When I arrived at the WUSA studios one very cold and snowy winter morning, I was greeted by a smiling and kind Hillary Howard. She was the type of person who instantly made you feel at ease and comfortable in an environment that was far from the everyday norm. And a TV studio like that one, for most people, was not normal. She introduced me to both on-air and off-air colleagues, the majority of whom were just as welcoming. One was a naysayer, but he was easy to ignore among the encouragement. It was exciting to witness the adrenaline and dynamics that went into the morning newscast, and by the end of the visit I knew this was something I wanted to do. I had been bitten by the bug, some would say. As she was dropping me off to exit the building, I built up the courage to ask Hillary if she was willing to mentor me. With pure honesty and kindness she told me that she wouldn’t be the best mentor but knew who would be, and she jotted down the contact information of a former colleague at the local Fox affiliate.
And she was right: John Henrehan was the best mentor a cub reporter could ask for. He taught me television journalism in a way that you could never learn in school. He introduced me to two local cable stations that had daily thirty-minute newscasts and told me to go volunteer, to live the news so I could learn the news. John taught me that the best way to master news writing wasn’t from reading books, or listening to my professors, or even from him—he told me that the only way to learn was to write the stories and keep writing them. My first story could take days to finish, he told me, but by my fortieth I should be able to pop out a news story in minutes—and I did. He reminded me that becoming a journalist requires hard work, patience, and humility.
At one of the stations he introduced me to, I learned quickly about the real-world vultures who try to tear you down. That’s not just something that stays in high school; it follows you all throughout life. At that particular station the news director harassed and bothered anyone he thought would get in the way of his success, and in his mind that was everyone. But at the other station, I was introduced into a journalistic family, the CTV76 family, who were welcoming and encouraging. I still hold all of them dear to my heart today. At CTV76, the team helped me improve my skills every single day I was with them. My success was their success.
But I still wanted something different from the daily grind.
As I graduated from local news in Maryland, I was hired as an entry-level journalist at CNN. I went from reporting on real news stories at my local cable station to printing out scripts for news directors and anchors who didn’t know my name—or care to learn it. I wasn’t just at the bottom of the ladder, I was the dirt beneath it, so I knew it was time to climb. I volunteered in the various news departments on my days off, hoping hard work would pay off. At CNN, I discovered that bullies and vultures exist even at the shiniest of networks (because of ageism, sexism, racism, or their own demons), but they had mentors within their doors too, similar to Mr. Henrehan, who went out of their way to help you.
Jealousy is rampant in all walks of life, especially in the field of journalism. Every step up you take, someone is grabbing at your feet from below to pull you back, and there are those above you who are trying to push you down and kick you off the ladder. What I learned is that you have to look for those hands that are reaching below to help you climb up and those underneath that are encouraging your flight—and often you are the one who needs to be vocal in asking for their assistance. You also need persistence and belief—especially when times get tough. There were many occasions when I wanted to give up and started to think that maybe that journalism teacher and the bullies along the way were right. What kept me on track was realizing that there comes a point when your dreams are no longer just yours; they also belong to those who encouraged you all along.
Following your passion is not an easy task. Little in life is a breeze. But it does feel damn good when you defeat the odds. The harder the challenge you overcome in life, the stronger you become as a person.
Despite the discouragement I met along the way, I went on to become that foreign correspondent I had dreamed of becoming. I covered both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. I sneaked into Myanmar while the military junta was hunting down journalists. I moved on to NBC News and covered the British royal wedding between Kate and Wills and then the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. I met many amazing people from all over the world and felt honored to have been used as a vessel to share such important stories of everyday people as well as dignitaries. I’m no Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer, but I accomplished what I wanted to, and it definitely had its ups and downs along the way.
Many friends with whom I shared my high school journalism class story throughout the years asked if I would confront my former teacher. My answer was always no. The older I grew and the more bullies I met, the more I realized that I wasn’t the problem, they were. Trying to stop someone from accomplishing their dreams or finding happiness in someone’s failures comes from darkness in the heart—whether that be a stain of jealousy, envy, or something else. That gloom eventually consumes the person that holds on to it. And despite their achievements, they never find contentment or happiness. This is not just something I think; it is something I’ve seen time and again. And when you are that helping hand for someone else’s dreams, there is no greater joy than watching their success—something the darker of hearts won’t ever come to know or feel.
But I did meet Mr. W again.
In the summer of 2015, I was invited by the US State Department to speak about my first young-adult novel, The Secret Sky. The book was based on the experiences I’d gained as a journalist in Afghanistan and was written in hopes that readers would understand the culture and situation of the complex country in a deeper way than they would from just a short news clip and report. I had posted the flier about the talk to my Facebook page and told friends and family in the area to attend if they could.
I arrived at the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, DC, on a hot and humid July day with my six-month-old son and mother-in-law. We waited in the building’s main lobby and watched as friends and former colleagues from around the world checked in to watch me speak. The excitement was building to share my experiences and the new book. A high school friend I hadn’t seen since she used to drive me to school in the mornings approached us. I was thrilled to see a face from my high school days.
As we were catching up, she dropped the bomb. “Guess who’s coming?” she asked.
“Who?” I responded.
“W,” she added excitedly, waiting for me to reciprocate her enthusiasm.
“Oh.” I gazed at her, trying to remember if through our sporadic Facebook messages over the years I had told her about his crushing words. I was more than sure I had. But maybe she had forgotten. In the end, she was one of the students he adored, and in return, she held him in high esteem. The thrill on her face began to fade when she saw the lack of it in mine.
When Mr. W walked through the building’s shiny glass doors, he approached me and said hello. I uncomfortably greeted him back.
After he signed in and received a visitor’s badge, the awkwardness continued. I had nothing I wanted to say to him, feeling caught off guard. So I just asked how he was doing as we were all escorted toward the elevators.
I really didn’t know how to fill the moments of uncomfortable silence, so I asked another mundane question. “How is Annandale High School?” I had always been proud to be a part of Annandale because of its mass diversity. When I attended, the walls of our school held students who came from 129 different countries and spoke seventy-four languages. As First Ladies, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama had both visited the school because of its great diversity.
Mr. W’s response felt like a slap to that beauty. “Filled with Hispanics and no more white people,” he said, unashamed. My former high school friend whacked his arm, signaling him to quiet down so others wouldn’t hear his remark.
Shocked and disgusted, I didn’t kn
ow what to do or say. Around me were friends and colleagues from all over the world, and others whom I didn’t know. I knew I didn’t want to cause a scene. I decided the best thing to do was walk away from this poisonous person. I had already said goodbye to his toxicity long before, and I didn’t want to be around it for one second more. Too much good had come from the kind people I had met along the way, and leaving behind the bad had led me to a fairly content life.
So as I spoke at the podium in the library of that government building, I focused on the faces in the room I had met along the way as my dreams were coming true—the embassy officials, the friends, and the colleagues I had met through the years. They were black, white, and everything in between. All of them had defeated their own bullies and demons to get to where they were.
Many people were upset with me for not confronting Mr. W that day. For not reminding him of what he had said to me so many years earlier. But I acted the way I was raised to. I try my best to show kindness and courtesy even to those I may feel do not always deserve it. But I do regret one thing about that last meeting with Mr. W: it is that I didn’t confront him about his words in the here and now. I let keeping civil hold me back from telling him that his words were wrong and uncalled for. As a journalist I had always been taught to be objective and listen, including to those you don’t necessarily agree with. But I have learned in the last year, more than ever before, that sometimes we have to be loud.
In life, we will always feel like we don’t belong. Even those who look comfortable in life have their challenges and insecurities. Those bullies, I’ve learned, are the least confident of all. They’re just paper tigers. We will always find people who criticize us. Some of that will be constructive, so I listen. Other times it will be hurtful. I’ve learned to not take it personally, because it is a reflection of those people’s own misgivings. But even with age and experience, it can be difficult.
I had a young relative tell me she had Mr. W as her teacher at AHS in recent years. One day, after he had bragged to his class about having had a student who went on to work at CNN and NBC News, she approached him and told him she knew what he had said to me all those years ago. His response to her was “Well, then, I guess she has me to thank for her motivation to succeed.” But I am not grateful to him, nor am I ungrateful. All I know is that any success I may have had and, ideally, will continue to have is credited to those who encouraged and helped me: my parents, Professor Jenkins, Professor Riley, Hillary Howard, John Henrehan, my CTV76 family, and all those people I worked with who held their hand out for me along the way.
There will always be the naysayers and the roadblocks. Sometimes the person who was putting me down the most was myself. But no matter how challenging life became, I had to learn to believe in myself—and sometimes that meant listening to the encouraging words around me. In the end, your thoughts are all that really matter.
I once asked Helen Thomas, the renowned journalist and one of my journalistic heroes, her secret for accomplishing one’s dreams, and her answer was plain and simple: “This will sound cliché, but never give up.” She was right.
DAVID LEVITHAN LIBBA BRAY ANGIE THOMAS ALLY CONDIE MARIE LU JEFF ZENTNER NICOLA YOON KATE HART GAYLE FORMAN CHRISTINA DIAZ GONZALEZ ATIA ABAWI ALEX LONDON HOWARD BRYANT ALLY CARTER ROMINA GARBER RENÉE AHDIEH AISHA SAEED JENNY TORRES SANCHEZ NIC STONE JULIE MURPHY I. W. GREGORIO JAMES DASHNER JASON REYNOLDS BRENDAN KIELY
ALEX LONDON
Different Dances
I TOOK MY BEST FRIEND’S girlfriend to junior prom, so you could call this a prom story if you wanted. Although there isn’t much romance, this is a kind of love story. There isn’t any kissing, but there is some violence. Also: drag.
The story starts during a class I wasn’t in with a girl I didn’t know and her boyfriend whom I didn’t know either. The class was a US history elective at the all-girls prep school across the street from the all-boys prep school where I went. Juniors and seniors could take classes at either school, so our experience became coeducational toward the end, after years of single-sex isolation during which gender roles were strictly established and rigidly enforced.
The boys wore ties and played sports. The girls wore skirts and took home ec. They also played sports, but the boys did not also get to take home ec, which struck me as a kind of injustice. My terrible lacrosse playing has not come in handy in adult life, and I still don’t know how to sew on a button. At my school, anything too far from preppy made you a “freak,” anything even slightly feminine made you a “fag,” and anything at all creative made you an “art fag.” Most boys never strayed from the gender norms, even in the classes they took.
My best friend, Ryan, was not most boys.
The US history elective at the all-girls prep school was called the Devil in the Shape of a Woman and covered the history of witchcraft in America from a feminist perspective. There were only two boys in that class and one of them was Ryan. He was the only junior.
Sitting in class one day as they discussed accusations of witchcraft as the violent policing of coercive gender constructs, a senior named L—— mentioned her plan to go to prom in a tuxedo, while her boyfriend would wear a dress, because “screw meaningless gender signifiers and screw the conservative school cultures that enforce them. Deconstruct the gender binary!”
Ryan overheard the plan and told L—— that it was pretty rad or cool or totally cowabunga, dude, or however we talked back then. The slang is lost to history; the sentiment is not. Ryan loved anything that would stick it to The Man or, as he now describes it, “undermine the social rigidity of our school’s oppressive gendered culture.”
At the time he probably just said, “Fuck yeah!”
That could’ve been the end of the story and I never would have known or gotten involved or nearly had a panic attack on the dance floor at junior prom had L——’s boyfriend not chickened out. He didn’t wear a dress. He didn’t even wear an interesting tuxedo. He wore a black rented tux like almost everyone else at the dance (except for some of the lacrosse players, who went with the tuxedo jacket and pastel shorts look). L—— wore a dress, and their prom unfolded like every other prom at our school ever had since its founding in 1897. This, by the way, was all happening during the school’s centennial year, 1997.
I’m not sure the hundred-year anniversary of institutional gender policing at prep school passed through Ryan’s mind, but he definitely felt like L——’s plan shouldn’t be abandoned because her boyfriend was too insecure. He offered to take her to junior prom and promised her he would wear the dress this time and she could wear the tux and they could still say screw you to the meaningless gender signifiers and screw you to the conservative school cultures that enforced them, just for a slightly younger crowd.
She said rad or cool or totally cowabunga, dude, or whatever, and the plan was set in motion.
The only problem was that Ryan had just started dating E—— and she wanted to go to junior prom with her boyfriend, not an unreasonable request if you liked the ritual of the school dance with its formal attire and corsages and clusters of hormonal teenagers gawking at each other across the dance floor.
I did not.
I was not a school dance sort of guy. I was too self-conscious to like dancing in public, and I definitely did not want anything to do with school-sponsored events filled with most of my classmates. Some of my classmates might have been good guys—some of them turned out to be—but at the time, all of them terrified me. I had only two close friends, Ryan and a metalhead hockey player, T——, and in a way they both terrified me too.
I didn’t want anyone to know me too well, not the real me anyway. None of them knew I was gay—no one did—and I worked very hard to keep it that way. I tried not to do anything that crossed the unwritten Rules for Boys that would’ve given me away. Even though I liked the theater kids, I didn’t dare get too close to them, in case that made my queerness more noticeable. I avoi
ded playing sports, because exposing how bad I was at them would make my queerness more noticeable. And when it came to girls, I veered madly from wanting to be seen with all sorts of girls—as cover—to keeping my distance in case it became too obvious to anyone paying attention that I was not like the other guys who flirted with them. In short, I organized a lot of my life and mental energy on keeping something invisible invisible. I didn’t simply want to stay in the closet. I didn’t want anyone to even suspect there was a closet in the first place.
So when Ryan asked if I would take his new girlfriend, E——, to the prom in his place, my brain did some Cirque du Soleil–level contortions.
On the one hand, I thought, going to the dance with an inarguably hot girl would be an excellent smokescreen.
On the other hand, going with my best friend’s girlfriend would raise some eyebrows. Why didn’t I go with a girl of my own? Why’d Ryan let me take his girlfriend? How’d he know I wouldn’t make a move on her?
And then there was the question of why Ryan had assumed I didn’t have a date already myself. Of course he knew I didn’t, but how did he know I wouldn’t? Did he suspect something? And why’d he want to wear a dress so badly anyway? Was he mocking me? Was he coming out to me?
All these thoughts raced through my head in half a heartbeat. The calculus of the closet is as quick as it is complicated. It’s also totally self-centered. His wearing a dress to the dance had nothing to do with me.
And I genuinely liked E—— and didn’t want her to miss the dance.
“Sure,” I told Ryan. “I’ll take her.”
And the deal was done. She knew who her boyfriend was, and however weird she thought his junior prom drag plan was, she kept it to herself and agreed to go with me as her boyfriend’s proxy. I did the whole thing. I wore an old tuxedo I’d gotten at a thrift shop. (It was plaid; my terrible fashion sense, although not deliberate, was definitely helpful in throwing everyone off the trail. Gay guys were supposed to dress well, right? I knew all the stereotypes and feared living up to any of them.) I got E—— a corsage; she got me a boutonniere.
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