Initially famous as the figurehead of a facebook page fast approaching half a million fans titled, “Let Constance Take her Girldfriend to Prom!” (supported by the ACLU), high school student Constance McMillen has just been named the Grand Marshall of this year’s Gay Pride parade in New York City. Let me state for the record: I want to go.
I used to work on the corner of 21st Street and Sixth Ave. the one time center of gay/club culture in New York. A block south, on 20th St. the cathedral-cum-danceclub that raised many a club kid once existed (granted by the time I was there, it was called Avalon. Now they’re turning it into a gourmet mall). Still, though the neighborhood had passed gay to become trendy and then acceptable, ending up kind of a boring shopping center with a Marshalls and Barnes and Noble, it still retained its roots, and paid a nightly homage to gay culture. The restaurant I worked at served happy hour to business men at 6. At eight we served “calamat” to guys from Staten Island and their dates. At 11, the drag queen came on, and the swishy waiters got swishier. I loved it. We were right on the parade route.
(That parade is bonkers. But I would back to see Constance. I wonder how that girl carries herself.)
At 19, I wasn’t much older than Constance will be when she conducts the parade. But clearly, I was years younger than her in terms of maturity and self-awareness. McMillen, a senior at Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Miss. who has been out as a lesbian since eighth grade, had planned to take her girlfriend to the prom but was told by the school that she could go alone or with a male date but not with a female date. Then, she made a stink about it, and the ACLU sued the school, after which the school district cancelled the prom. School officials then said that parents would organize a private event with school chaperones that Ms. McMillen could attend, and she did, along with a handful of other students. But many more students went to another prom the same night at a country club to which Ms. McMillen said she was not invited.
I’ve suspected that she would become an emblem for gay rights, especially since the gay high school student and the injustices he/she suffer is a conventional trope in teen pop culture (i.e. Kurt Hummel in Glee). This, combined with the interest of legitimate (agenda-less) journalists in writing articles like this one that examine homosexuality in the animal kingdom (crushing the theory that “gay” is “unnatural”) have tended to create, in secular American culture, an image of homosexuality that is not only natural, but loving, nurturing and sympathetic. Gays! They’re just like us! (Seriously. There was even a gay couple on “The Marriage Ref” on Monday night. They were fighting over a larger-than-life sized Betty Boop statuette/condiment holder. Really.)
Does this seem backwards to anyone else? Shouldn’t wide social acceptance come after legitimate and legal social change? McMillen should already live in a world where it’s acceptable for her to take whomever she likes to her prom. There have been too many others her age who have been humiliated or worse and have affected our collective consciousness enough to become almost wholly sympathetic character types in our art for kids like her to be symbols for a cause. They should already be benefiting from that cause’s triumph.
