March 10, 2010

This is Constance McMillen. She’s a very disturbing person, or at least the Itawamba County School District in northern Mississippi seems to think so. In fact, Constance is such a problem, Itawamba County Agricultural High School, where she’s a student, has cancelled its prom this year, simply to keep Constance and her date from attending.

Wow! What did she do?! Gut a teacher?!

Well, I’ll tell you what she did. Constance has a girlfriend, and she’s asked her school if she can bring the girl to the prom…and she also wants to wear a tuxedo. I’ll pause for a second while you reel from this.

Okay. Unfortunately, there’s a very clear rule at Itawamba County Agricultural stating that any date taken to the prom has to be of the opposite sex of the taker, never mind that the rule is brazenly unconstitutional. So, due to the “distractions to the educational process” generated by Constance’s request, the school district has pulled the plug on the prom, stating that they hope some “private citizens will organize an event for the juniors and seniors.” They are also, they say, protecting the “safety and well being” of their students by doing this.

Talk about your distractions to the educational process.

                                                ***

If you’re quick, you will have already deduced that Constance McMillen is gay. And, as you may have also deduced, there are grown people in Mississippi who still get freaked out by stuff like that. Apparently, they misplaced their sense of human decency when they were busy barreling forward into the past. Used to be, you could quash gays - and, in the good old days, African-Americans - just by, you know, systematically quashing them. But now you got the Internets, and all kinds of agitators end up hearing about it, and then you’re famous for all the wrong reasons.

Key among those agitators is the American Civil Liberties Union, which has given the school district until Wednesday to withdraw the rules against same-sex prom dates and proceed with the prom, or they’ll get their asses sued off. The worst part of all this, of course, is that Constance, who has done absolutely nothing wrong, now faces the ire of classmates who feel she torpedoed their Big Night. Surely, at least a few members of the school board knew full well this would happen when they cancelled the prom, whether they admit it or not. If they weren’t aware of that possibility, they know so little about American teenagers they simply aren’t equipped to look after them.

But let’s hear what Constance herself has to say about all this.

You tell ‘em, Constance. You tell ‘em. They should make room for you on that school board.

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During my early-1980s high school years in north Alabama, there weren’t any gay students. By that, I mean there were gay students, but nobody dared even speak the word, let alone display public affection for a person of the same sex. I remember there was a “hilarious” story about a star halfback on our football team who, after a “fag” made a pass at him, lured the kid down to a beach in the middle of the night and beat the holy shit out of him. I heard football players telling this story two or three different times in the gym and the hallways, and each time it elicited gales of laughter.

Yay, team! Go Knights!

As for me, I was a teenager living in a very conservative southern community. And, since I was also a guilt-driven Catholic coming to terms with my own sexuality - the Church does you absolutely no favors in this area, even if , like me, you were never raped by the friendly neighborhood Servant of God - I was uneasy with the idea of same-sex contact. I couldn’t get my mind around it, and same-sex love didn’t even enter into my thought processes, not that I felt for a second that gays deserved a good beating. But one day I had a rather emotional revelation, and it came, fittingly enough, in the form of a song by Elton John.

Outside of an occasional catty showbiz snipe, John is so morbidly benign by this point in his career a lot of people don’t even know that he was once a camp icon who threw caution to the wind when, in 1976, he casually mentioned during a “Rolling Stone” interview that he was not adverse to sleeping with men. As crazy and drugged-up as he was during his hardest rocking years - and he was very crazy and drugged-up - John was also a groundbreaker. He was easily the biggest star to ever come out of the closet while his light still shined brightly in the public eye, and it took a lot of guts to do it.

Somewhat surprisingly, then, “Elton’s Song,” the track that struck me with such force all those years ago, is on 1981’s “The Fox,” a so-so album released near the beginning of John’s less-adventurous drift into the middle of the commercial radio road.

This particular tune, though, with lyrics supplied by British rocker Tom Robinson (who caused his own homo-stir overseas with his caustically bitter anthem, “Glad to be Gay”) is as heartrending as anything that bears John’s name. The arrangement is a bit dated by now, with synthesizer washes supplied by producer James Newton Howard. But John and Robinson paint an acute portrait of a gay teenager’s unrequited crush on a classmate with such genuine, been-there compassion it can stop you in your tracks.

"Elton's Song"

Staring all alone
At your grace and style
Cut me to the bone
With your razor blade smile
I watched you playing pool
It's all around the school that I love you

Sitting in my room
I've got it bad
Crying for the moon
They think I'm mad
But I would give my life
For a single night beside you

                                                ***

I remember I was driving my dad’s car across the Tennessee River Bridge, heading into Huntsville, when I first heard “Elton’s Song” on a cassette I purchased that morning. Robinson’s lyrics are precisely over-romanticized to convey the do-or-die nature of adolescence, but I couldn’t have known that at the time. I was well aware of John and Robinson’s shared sexuality, though, so I knew what was going on in the song. It brought tears to my eyes.

Here, in the story of a protagonist I would have told you was nothing at all like me, I saw myself. I knew, just as every other teenager knows at one time or another, what it was like to have feelings for a person that I could never bring myself to voice out loud, to be trapped in my own self-doubt, or in the fear of being mocked for daring to speak my heart. And I realized how horrible it must be when kids have the possibility of physical and mental retribution thrown on top of all that because, unlike most of their peers, they’re falling for a person of the same sex.

In that instance, driving across the river, I realized that there’s no such thing as “straight” or “gay.” There’s just humanity, and we each land at some point across a wide spectrum of sexuality. Everyone has the same heart beating inside of them, and that’s all that truly matters.

Physical desire is part of our existence. Virtually everyone on earth experiences it sooner or later, in one form or another. But not everyone experiences love, and to keep a teenage girl from pursuing that possibility in public, without shame and without fear of being held up as “different,” is an ugly, vicious thing to do. Constance, your sense of individuality and self-belief is inspiring, and you don’t have to be gay or a teenager to feel it. Hopefully, the world will catch up with you one day soon, and this foolishness will finally be a thing of the past.

Paul Tatara