Genderqueer at Cotillion: Change comes even to River Oaks
This fall, when Facebook showed me an article published by my high school student newspaper, it hit me like a punch: “Coalition lobbies for LGBT+ acceptance in Cotillion.”
Memories rushed back. As a student at St. John’s, I had always looked forward to cotillion. It basically amounted to a fancy party, involving students from two other private schools. The event felt traditional (ours is said to date to 1944) but also the slightest bit feminist: Girls — who pay a $250 membership fee to an organization independent of the schools — ask boys to be their dates, not the other way around.
For me and my peers in the class of 2009, attending cotillion was practically a given, one of those things that everyone at our wealthy River Oaks school did. Sure, some girls later became debutantes — a different social ritual altogether — but it seemed that nearly all of us in high school went to cotillion, just as a majority of us in middle school inexplicably agreed to learn ballroom dance.
I realized, staring at the headline, how much we’d taken for granted. I felt the immediate guilt of not thinking about the viewpoints of those who didn’t identify as I did, as someone straight. I hadn’t considered what participating in cotillion meant. Or whom it might exclude. I also didn’t remember any of the 130 or so people in my class at St. John’s being openly gay at the time. We didn’t condemn homosexuality. We just didn’t talk about it.
Now I wanted to understand the consequences — and learn from the person who finally brought it up.
I met 16-year-old Lincoln Dow, whom the article said was agitating for the change, at Starbucks one day after school. His seriousness contrasted with his slight frame. His brown hair hit near his collar, as long as the dress code allows.
He explained how, at a freshman-year meeting about high school activities, cotillion was described as the reverse of a traditional dance. Nothing struck Dow as wrong about that until a friend, who identifies as genderqueer (meaning neither, both or a combination of male or female), brought it up.
Dow identifies as straight, but he saw the problem in assumming that a traditional dating structure was a man asking a woman. And he sympathized with his friend, who felt uncomfortable and hurt by the assumption that, for cotillion, girls need to ask boys. It’s excluding people, and it shouldn’t be, they said later, in an interview.
What about girls who want to ask girls? Boys who want to go with boys? Or people who don’t identify with traditional notions of gender in the first place?
The friend asked Dow, who had a reputation as a liberal activist, to talk to school administrators about changing the rules. In the spring, he met with the St. John’s high school dean and school counselor. Both seemed on his side, he said, but gave the impression they could not help: The event was not schoolsponsored. The dean declined to comment for this story for that same reason.
Dow sprung to action this fall, when people began inviting dates. He used an app to form a group-chat with about 75 people, including some at a second school. Over texts, he said they split by grade to write letters to their respective cotillion chairs. A former PETA volunteer, Dow also made contingency plans. Two parents offered to fund a boycott event, he said. He contacted the ACLU.
The school newspaper published the story in September about his efforts. It left the issue in limbo yet drew ample attention. The first mother I called said the sophomore-level leaders were willing to change the policy, which had detailed that women bring a “male escort” — but no one had asked them. She and the other sophomore organizers first read about the topic in the paper.
The article, which assumed a resistance to change, was later taken down from the publication’s website. A follow-up ran a month later with a formal retraction of the original story. It quoted the junior cotillion policy as: “We welcome all girls who are members and their escorts, regardless of gender.” Males are still not allowed to join and ask dates, the sophomore parent told me.
The back-and-forth made me wonder how my classmates who now don’t identify as heterosexual had processed the whole thing. Had they felt excluded? Our conversations were ones I wished we’d had as students.
One friend said that St. John’s had done much to help him grow into himself — except in this one regard.
As a student, he noticed the school didn’t seize opportunities to state clearly its acceptance of the LGBT community. He said it hadn’t been a place where he, and a number of others, felt comfortable being openly gay.
“I felt every lack of inclusion,” he said.
The school’s relationship to what effectively served as a gay-straight alliance group, for example, was never clear. (The group went by a different name.)
But individual teachers and students made him feel welcome. He remembered a student who launched a campaign against using “gay” as a derogatory word; he remembered faculty members who put up “safe space” stickers. Those efforts mattered.
Another of our classmates, Will Brown, now 26, said that if he could live high school over, this time he’d stand up to students talking badly about people they suspected were gay. As a student, though, he didn’t feel he “had the ability to make waves.” He was afraid.
Brown was coming to terms with the fact that his attraction to men wasn’t a passing phase. When he came out to his family senior year, he didn’t tell anyone at school. Only later did he realize how much he consequently missed: teenage first love, teenage heartbreak.
Wren Fondren said she’d kept friendships superficial; she didn’t want others to know she was bisexual. In secret, she dated a girl from another school. Rather than go to cotillion together, they skipped it.
“For me, it was so not even an option to be out in high school,” said Fondren, 26. “There was still too much shame.”
Talking to them, I kept coming back to the same question: If cotillion fostered a feeling of notbelonging for some, what was the point of continuing it?
At its best, the rule that girls do the inviting offers a sense of female empowerment. I remember the nerves that built up over asking a boy I liked to go with me, and the excitement that followed when he said yes. It was fun to go to a party with the person you had picked, rather than a person who had picked you.
Perhaps it helped me grow into a woman who sees no problem in asking a man on a date. But the concept also drew from a different time, one that Mary Grace Greenwood, class of 1957, helped me understand.
Greenwood recalled cotillion as a chance for women who hadn’t married after their debuts to keep socializing.
“The purpose of being was to find a man and get married,” Greenwood said. “That’s what we did. That’s what we were supposed to do.”
Now, she says, the idea that women need a dance to empower them seems “really archaic.”
In a world where so much has changed — and continues to change — regarding not only women’s but also LGBT rights, it’s hard to imagine how an institution such as cotillion still belongs.
Dow, the teen activist who started the discussion over cotillion, is 10 years younger than I. Yet Dow is growing up in what feels like a different era, one in which gay marriage is legal and gender is understood as different from one’s biologically determined sex. Dow can wonder why anyone shouldn’t be able to ask anyone else to a high school dance. I envy him that.
But change comes piecemeal, and lingering issues certainly aren’t unique to my alma mater. A cotillion that includes St. John’s neighbor, Lamar High School, stipulates online that girls attend “with or without a gentleman escort.” In Dallas, the headmaster of the Hockaday School, against which St. John’s competed in sports tournaments, stepped down amid controversy over whether girls should still be required to wear white dresses at graduation.
And, of course, a debate still rages in Austin over allowing transgender students in bathrooms.
Last weekend, Dow attended cotillion — as did his friend. Dow figured he ought to go since someone asked him. His friend, who took no date, had worried about missing out.
Asked how it went, Dow wrote in a text, “Exceeded expectations.” His friend agreed it went well. Still, Dow wasn’t sure if any same-sex couples had gone. After arriving, he wrote, everyone mixed in with everyone else.
Lincoln Dow is 10 years younger than I. Yet Dow is growing up in what feels like a different era. He can wonder why anyone shouldn’t be able to ask anyone else to a high school dance. I envy him that.