and cruelty? It's clear that Bennett's story achieved such heightened, symbolic status in the queer community because queers are obsessed with proms. That preoccupation has driven us to create alternative parties such as Seattle's "alternative prom" for queer youth and the former "The Prom You Never Went To" in order to put demons of teen angst to rest. The queer community has bigger issues to address than proms, but Bennett's story hit an arterial nerve. Lots of people--but especially queers--seem forever stuck in the waxed hallways of high-school memory, trying to rewrite our rejection and alienation stories. High school is a compressed and emotionally loaded place to begin with, where we undergo the confusion of puberty while facing intense pressure to conform socially. If we wake up to the fact, in such a rigid environment, that our sexual desires are aberrant, the heat of potential hell and heartbreak reaches a boiling point. The scars and badges queers carry from high school are great fodder for personal growth (in therapy), but don't make compelling politics.
|
Linking? Use This URL!
photo by David Belisle
photo by David Belisle
The Hunted The Producers
|
| HOME | ARCHIVES | FEATURE | NEWS | CALENDAR | COLUMNS | ARTS | CLASSIFIEDS | PERSONALS | CONTACT | SEARCH
|
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
