Thanks to my mom for sending along this clipping from the Columbia (MO) Daily Tribune, about my alma mater, Hickman High School. The full article can be found here, but in a nutshell, it’s a report about openly-gay Columbia Board of Education president Michelle Gadbois, and the historic occasion, at my former high school, of a Homecoming Queen candidate being escorted by her girlfriend to the homecoming football game, the first time a same-sex couple has been allowed to do so.
One of my first blog entries a few months ago was about my upcoming 30th high school reunion. I made a comment that on the reunion website, of all my classmates who posted their profiles, not one of them had identified themselves as gay or lesbian. Out of a graduating class of over 550, I was the only one? Right … (although since I first visited the reunion website, many more people have posted profiles and one does talk about her her female partner — you go, Cathy!). I can’t begin to untangle what this says about the times (thirty years ago and today), or whether people’s attitudes progress or not. Did my fellow gay and lesbian Class of 78 members purposefully stay away from the reunion, feeling perhaps that lingering pain of being an outsider? Or were they there, but still unwilling to “out” themselves, even after all these years? Or was it just a statistical anomaly?
But here we are anyway, these thirty years later, and Hickman, my hat’s off to you. You have done yourselves proud, and made me even prouder to be a Kewpie.
And another huzzah, to the state of Connecticut, which on this day became the third state in the Union to legalize gay marriage.
