This is a post about two groups of fuckers.
The first group of fuckers are the parents, students, and school administrators of the Itawamba Agricultural High School. As you may remember, IAHS is where a lesbian high school senior, Constance McMillen, was told that she couldn’t bring a female date to the prom … and when she persisted, the high school actually canceled the prom rather than run the risk of a couple of lesbians being happy for an evening. With the aid of the ACLU she brought suit, and (of course) the judge ruled that the school had violated Constance’s civil rights.
The prom was back on! Yay! Constance was told that the prom would be held at a country club in Fulton, Miss., but when she arrived, she discovered that she’d been sent to a ‘fake prom’ attended by only 5 other students. In a nice bit of homophobia/disabled-phobia crossover, two of those five were learning disabled.
Constance was pretty cool about the whole thing, (as I imagine you would have to be, growing up in a place like that) saying about the disabled kids, “They had the time of their lives. That’s the one good thing that come out of this, [these kids] didn’t have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom].”
Meanwhile, of course, the rest of the parents and students had their own, ‘secret’ prom at a location outside the county, where they could safely exclude undesirables like gay and disabled people while engaging in pretend-lesbianism for the benefit of any straight boys who might be watching.
Okay, so that’s the first group of fuckers. Cruel, vile, vicious people who decided to deliberately and hurtfully exclude their classmates. I hope they suffer. Specifically I hope they suffer by being stuck in Itawamba county Mississippi for the rest of their miserable, bigoted little lives, while Constance goes on to get the fuck out and have a rich, full life.
—–
Sadly, though, the second group of fuckers are the commenters over at Firedoglake, who, in a thread about the secret-prom-fakeout decided to Facebook-stalk and identify several seniors at IAHS who posted in defense of the secret prom. Not only identify, but in some cases post oblique threats like,
Congratulations, [begleg10], you have just rendered yourself unemployable in any decent place. Decent places have laws against discrimination history on the basis of sexual orientation. Your public history of homophobic bigotry makes you a discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen.
Other commenters posted bits of their personal information and talked about how they were sending nasty messages to their facebook profiles.
Okay. Look. Guys. I don’t like this any more than you do, but these are teenage girls who commented anonymously. I think it’s incumbent on everyone to respect that privacy. I don’t respect them personally, and I don’t have to. You don’t have to respect them in order to not invade their privacy and harass them online. Jesus. This shit isn’t that hard.
—–
Three final comments.
1) Of course, the first thing this reminds me of is that this was precisely what bigoted southern parents did when confronted with racially integrated proms. As recently as 1990, 10 counties in Georgia were holding private, segregated proms. Charleston, Mississippi’s first integrated prom was held in 2008, thanks to Morgan Freeman. I just can’t imagine holding on to hate that tightly for so long. Fuckers.
2 ) It’s interesting, isn’t it, that two girls kissing is perfectly acceptable as long as it’s clear that they’re both straight. It’s only is a situation where they might be kissing for their own pleasure that it becomes a problem. Because after all, male sexual titillation is the alpha and omega of meaning. Fuckers.
3) Finally, a continuing trend in discussions of this is folks from the area, or from the south in general, upset about negative stereotypes of the south that are repeated in discussions of this story. I think there’s something to that, sure … it’s not cool to assume that everyone from Alabama is an ignorant hick … on the other hand, there’s a certain irony in hearing this complaint from people who are defending the secret prom and institutional homophobia. Like, your entire town can’t act like bigoted assholes and then get upset when everyone calls them bigoted assholes. Fuckers.
And a one last comment, courtesy the divine Ms. Nina Simone:
Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people
Last year I moved (temporarily) to a small shithole of a town in deep East Texas.
Lufkin, Texas, population about 30,000.
The local high school there still has a segregated prom. There is the “official” school prom which is mostly attended by the black and Latino students, and then there is the all white prom at the local country club held the same night.
I was shocked when I first saw the photos in the paper last spring.
Stranger still that the locals didn’t see anything wrong with this practice.
Hatred and bigotry are alive and well.
So sad.
Discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen? Anon’s threat is decidedly optimistic, as it’s clear that its target lives in an area where discrimination is publicly rewarded.
Very good point about the girls kissing for male enjoyment…
People suck.
And beyond the horrible folks who planned this mess, nobody in the whole town felt moved to warn any of the seven kids or their families about the hoax? Even anonymously? What kind of neighbors, colleagues, classmates, friends, relatives, PEOPLE think that’s okay? Shudder.
Right.
I swear to god, these fuckers are lucky that Constance didn’t go Carrie-style telekinetic death machine on them.
—Myca
It is looking more and more like the first group of fuckers was less concerned with the lesbian issue and more concerned with the fact that Constance wanted to wear a tux.
http://www.bilerico.com/2010/04/a_prom_and_pretty_ugly_things.php
@Penny: Constance did know about the other prom everyone else went to.
And courtesy of Dan Savage, a reminder that this school didn’t start their fuckery with Constance: they also expelled a transgender student and eventually hounded his* family out of town.
*Note – the student was presenting as female at school but according to the article, prefers to use male pronouns at this time.
I’m in 2/3rds agreement with you, Myca, but I have to contest two of your final comments.
1) What, precisely, makes you think racial segregation has ended? I don’t see anybody brown in those photos of the “real” prom.
and
3) The entire town didn’t do this. The parents who paid for that private prom did it, along with raising their kids to be bigoted assholes. Please place credit where credit is due; I’m very, very sick of people declaring racism to be a Southern thing, or even somehow worse in the South.
I’ll stop here, at the risk of derailing; this is about homophobia, not racism. Though granted, hate is hate.
1. Since I first heard of the quaint USian ritual of the prom, the idea has bothered me in terms of both its gender-policing sexism and its heterosexism. The more I hear, the more glad I am that I never had to go through that.
2. I’ve been observing this faux-lesbian thing in straight culture since I moved to the USA (to the south, in fact – I’m in GA). I’ve never seen it in the UK, though this may be because I’ve spent way way more time on queer and alt scenes there rather than the mainstream straight scene.
My theory (and of course my amateur anthropology is biased by my own queer perspective) is that its main purpose is to allow straight American men to participate in dance on a purely voyeuristic level rather than having to act as equal partners in the spectacle alongside straight women who dance. (I’ve met many who refuse to dance). It lets them build the arbitrary wall between ‘male’ and ‘female’ that bit higher, and also allows them to marginalise female heterosexuality in the same way that all sexualities other than male heterosexuality are already marginalised.
Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people
I love that statement proceeding your comments. I love so much it will almost certainly appear on my blog in the very near future.
followed one of the above links and then I found this link, which proves not only is it not coincidental, but that constance was cross dressing months before in support of her friend who got bullied out of the school by admin, and leads me to believe that was at least part of why she wanted to wear a tux to prom, to protest Juin’s treatment.
http://www.wtva.com/news/local/story/School-Dress-Debate/ykCINbiIaUC-t4jOCXDpng.cspx
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Oh no, I’m not saying that segregation has ended, certainly. In fact, I referenced that Charleston’s first integrated prom was only 2 years ago, and I’m sure that there are plenty of segregated private proms out there.
Well, this was about homophobia, not racism, but yeah. In general I would agree with you … but when out of the entire school, only 7 students didn’t go to the gay-hating prom, I feel like that’s pretty total.
What’s more, this is the result of continued bigoted action by not just the parents, but the school administration and county school board. There have been a lot of places along the line where someone could have put the breaks on this, and nobody did.
—Myca
I was extremely unhappy about the stalking – cache the pages, by all means, but stalking and threats is not cool.
Not allowing the bigots to pretend it didn’t happen by preserving the evidence is not stalking, but going to their individual FB pages to leave hateful messages is unworthy. On the other hand, the horrible FB page the bigots put up being flooded with gay positive messages? Totally cool.
It disturbs me to see the people on the side of justice and progress stoop to the hateful and bullying tactics of the bigots. All that’s needed is to preserve the evidence and talk about it so that it is not forgotten or erased. The punishment is bringing their hateful bigotry to the public eye – nothing more is needed, and certainly not threats.
It goes without saying that I think these assholes are lower than low, and I hope their decision comes back to haunt them in many and varied ways. The world has a way of balancing things out without needing help from misguided people resorting to hate tactics in return.
The proper target for ire here is the parents who threw the rogue prom. Not the kids — half of ’em will go off to college, get away from their parents, and realize that they were jerks in high school, just like half of everyone does. 17-year-olds don’t have the experience to know how wrong they were.
But 40-year-olds do, and they willingly chose to give their children the message that discrimination is good. They’re the ones I despise in all this; they’re the proper targets. After all, they failed their own children as surely as they failed Candace, because given a chance to teach their children to do the right thing, they turned around and taught the opposite lesson.
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I’m not sure, Thene, but I suspect you may be misunderstanding the issue with the “faux lesbian” reference.
We’re not talking about girls dancing together while the boys watch. We’re talking about “straight” girls who are putting their lips, tongues, and other body parts together in a clearly sexualized fashion… at the “gay hating” prom.
Dancing isn’t the issue. It’s the hypocrisy of expressed and pro-active homophobia – followed by pseudo-lesbian kissing, tonguing, and grinding from “straight” girls at the homophobic event. Because “girls getting it on with each other is HAAWWWTT!!” It doesn’t make them “really gay”, of course. Just “sexy”.
And, unfortunately, the whole “I’m not a lesbian, I just like making out with other girls” scene is a growing (and even popularized, thanks a lot Miss Perry) issue in a number of areas.
this story has been a reminder the past few weeks of the simmering racism as well as the homophobia in the US today. it is not limited to the south, of course. the tea party folk are of course reminders every night in the news. and this week Newt Gingrich, Palin, and others are reveling in this fuckery in their Southern Racist Leadership Conference convention.
as to the violent attitude of many FDL folk… this is why many of us rarely bother with that sight anymore.
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Nicely done.
Uh, yeah, I think that 18-year-old “children” are old enough to know right from wrong. And old enough to learn how to use their Facebook privacy settings. The ones who aren’t yet legal adults still are old enough to know better.
But I guess I’m not eligible to comment here, because I don’t believe in the inherent worth or dignity of people who want to see some of my closest friends dead. Screw that “Kumbaya” horseshit.
Sure, which is why I called them fuckers. I don’t think that what her classmates did was more acceptable than what their parents did.
That having been said, stalking someone who posts a comment anonymously, posting their personal information and photos and threatening them isn’t cool, no matter who they are.
Yeah, a lot of people don’t care about the basic humanity of their ideological opponents. I like to think I’m better than that.
—Myca
LOL. And that’s why the left has absolutely no political power in the U.S. anymore. But enjoy wringing your hands over “using the Master’s tools.” At least you’ll still be pure.