It seems homophobic institutions are trying out a new strategy for dealing with the pressure to treat gay people like full human beings: If they can't legally discriminate, they'll punish everyone. First, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington decided to stop offering all spouses of employees health coverage, since some of those spouses could now be the same gender as their partners. And now, a Mississippi school board has decided to cancel the prom at Itawamba Agricultural High School, rather than allow 18-year-old senior Constance McMillen to attend with her girlfriend. One more and it'll be a trend!
The school board tried simply refusing to let McMillen attend the dance with a female date -- oh, and telling her, just as another Mississippi school told Ceara Sturgis at picture time last year, that she couldn't wear a tux -- but as with the Sturgis case, the ACLU got involved. And I think we all know how those people can be about demanding that institutions abide by the law and respect people's civil rights. So, rather than welcome lesbian students to their own prom, the board did the only logical thing: Called the whole thing off and suggested that a private company, which would be free to legally discriminate against gay teenagers, host an alternative dance. And they say conservatives can't think outside the box!
I snark, but this decision -- in addition to being patently cruel on its face -- has already had more serious repercussions for McMillen than just missing a dance. She told the Clarion-Ledger that when she first heard prom was canceled, her response was, "Oh, my God. That's really messed up because the message they are sending is that if they have to let gay people go to prom that they are not going to have one. A bunch of kids at school are really going to hate me for this, so in a way it's really retaliation." And unfortunately, she called it. Back at school today for the first time since it hit the news, she's been greeted with dirty looks and one fellow student sniping, "Thanks for ruining my senior year."
That's what makes this even worse than a dozen other outrageous stories about LGBT kids being banned from school dances: The members of the school board aren't just expressing their own prejudice, they're fomenting anger and resentment among her peers, shifting the focus from their thwarted attempt at illegal discrimination over to the one stubborn kid who's ruining it for everyone. Never mind that it's their own petulant, hateful decision that sabotaged the planned prom; they surely know they can count on a certain number of kids to blame McMillen for standing up for herself, and make her miserable for it. They know damn well they've created a recipe for harassment, potentially even for threats to the girl's safety. (And how much you want to bet they're doing it in the name of Jesus?)
The student who claims McMillen has ruined her whole senior year highlights just how large the idea of prom looms in the minds of many teenagers. A few years down the line, they might think themselves silly for putting so much emphasis on one dance, but then, look at how many stories about students being barred from proms -- because of their sexuality, their race, their choice of clothing -- make national news every spring; it's a big deal to adults, too apparently. Something about seeing the culture wars in microcosm, set against a backdrop of heightened adolescent emotion, is fascinating -- yet at the same time, easy to forget five minutes after you read it, because come on, it's just a school dance. But this time, it's not only about one or two kids being left out -- bad enough, every time it happens -- but about a school board defending its right to discriminate so fiercely it will deny a rite of passage to all the graduating students, and blame it on the one who stood up for her own civil rights and dignity. It's about an institution doing an end run around the law to preserve its own bigotry, just as the Archdiocese of Washington has done. And the scary thing is, it really could become a trend.
An 18-year-old Mississippi lesbian student says she got some unfriendly looks from classmates when she returned to school after officials canceled the senior prom because of her request to escort her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo.
Constance McMillen says she didn't want to go back, but her father told her she needed to face her classmates and school officials in Fulton. McMillen says one student told her, "Thanks for ruining my senior year."
The Itawamba County school district announced Wednesday it wouldn't host the April 2 prom at McMillen's high school.
The decision came after the American Civil Liberties Union told officials a policy banning same-sex prom dates violated students' rights.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- A northern Mississippi school district will not be hosting a high school prom this spring after a lesbian student sought to attend with her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo.
The Itawamba County school district's board decided Wednesday to drop the prom because of what it called recent distractions but without specifically mentioning the girl's request, which was backed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The student, 18-year-old high school senior Constance McMillen, said the cancellation was retaliation for her efforts to bring her girlfriend, also a student, to the April 2 dance.
"A bunch of kids at school are really going to hate me for this, so in a way it's really retaliation," McMillen told The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson. Calls to McMillen by The Associated Press late Wednesday went unanswered.
School policy requires that senior prom dates be of the opposite sex. The ACLU of Mississippi had given the district until Wednesday to change that policy, arguing that banning same-sex prom dates violated McMillen's constitutional rights.
Instead, the school board met and issued a statement announcing it wouldn't host the event at Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Fulton, "due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events."
The statement didn't mention McMillen or the ACLU. When asked by The Associated Press if McMillen's demand led to the cancellation, school board attorney Michele Floyd said she could only reference the statement.
"It is our hope that private citizens will organize an event for the juniors and seniors," district officials said in the statement. "However, at this time, we feel that it is in the best interest of the Itawamba County School District, after taking into consideration the education, safety and well being of our students."
Kristy Bennett, legal director for the ACLU of Mississippi, said the district was trying to avoid the issue.
"But that doesn't take away their legal obligations to treat all the students fairly," Bennett said. "On Constance's behalf, this is unfair to her. All she's trying to do is assert her rights."
Itawamba County is a rural area of about 23,000 people in north Mississippi near the Alabama state line. It's near Pontotoc County, Miss., where more than a decade ago school officials were sued in federal court over their practice of student-led intercom prayer and Bible classes.
Anna Watson, a 17-year-old junior at the high school, was looking forward to the prom, especially since the town's only hotspot is the bowling alley, she said.
"I am a little bummed out about it. I guess it's a decision that had to be made. Either way someone was going to get disappointed -- either Constance was or we were," Watson said. "I don't agree with homosexuality, but I can't change what another person thinks or does."
Other students are on McMillen's side.
McKenzie Chaney, 16, said she wasn't planning to attend the prom, but "it's kind of ridiculous that they can't let her wear the tuxedo and it all be over with."
A Feb. 5 memo to students laid out the criteria for bringing a date to the prom, and one requirement was that the person must be of the opposite sex.
The ACLU said McMillen approached school officials shortly before the memo went out because she knew same-sex dates had been banned in the past. The ACLU said district officials told McMillen she and her girlfriend wouldn't be allowed to arrive together, that she would not be allowed to wear a tuxedo, and that she and her girlfriend might be asked to leave if their presence made any other students "uncomfortable."
McMillen said she feared she would be thrown out of the prom because "we do live in the Bible Belt."
Everyone who's ever fretted about how to talk to a child about gay marriage -- as though the basic concept is somehow infinitely more difficult to understand than straight marriage -- should be required to watch this video, in which little dude Calen processes the realization that his uncles are "husband and husband." In under a minute, Calen goes from, "What? Huh?" to "Ohhhhh" to "OK, bored with this now." I don't even want to spoil it by quoting him directly (if you can't watch or hear it, there's a transcript at AMERICAblog), so I'll just say it is compelling evidence that kids' fragile little minds can handle the concept just fine -- and watching them get it might just be the cutest thing you've ever seen.
Update: The YouTube video has been made private. It's unclear why -- although it occurs to us that Calen's uncles might be a bit spooked by their sudden viral fame.
Looking in the mirror used to make Yiliam Gonzalez sick to her stomach.
"I would see myself, and my body didn't match who I was," said the 28-year-old wedding pianist, who went by William before receiving a sex change under Cuba's universal health care system.
Gonzalez is living proof of a small but remarkable transformation for the rugged revolution of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and a band of ever-macho, bearded rebels, who long punished gays and transsexuals -- but now are paying for sex changes.
Standing six feet (183 centimeters) tall, with shoulder-length blonde hair, heavy makeup and an ID card still bearing a man's name, Gonzalez underwent the procedure in 2008. She was one of eight Cubans to do so through a program begun in 1988 -- then suspended for two decades, after many complained the communist government had better ways to spend its scarce resources.
The operations have begun anew under President Raul Castro's daughter Mariela, Cuba's top gay-rights activist, and 22 more transsexuals are waiting to have it performed.
Mariela Castro says the government is moving cautiously, doing only a few per year.
"There has been a lot of resistance because homophobia remains strong in our culture," she said at a recent conference on sexuality.
In the 1960s, Cuba was ferociously anti-gay, firing homosexuals from state jobs, imprisoning them or sending them to work camps. Many fled into exile. Transsexuals, though not gay, were considered the same.
While gay jokes remain as common as shots of strong espresso in Cuba, government media campaigns now discourage homophobia. Hundreds of gay Cubans marched down Havana's spiffy "La Rampa" boulevard last spring, just a year after authorities had forbidden a gay-pride parade.
"I'd like to think that discrimination against homosexuals is a problem that is being overcome," former President Fidel Castro said during a series of interviews with French journalist Ignacio Ramonet between 2003 and 2005. "Old prejudices and narrow-mindedness will increasingly be things of the past."
Mariela Castro has seen to it that the state formally recognizes transsexuals. A state-trained kindergarten teacher with a degree in sexuality, she runs the National Sexual Education Center. It spent years lobbying communist officials, who finally agreed to lift bans on sex changes in 2008 -- though the resolution was never made public to avoid unwanted attention.
"These processes of negotiation are sometimes done very quietly," Mariela Castro said, "so as not to stir up ghosts."
She now says that financial concerns in the past were simply used to hide prejudices.
That's not unusual, said Denise Leclair, executive director of the Washington-based International Foundation for Gender Education.
"In many countries people complain bitterly. It's primarily driven by religious beliefs," Leclair said.
Religious objections weren't a problem in Cuba, which was officially atheist for decades. Instead, many Cubans claimed their country was too poor to pay for the procedure, writing letters to the editor in the Communist Party newspaper Granma after the first successful Cuban surgery was announced in 1988.
Leclair said a male-to-female change can cost $10,000 to $25,000 in the U.S., or up to four times higher than that, depending on all the procedures performed. About a dozen American doctors do between 1,000 and 2,000 such operations a year, she said.
Canada, Britain, France and Brazil offer government-financed sex changes, among other countries.
San Francisco began paying for sex changes for city and county employees in 2001, and Fort Worth, Texas, is considered following suit. Some large employers, including IBM and the University of California, negotiated contracts with their private insurers to cover the procedure known medically as "sexual reassignment surgery," and other insurance companies have begun covering at least part of the treatments.
Still, Leclair said most of the largest U.S. insurers don't cover the surgery.
Cuba won't say how much its sex change costs, but doctors earn state salaries worth an average of about $20 per month.
Despite a global recession that has hit Cuba especially hard, prompting Raul Castro to announce unspecified cuts in health-care spending, his daughter says the state can't afford not to perform the surgeries.
Gonzalez said opponents "don't know what a person who is transsexual suffers. It's a prison you can't get out of."
Gonzalez knew she was different almost from birth. By 4, she was already so partial to girl's clothing and toys that her parents put her in therapy. The government formally designated her transsexual in 2000. Six years later, Mariela Castro won approval to restart the procedures, and Gonzalez was among the first recipients.
Gonzalez refused to say the exact date of the operation or how she was chosen.
Two specialists from Belgium performed it over eight hours with a team of Cuban doctors.
Leclair said 40 percent of transsexuals become suicidal. But Gonzalez says her boyfriend of seven years kept her from getting depressed.
"He always saw the woman in me and accepted me how I was," she said, "but we couldn't have sex in a complete way until now."
Gonzalez can't get married, however, as she is still waiting for permission to change the name on her government ID card. Until then, she also cannot work in another wedding venue, though she would like to, or go back to school because her name no longer fits the woman she has become.
It's a problem that Cuban Olivia Lam knows all too well. She was born Alfonso Manuel but has been waiting for sex-change surgery for two years.
While her name has not been changed, authorities allowed her to take a new picture for her ID card -- one where she is dressed as a woman.
"The picture is me, even if the name is not," said Lam, a gregarious 43-year-old who waves her arms when she talks, making her ever-present hoop earrings dance on her earlobes.
Both women say they think the delay in getting ID cards is because of the slow Cuban bureaucracy and not any kind of government resistance.
Lam, who works as a hairdresser out of her two-room apartment, first began cross-dressing at 21. Though she has been formally classified as transsexual since 2008, she has no way of knowing when -- or if -- approval for sex-change surgery will come.
And though the government now accepts her, Lam acknowledged that getting her own family to has not been easy.
"I don't think any parent wants their son to be different," she said, "but they understand that you're not like this because you want to be."
As a California state senator, Roy Ashburn has been remarkably consistent on at least one issue: Every single time he's voted on a gay-rights measure, he's voted "no."
We'll see whether that changes now that Ashburn has admitted that he is, in fact, gay. Ashburn, whose sexuality came to light when he was arrested for driving drunk after allegedly leaving a gay bar, says he was just doing what his constituents wanted.
Of course, he's hardly the first anti-gay political figure to lead a hypocritical private life. Some, like Ashburn, have been compelled to make public admissions. Others have denied it, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, sometimes even to their graves. What follows is Salon's slide-show look at some of the most famous anti-gay hypocrites of recent years.
During his time in California's Senate, Roy Ashburn voted against every single gay rights measure that came up. That made the story of his arrest two weeks ago -- he was pulled over for drunk driving after leaving a gay bar, and he had another man in the car with him -- more than a little interesting.
On Monday, Ashburn admitted to what everyone had pretty much figured out now.
"I'm gay," he said in a radio interview. "Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long." The Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert blog reports that Ashburn explained that he voted the way he did on gay rights because he felt that's what the voters of his district wanted.
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