Ryan arrived with L—— in her car. He’d paid for her tuxedo rental, an odd deference to gender formality. Black tie, black cummerbund. The rental place had to do some alterations because they didn’t have tuxes cut for women, but the overall effect when she came into the converted gym was striking. Hair pulled back, a jawline that could cut diamond. She looked like a gender-bending James Bond.
But all eyes went to Ryan.
L—— had made his dress from scratch, and looking back, I can say with certainty that he was the only person at the junior prom in a bespoke outfit, but that wasn’t why everyone was looking at it.
The dress was a blue-and-white floral-print maxi dress; its delicate shoulder straps amplified his bony collarbone and thin neck, flowed over his narrow hips, and revealed his armpit hair when he strolled through the gym. The music hadn’t stopped and the gym’s air was surely cloying, but I remember an airless silence. Someone near me muttered something about “art fags,” and my heart double-timed its beat.
L—— and Ryan hit a spot on the dance floor, acting like they hadn’t noticed all eyes on them but obviously reveling in the attention, and they danced. Desperate for the distraction, I danced with E——, glad my lack of rhythm wasn’t at all the most remarkable thing happening at that moment. She gave a nervous laugh and rolled her eyes, but at Ryan or at me stepping on her foot I’ll never know.
When the song was over, L—— excused herself to hang out with the other seniors who were there and whom none of us juniors knew. Ryan came over to us, cut in, and returned to his rightful place as E——’s date. I was a fifth wheel, happily enough, and we formed a little dancing and standing-around circle with T—— and his date. In a group, the dynamics were vague enough that I could disappear into them. We weren’t two couples and a mysteriously dateless guy, just a shapeless gang of unpopular pals. But even in the group, I stayed aware, senses on high alert for every glance in our direction. I absorbed every muttered word about Ryan like it was a misplaced punch meant for me. The subtleties of gender and sexuality weren’t a factor in the inner lives of my peers, and to them, cross-dressing meant gay, and gay meant weak, and weakness was to be pounced on, mocked, and eradicated. At least, that’s what I feared and convinced myself was true.
Ryan was loving his role at the dance, dragging the lax bros and leaving the chaperones speechless. He wasn’t really a guy who loved school dances either, but in political performance art he’d found his purpose. Drag is a fun-house mirror that amplifies identities, bends them, and mocks the absurdity of the costumes those of us who aren’t in drag put on. It’s a form of honesty.
We all put on drag, especially in high school: as students, as lax bros or math geeks or skaters or stoners or—like I did—as totally invisible normal straight teenagers without a weird thought or a forbidden desire in our hearts. The right shoes, the right brand shirt, the right slang—it was all a show we performed for each other and for ourselves, and in putting on that simple maxi dress, Ryan was showing all of us how silly our own drag performances were. It wasn’t great drag; he’d made minimal effort at it—I don’t even think he was wearing heels or makeup—but it forced everyone looking at him to reveal themselves and the drag they put on to fit in.
One guy in our class, S——, didn’t like his junior prom being “mocked.” His commitment to the gravity of school dances was a new thing, but he’d always been the sort of desperate alpha male whose machismo was so inflated, it could be popped with the pin from the flowers on the white floral boutonniere on his shoulder strap. The problem with guys whose masculinity can be threatened with an outfit is that they’re not so great at self-control. Assuming everyone else is as fragile as they are, they think they can punch the world into becoming a safe space for their egos.
He made a move across the dance floor to tear Ryan’s dress from his shoulders or to tear Ryan’s head from his neck. It was unclear what the goal was, but two of his thick-necked friends restrained him. He was red-faced and huffing, like a cartoon bully, but he relented, although he hurled a few more “tranny,” “loser,” and “homos” our way before leaving us alone.
The last one stung. “Homos” was plural. How’d I get roped in to his insult? I was dressed in standard dude uniform. I’d gotten a haircut and had brought a girl to the dance. I didn’t even jump up and down when the DJ played Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” I’d done everything right!
I retreated deeper into the darkness of myself, put on the most “over-it” face I could, suggested prom was “so boring” and that we should just leave because it “sucked, like everything at this school.” I wasn’t about to let myself have fun or look like I was enjoying my best friend’s drag act at all.
So it struck me as doubly dangerous when a slow song started and Ryan asked me to dance.
“It’ll drive them crazy,” he said, with a look over his shoulder to the other side of the room where S—— and the other goons were still sneering at us. Ryan had gotten into their heads, upset their sense of what their community of bros was and who was allowed in it, and now he wanted to take his performance to the next level. He had no idea what he was putting me through.
“Shall we dance?” He offered me his arm in gentlemanly fashion (his drag was inconsistent; the dress does not the drag queen make). If drag targets our absurdities, it’s an imprecise missile. He’d hit a target he hadn’t aimed at: me.
The hypersensitivity of the closet meant that I could see and hear S—— and the rest of them across the gym at the same time as I saw T—— and his date shaking their heads and laughing, and E—— trying to keep a good-natured smile on her face while also fighting the urge to grab Ryan and reel him in so they could just enjoy the dance as boyfriend and girlfriend. I have no idea. My fixation was on the boys and my fragile place in their ecosystem and my survival. I truly believed that if I was outed, I would die.
I took Ryan’s arm anyway, because he was my friend and he was braver than me, and because part of me had a crush on him and because part of me was scared to say no and lose the only close friend I had. My entire identity was balanced on a razor’s edge, and as my hands hit his hips and his hit mine and we began to awkwardly middle-school-style slow dance with two hundred sets of eyes on us, I realized three things at the same time.
The first was that it was actually kinda fun to dance badly in a place where everyone else preferred not to dance at all, and to ignore the sneers and the threats and the eye rolls and just do something silly with my friend. The unspoken but violently enforced rules about who got to dance with whom were joyless rules, and if I had to choose between the fake safety they offered and the joyful danger of supporting my boundary-pushing friend, I’d choose my friend every time. In spite of how much it scared me, I’d dance with him because that’s what he needed me to do.
The second thing was that Ryan felt the exact same way. He didn’t know the terror I was feeling or the earthquakes he’d triggered in my heart, but with all eyes on us and all the hate burning our way, I got a message he probably didn’t mean to send: Screw them—it’s us against the world. At that moment, there was nothing I felt I could’ve told him that would’ve pushed him away. Every joke we had that no one else understood, every oddball game we’d invented and absurd daydream we’d shared were the stitchings of a friendship that I couldn’t possibly tear by simply being myself. It wasn’t a romance, but if it wasn’t love, then I don’t know what is.
Third, I have never wanted a song to end sooner than Extreme’s “More Than Words,” but I still tear up whenever I hear it.
I didn’t come out until almost a year later, but the process truly began that night, facing the straight-guy drag I put on every day and seeing it for the lie it was. I grew less and less afraid of the violence of my peers or the judgments of my community until the want of a real life overtook the fear of one. I came out in tandem with a boy I had a crush on, and suddenly, I had a boyfriend.
We were, as far as we knew, the first open same-sex couple in the school’s hundred-year history.
When my boyfriend, V——, and I considered going to prom, S—— was just as angry about it, just as threatening as he had been when Ryan wore that dress, but again some of his thick-necked friends told him to back off or told him it wasn’t worth it. Some, surprisingly to me, told him he was being a homophobe. In the days leading up to prom, some of them even told me they had my back if it came to violence. I had more allies than I’d ever imagined. And Ryan, who’d never been in a fight in his life, was ready to fight for me too.
The year before, he’d tried to queer prom because he found the whole tradition completely ridiculous. One year later, he was ready to take a fist to the face for my right to be queer at it.
It wasn’t easy being in the closet all those years, and it wasn’t always easy after I came out, but if I could go back in time to talk to myself at that junior prom, when my best friend took me away from his girlfriend to dance, I’d want to say, “Enjoy it.” Resisting the forces of closed-mindedness and hate is hard work and takes some risk, but it doesn’t have to be joyless. Sometimes it’s a march in the streets with banners and bandanas. Sometimes it wears a floral-printed maxi dress and sways to a mediocre pop song. Fear had gotten in the way of my joy for too long, and I decided never to let it do so again.
I ended up not going to senior prom, but not because of the threats. I wasn’t trying to prove a point or to queer the institution or to mock its dumb gender conventions. I was just trying to be my actual self, as fully as I could, and my actual self didn’t like school dances. I’d spent years trying to do what everyone else expected of me, and I was over it.
Instead, V—— and I put on tuxes and went to IHOP.
Ryan and his new girlfriend came with us before the dance—he wore a tux and she wore a dress—and then we split up. They went to prom, and we went out on our own and had a date as far from the school gym and the balloons and the DJ and the corsages and hormonal lax bros as we could get. I don’t know how that night went for Ryan, but it was a memorable one for me and my first boyfriend. Our two bow ties didn’t stay tied for long.
I didn’t dance with Ryan again until sixteen years later, when my husband and I got married and he was in the wedding party. I don’t recall the song, but all eyes were again on Ryan and me, and it turns out I didn’t mind dancing with him so much after all. As teenagers, we’d danced in defiance. Now we danced in celebration, and I’m grateful he gave me the chance to do both.
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
HOWARD BRYANT
The Dreadful Summer of 1991
WHEN YOU WANT TO BE a writer, especially for newspapers or magazines, you need experience. Being book smart is helpful, but there is no substitute for being in the field, covering events, learning the basics, actually talking to people. While most of my friends were having fun, sunning it up at the beach or backpacking across Europe, I spent my college summers looking for the internships I hoped would get me into the writing business.
My internship strategy was simple: Apply at the newspapers you respected the most, and if there were some you weren’t familiar with, apply to papers in cool cities that intrigued you. That way, you’d either be at a paper where you wanted to work or in a city where you wanted to live. So began the 1991 summer job search—and I got neither.
I applied to the Washington Post.
Rejected.
I applied to the San Francisco Examiner.
Rejected.
I applied to the Seattle Times.
Rejected.
I applied to my hometown paper, the Boston Globe.
Rejected.
I got one call from a newspaper that summer, the Lancaster Sunday News, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, sleepy farm town of the Amish and Mennonites and—did I mention?—lots of farmland. They called me in for a job interview, and it was a disaster. The editor, an old, balding white man with pinkish skin named Dave Hennigan, sat me in his office, looking at my young, black face with the high-top fade eighties style, and it clearly made an impression, because he asked me very few questions about my writing, my ambition, or my interests, but many—so many—questions about what it was like being black.
“How did your subjects react to you being black?”
“Do you think you could be effective not being in an ‘urban’ environment?”
“Have you ever not gotten a story due to white racism?”
I had interned before—at the Philadelphia City Paper, at the Quincy Patriot Ledger outside Boston, at Philadelphia Magazine, and at the Philadelphia Inquirer—and I had been the editor of my college paper at Temple University, and no one had ever asked me, essentially, whether being African American prevented me from doing my job. It felt like the kind of question someone would ask if they were looking for a reason not to hire you. Instead of saying what was in my head (What kind of stupid question is that?), I said the same thing, only nicer, more diplomatically.
“Sir, I’m here to do a job. And when you are sent out to get a story, you come back with a story. I don’t think I would be much good to you or to myself if you sent me out for stories and I came back with excuses.”
Dave Hennigan clasped his hands together, shook my hand and said thank you, and the bizarre interview was over. I went across the street to a restaurant, the Lancaster Dispensing Company, had lunch, and got ready to make the drive back to Philadelphia with one thought in mind: Well, that was a disaster.
Remarkably, I got the job.
Lancaster had three newspapers—the New Era, the Intelligencer-Journal, and my new paper, the Sunday News—all housed in one building. Of the three newspapers combined, there was one other African American reporter in the building, whom I never got to meet. The other black people were janitors or maintenance people. That was no big deal. I’d grown up in virtually all-white Boston and Plymouth, Massachusetts. I was used to being the only black person around.
But here, no one spoke to me. Nobody even looked at me. The editors gave me no assignments. Each day, I sat down and read the newspaper, ignored. When I would make eye contact with people in the hallway, they would look down. I wanted to get out in the field, write stories, talk to people, and learn how to be a reporter. People in the building treated me as if I were made out of Kryptonite. This went on for weeks.
I wanted out. Maybe the interview with Dave Hennigan wasn’t so bizarre. Maybe he was trying to telegraph to me not to come here. If this was what being an intern was, what could the real world be like? I thought back to high school, where my guidance counselor in Plymouth told me that if I wanted to be successful as a black person, I had to leave Massachusetts because white companies wouldn’t give you an opportunity to succeed. Even if they hired you, promotions would go to everyone but you. If you wanted to be successful, he said, you had to move to a place that was willing to give you a chance, and then once you proved yourself, Boston companies would not only recruit you, but be proud of you because you were from Boston. Being in Lancaster felt like the dead end my guidance counselor had described.
So, where would the hope come from? How could I survive this summer? What if this was what the white professional world was really like? Growing up around whites, I had already seen their underside, when your friends would try to explain their cultural dislikes of certain black people by saying, “I don’t mind black people, but I hate niggers.” They actually meant this as a compliment, that you weren’t one of them—and I was supposed to be grateful they didn’t see me as one of them. Whites would always remind you that you were the different one, like the time my friends and I went to go play hoc
key and one of the dads asked me if I was the puck. Get it? A hockey puck is black. I’m black. Hilarious.
William Raspberry was a columnist for the Washington Post at the time. My favorite columnist at my favorite newspaper. I noticed an article in the paper that said he had recently been in Lancaster and spoken at Franklin and Marshall College. So, desperate, ready to quit and return home embarrassed, I called him, a man I had never met or spoken to in my life. The day I called, I got lucky. He answered his phone.
“Do you understand why they treat you like this?” he asked. “It isn’t really because you’re black. It’s because you’re a threat to them.”
“How can I be a threat? I’m just an intern. I’ll be gone before September.”
“Exactly. You’ll be gone. You’re a threat because you’re young and talented and have your whole life of possibilities ahead of you. Most of those people there are stuck. They aren’t going any farther than where they are right now. You’ll be gone, to go see the world and dig into life and do all the things they’ll never get to do.”
We spoke for a few more minutes, and William Raspberry told me two things I would never forget:
“You also said you wanted to be a reporter, yes? Then why are you sitting around and waiting for them to tell you what to do? A reporter finds stories. Go to work. Dig into life. Learn about people. Don’t just see the world, but feel it.”
And . . .
“Just like in life, there are good people in that newsroom. Find the people who take an interest in your success. Spend time with them. Learn from them. And the people who aren’t interested? Forget them. Only concentrate on the people who make you better, as a reporter and a person.”
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