Rebel’s prom queen title a crowning achievement

My love of high school prom season is the most basic, uncool thing about me.

School dances are usually minefields of rejection and antiquated gender politics, but there’s an honest reason that orchid corsages, white limousines and tiaras still give me “the feels.”

Twenty years ago, my classmates voted me their prom queen — wave with the wrist right, left, nod the head in acknowledgment — making me the first male student to win the title in my San Francisco high school.

You may be wondering why I was nominated for prom queen instead of, let’s say, a female student. You may also be questioning whether nominating a gay teen boy for the title was a prank meant to embarrass me. It wasn’t a prank: It was an act of rebellion.

At the turn of the millennium, the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts was a place where the social structures of regular high schools had little meaning. There were no sports teams, so there were no jocks. No jocks meant no cheerleaders. The clique pyramid dissolved further from there.

Some people were more socially sought after than others, but most of us realized our campus was essentially the Island of Misfit Toys from the RankinBass “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” Christmas special. Yes, we were artists, but like the toys too strange for Santa’s workshop, many of us were also too divergent from the norm to have thrived at non-arts high schools.

In an environment where going to protests was considered a social activity and the bohemianism depicted in the musical “Rent” was seen as aspirational, it made perfect sense that a gay boy could be our prom queen — emphasis on “queen.” Mainly, I think my class liked the idea that giving this emblem of teenage popularity and acceptance to a gay boy would be subversive, a glitter fist in the face of the homophobia that still permeated culture at the time. This was the era of California’s Knight Initiative same-sex marriage ban, when radio show host “Dr. Laura” Schlessinger called queer people “biological errors,” and the term “hate crime” emerged when discussing the murders of LGBTQ people.

It should also be noted that then, and even now, there were often stories in the news about how some school denied a same-sex couple entry to the prom (the hit musical “The Prom,” coming to Golden Gate Theatre this summer, tells one such story) or refused to let a transgender student wear formal wear appropriate to their identity. It wasn’t like I was throwing a brick during the Stonewall riots, but accepting my nomination for prom queen was baby activism I could fully embrace.

The night of the dance at the Palace Hotel, I didn’t take the term “queen” literally and go in drag, which I look terrible in. Instead, I wore a tuxedo with a satin spread collar shirt (sans tie) like every early-aughts queer celebrity from Alan Cumming to Rosie O’Donnell. When my name was announced as winner, I graciously accepted the tiara, struggled to determine who would lead the victory dance with the prom king, a cis straight male, and for the length of the dance basked in having tilted at the windmills of gender normativity.

While my reign as prom queen did not go on to change the course of the LGBTQ rights movement, I was heartened to learn that in 2005, another gay male student at my high school took home the tiara.

But that’s just San Francisco. This May, I was thrilled to read that nonbinary high school senior Cristian Hernandez was crowned their high school prom king in Indiana in full-glamour drag, after a high school in Missouri making Zachary Willmore its first male homecoming queen last November and Evan Bialosuknia being the first transgender homecoming queen at her high school in Florida in September.

Twenty years later, I can’t take credit for it, but maybe high school dances aren’t as basic as they used to be.

I was heartened to learn that in 2005, another gay male student at my high school took home the tiara.