Gay Prom and New York City
In high school, I befriended a girl who lived down the street in my same year. She was the anti-thesis of everything my family saw in me, but reflected how I saw myself and could not yet portray. She smoked Blue Camel Crushes, and used to pass them to me to pop the flavor ball (the “crush” part, I suppose) before she would light them. I never smoked them. My mother would smell it. And I didn’t want to, anyways. She had been out of the closet as a lesbian since she was a kid. It wasn’t a real conversation she ever had to have with her single father and younger brother. It was a fact about her. I loved that. I wished others could share my confidence in my own identity; but while I was still struggling with accepting being bisexual, society was still working on some pretty hard-and-fast stereotypes I would never fit. I admired how little she gave a shit about others’ opinions of her, because I could see the tangible self-love it provided the space for when she purged her brain...