10/26/2007
Two Princes: Gay Couple Elected Homecoming Royalty
Earlier this month, a gay couple, Brandon Raphael and his prince, Kiernan Gatewood, were elected "Princes" of Davis Senior High School's Homecoming in Davis, California. They rode the parade route in the back of a pick-up truck and were cheered on by the local comunity and their school.
The Sacramento Bee reports: "In the weeks since officials announced the homecoming court, there's been no public outcry -- not by campus leaders, not by students and not by the community. Students said they were encouraged that the election was not an issue for campus administrators. They said they were less surprised that a gay couple would win than they were that officials allowed it to happen."
Said Chandler Fox, co-president of the school's gay-straight alliance: "I think it's just such a good thing for our school. Just knowing that the other kids recognize them as a couple and would vote for a gay couple to be prince and prince of homecoming. ... I don't know, I just think it's awesome. I want people to know about it so maybe it can happen at another school."
Royal yes to diversity at Davis Senior High [sacramento bee]
(via queerty)
Posted 11:25 AM EST by Andy in California, Education, Gay Youth, Gay-Straight Alliances | Permalink
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my dears, this is so wonderful. Just thrilling. Evohe Pan!
Posted by: the queen | Oct 26, 2007 11:34:26 AM
What a great story, the next generation will no longer have any hangup's on same sex relationships. Our time is coming, hope to live long enough to see the smug religious freaks get their due.
Posted by: davefromtampa | Oct 26, 2007 11:36:55 AM
QUEEN: EXCUSE MY IGNORANCE, WHAT IS, 'EVOHE PAN'? IT SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING THAT YOU WOULD BUY AT A JEWISH DELICATESSEN.
Posted by: CLIFF | Oct 26, 2007 11:49:09 AM
I've driven through Davis, CA many times on my way from San Francisco to Tahoe or BurningMan. I wouldn't think Davis would be liberal enough for this to happen...and that is perhaps the best part of this story. Yayyyyyyy for Brandon and Kiernan!!!!!
Posted by: peterparker | Oct 26, 2007 11:58:35 AM
Woo hoo - Central Valley represent!
Davis is a particularly liberal outpost in that area due in large part to the presence there of UC Davis, which has a large lesbian student body. I mean, there are lots of lesbians who go to school there, not that their lesbian bodies are particularly large.
Posted by: GM | Oct 26, 2007 12:06:01 PM
They're so cute...although I'm scared that Milwaukee Pastor Trewhella will say it rained that dreadful day cuz God was crying.
Posted by: Davey | Oct 26, 2007 12:35:05 PM
Hurrah! : )
Posted by: Giovanni | Oct 26, 2007 12:39:31 PM
♥ This is a wonderful story!♥
Posted by: ~^~ | Oct 26, 2007 1:13:13 PM
Maybe next year they'll carry the title of co-Kings, instead of mere co-Princes. Nice step.
Posted by: Nita | Oct 26, 2007 1:37:54 PM
Even if Davis is a campus town the region is awash with immigrant Slavic Christian bigots who are much, much worse than our homegrown garden variety gay bashers. Their great granddaddies were the Czarist Black Hundreds who pillaged and murdered Jews for sport. Their granddads welcomed Hitler’s invasion of the USSR with open arms and volunteered as SS death camp guards. Now their descendent infest the Sacramento area and have mounted a campaign to intimidate GLBT high school students. Brandon and Kiernan have guts and I’m glad it went well for them.
Whether they wanted to make a political statement or not that’s just what they did. It’s another sign of the times. So is the explosive growth of GLSEN/GSA chapters which have proliferated to over 3500 high school campuses. So are the stories about 10 year olds confidently coming out in Australia, the new openness of gay youth in Stalinist Vietnam and across Eastern Europe, the ‘pink shirt’ movement in Canada, and the political combativeness of GLBT youth who stand up strong and proud against the bigoted candidates of the twin parties.
The emergent politicization of GLBT youth and their much more gay friendly generation mates is part of a profound global youth radicalization. It’s likely to have the same impact as the student/youth radicalization of the 60’s and 70’s that that defeated Democrat LBJ’s genocide in Vietnam and unceremoniously dumped him and Nixon into the garbage can of history.
Hillary Clinton’s in for a wild and bumpy ride when she gets elected. Poor, poor Hillary. She’ll be just in time for the next round - Iraq and Iran. No one deserves it more.
Posted by: Bill Perdue, RainbowRED | Oct 26, 2007 1:48:36 PM
My god... that is my high school dream come true. I hated both of the proms I attended and really wondered what it would have been like to go with someone I actually liked than to drag some gal pal with me.
I recall that in Atlanta, back in the 90's, there was a "prom" during the Pride festival. I didn't go (didn't have a date) but I have always wanted to have a real, happy experience at a function like that. I guess that I will just have to live vicariously through the "princes".
More power to them. Best wishes!
Posted by: Jonathon | Oct 26, 2007 1:58:40 PM
Awwwww....See what WE (human beings) are capable of? Sooo cute!!
Posted by: Shabaka | Oct 26, 2007 2:05:22 PM
Hillary again? One doesn't recall seeing compound nouns made from the word "Hater" before the Net turned into a kind of parallel universe. In any case, I’ve always thought it juvenile because it typically comes from the mouths of the young and ignorant and is a cheap and lazy ass substitute for contextual response [I TRY to package my name calling in facts rather than the other way around]. Criticize Britney, and you’re reduced to a “Britney Hater,” automatically guility of using any excuse to put her down unfairly. Criticize Reichen, and you’re a thoughtless, jealous “Reichen Hater.”
Therefore, it pains me to come even remotely close to the one-man mental ward that is Chris Crocker but the ludicrous overreach of the post above by Bill Perdue using this lovely incident as another excuse to bash Hillary Clinton only proves my previous conclusion that he starts with hating her a priori and then staples, glues, Scotch-tapes, makes up whatever he can to try to justify it.
The joke, on him, of course, is that just as his response to others who disagree with him about whatever is simply to try to assassinate their character by calling them conservatives, equating them with Republicans, etc., virtually everything he writes about any Democrat but particularly Hillary could come word-for-word from a Republican propaganda playbook.
His tactics and delusions most remind me of Indiana Republican Congressman Dan Burton who invited reporters to his backyard to watch him, I kid you not, shoot a watermelon with a .38 handgun and examine the resulting holes to “prove” that White House advisor Vince Foster could not possibly have committed suicide in 1993 thus giving more “credence” to the whackos’ claim that the Clintons had Foster murdered. Their tireless efforts resulted in five different official investigations, one, at great taxpayer expense, by "special prosecutor" and Repug whore Kenneth Starr—all concluding suicide. Comrade Perdue has not been earning his pay from the Republicans or the Socialist Workers Party if he's left that out of his diatribes against Hillary.
She's far from perfect, and I'll vote in my state's primary for any Dem who I think at the time has the best chance of keeping the White House and our future out of Republican hands. But one of the worst things she's done is give Perdue a bad case of chronic gas.
Posted by: Leland Frances | Oct 26, 2007 2:32:50 PM
What a great story!
It's encouraging to see high school aged kids do this without much (any!) controversy.
In my demographic (and where I went to high school in Ohio) we have to actively engage our friends and family to do what comes naturally for these Davis students: accept people.
It's sad, but it can be done as I saw a few weeks ago when I went to a Let California Ring houseparty. By sharing love stories - like Brandon and Kiernan's - people are slowly starting to realize, again, what these Davis students inherently knew: love is love, so recognize it as such.
Posted by: Brian | Oct 26, 2007 2:54:09 PM
I love Leland and Bill, and I always will.
Iiiiiii will always love yooooou.
I love Whitney Houston and Dolly Parton too.
Posted by: Derrick from Philly | Oct 26, 2007 2:59:57 PM
No matter how bad it is now, there is hope for young people who don't have all these silly ideas and haterd about gay men and women and can accept people on who they are!
Congratulations Prince and Prince!!!
Posted by: Sebastian | Oct 26, 2007 3:03:54 PM
every once in a long while a story is so perfect that one can only say, yessss!!!
Posted by: nic | Oct 26, 2007 4:03:46 PM
Gosh, it’s hard to realize that the first gay to sue for the right to take another guy to his high school prom, Aaron Fricke, when he was 17, would now be 45.
The decision in the Rhode Island “Fricke v. Lynch” US District Court case which he won 27 years ago is still used by plaintiffs whenever schools try to fight any of their own students from doing the same—which some still do. It would probably be many more but most gay kids self-censor and don’t try.
We hope they're still around, and if they are, we're sure Aaron Fricke and Paul Guilbert, reading this story,
are somewhere smiling for as Aaron wrote about what he was thinking facing all the reporters who showed up at his prom:
“"I thought of all the people who would have enjoyed going to their proms with the date of their choice, but were denied that right; of all the people in the past who wanted to live respectably with the person they loved but could not; of all the men and women who had been hurt or killed because they were gay; and of the rich history of lesbians and homosexual men that had so long been ignored. Gradually we were triumphing over ignorance. One day we would be free."
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41REPFDNEYL._SS500_.jpg
Posted by: Leland Frances | Oct 26, 2007 4:52:52 PM
Proving that Hillary Rodham Clinton is an oil pirate sailing on a parallel course with George Bush.
Democratic Party hacks have to cultivate a blinkered vision of reality to survive. Otherwise they’d even look silly to themselves as they robotically genuflect before the altar of HRH HRC. It’s a gruesome caricature of religion whose only redeeming feature is that it provides an object lesson for honest GLBT activists.
These hacks rationalize voting for right wing judges, deny the truth about the war, proffer blind allegiance to Frank and Pelosi while they render ENDA harmless to help businesses that underpay us and invent lame excuses for obscenities like DOMA and DADT. They can’t bring themselves to ask why Pelosi says that “impeachment is off the table.”
Politics are not static. Deep divisions are appearing across the social landscape, causing groups to splinter and fracturing the consensus that’s held radicalism in check. A great polarization is occurring over the linked questions of war, union busting, pandering to bigots, cruelty to immigrants, and a falling standard of living. Through it all the Republicans and Democrats are marching in lockstep to the right. The GLBT movement is fissuring in an effort to find an independent voice and resume our fight for full equality.
At the core of all this is the oil piracy in Iraq. It’s the linchpin that connects, informs and polarizes every layer of American society, especially ours. We can’t ignore its impact here or on our brothers and sisters in the Mideast.
Imperial wars of economic aggression always move politics to the right, energize right-wingers and divert attention from domestic questions like workplace discrimination, hate crimes, etc. The war’s especially gut wrenching for us because the US military command routinely arms the same militia and security forces in Iraq. These jihadist thugs declare fatwa’s against us and then hunt down and butcher our brothers and sisters.
Every vote for war appropriations by every Republican and Democrat is a death warrant of GLBT folk.
According to the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq this US sponsored murder campaign is being used to undermine Iraqi society while US companies steal their oil. Nothing else accounts for the genocidal level of civilian murders.
So how does HRH HRC perform on this question? Is she for total and immediate withdrawal or will she lead us deeper into the quagmire?
Start by checking out her comments or visiting her websites and you’ll soon discover that she runs on Bill Clinton’s record. That includes the gay bashing DADT and the backstabbing treachery of DOMA, both enacted by bipartisan bigoted pluralities. And it includes the union busting NAFTA.
The go on to check out her record.
When the uproar over USMC General Peter Pace’s statement that "I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that (the U.S. military) should not condone immoral acts...” even the Democratic lapdogs of the HRC had jump in and demand an end to the spineless silence of Clinton and Obama who finally distanced themselves from his comment, although neither lifted a finger to demand his ouster as Chairman of the JCS.
How does the press portray Clintons two faced shifting support and pretense of opposition to the war?
David Koppel speaking on National Public Radios’ “All things Considered” program on June 11th this year said “Democrats are telling voters that if they are elected, all U.S. troops will be pulled out of Iraq. But as Sen. Hillary Clinton privately told a senor military adviser, she knows there will be some troops there for decades. It's an example of how in some cases, politics can force dishonesty.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10947954
Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, said in a NY Times Op-Ed that Clintons attempt to appear in control “gliding along with the help of good lighting, a hearty guffaw and a clever husband” has been replaced by panic as her consistent support for the war sheds light on her two faced strategy. When questioned about supporting Cheney’s wet dream, the latest “Sense of the Senate’ resolution which gives him and Bush an opening to attack Iran, Clinton said, “labeling them a terrorist organization gives us the authority to impose sanctions on their leadership. ...I consider that part of a very robust diplomatic effort.” The draft of that resolution, since camouflaged, was described as “tantamount to a declaration of war” by Senator Jim Webb of Virginia.
Dowd concludes that “Voters seem more concerned with Hillary’s political expediency — which the vote underscored — than with her ability to be manly.”
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E1D9173CF930A25753C1A9619C8B63
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803E4DC143CF933A25753C1A9619C8B63&n=Top/Opinion/Editorials%20and%20Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Columnists/Maureen%20Dowd
David Bromwich teaches literature at Yale and frequently contributes to the New Republic, the Nation, and the New York Review of Books. Writing in the Huffington Post on Sept, 27th this year he said “Hillary Clinton voted in favor of the Kyl-Lieberman amendment to press the army toward war with Iran. This was an important step, for her, and a vote as closely considered as her vote to authorize the bombing and occupation of Iraq.” Bromwich thinks that the bipartisan “Sense of the Senate” resolution is an alarming escalation of the preparation for extending the war because it states that, "that it should be the policy of the United States to stop INSIDE Iraq the violent activities and destabilizing influence of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, its foreign facilitators such as Lebanese Hezbollah, and its indigenous Iraqi proxies."
It goes on to declare that the “Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran (their army) is a "foreign terrorist organization”. Bromwich concludes that “… during the Vietnam War that a dead Vietnamese is a Viet Cong. It will assuage the conscience for U.S. bombers of Iran to know that a dead Iranian is a terrorist. The Senate, by this classification, has absolved the bombers in advance.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/hillary-clinton-votes-for_b_66174.html
Further documentation about the dishonesty of the Democratic candidates and their altar boys can be found at
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/64433/ concerning the division of Iraq
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/08/071008fa_fact_hersh Seymour Hersh’s alarming analysis of the expansion of the in the New Yorker
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,513572,00.html and the same in Der Spiegel
From the antiwar and trade union movements and press:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=41233
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7384
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/64433/
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/65381/
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=14357
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/article.php?id=9779
http://www.codepink4peace.org/article.php?id=1799
The hallmark of a lying politician and their shills, hacks, buzz meisters and flacks is that they never bother to try to prove their ideas. The substitute venom and lies for facts. But hey, what else can they do?
Posted by: Bill Perdue | Oct 27, 2007 6:56:35 AM
for the love of god bill, give it a rest. not everything that happens on earth is related to the clintons. to your way of thinking, if a butterfly flaps its wings in the amazon, a hurricane will happen in the carribean, but not before hill and bill put their evil spin on it. some of us might take you more seriously if you would not subsume yourself to the ridiculous.
Posted by: nic | Oct 28, 2007 4:23:26 AM