Chapter 123: Summer Planning

Tuesday, April 8, 1986

We added a non-date to the calendar for the week. Aggie Cinema was showing ‘Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure’ at the Grove at midnight on Friday. Darla wanted to see it again, Amy was interested in seeing it since I liked it, and Jas, Angie, Paige, Cammie, Mel, Candice, and Sherry were all in as well. We might well open it up to some of the study group people, too.

That took Friday out of the picture as an actual date night. Darla and I might take Saturday. Amy considered, but rejected, Cepheid Variable’s showing of ‘Animal Farm’ on Thursday. We might simply go from dinner to bed. I was nearly certain ‘bed’ was Amy’s intent, anyway. She had ways of making her feelings known!

Jas called Francis after classes and checked on the France trip. Late July through early August was the current plan. He would start looking at flights, hotels, and all of that sort of thing. It sounded great.

It also sounded like I should practice at least some very basic French. Learning languages had gotten easier with later technology, but we would do the best we could with what we had available now.

Angie had called Sting’s office early in the morning our time, which made it late afternoon there. The secretary who answered the phone seemed aware of the offer, said Sting would be thrilled, and that we should expect a further piece of mail with details on how to purchase tickets. They would make sure we didn’t have to jump through hoops just to attend.

I wondered if this would somehow turn into ‘no good deed goes unpunished.’ Explaining why Sting was personally inviting us to a concert would be difficult without explaining what happened at Live Aid.

Still — we could do that now. We hadn’t spent any of Camille and Francis’s money on that trip, and we’d been responsible with it when we had spent some of it. Our donation would also count as ‘responsible’ from the perspective of nearly a year later. Things had changed considerably, and it was probably time to rip one more band-aid off. We still had quite a few band-aids to go, no matter what!

On the subject of technology, the Macintosh Plus and peripherals were finally available for pickup. I hadn’t made much progress on desk space, but we cleared some room on a desk in the living room and moved an end table to act as a printer stand.

Some furniture shopping was clearly called for, but we would have a functional setup, anyway.

We would pick up the equipment tomorrow after classes. Angie, Paige, and Cammie all volunteered to help. Jas and Mel did, too, but we didn’t actually need six people, and Angie, Paige, and Cammie had the same last class as I did. We would go get the car and then head to pick everything up.

During dinner, Angie mentioned that PROMISE was starting to ramp up again. This was earlier in the year, but the organization was far better known now. Newspapers and kids outside of the state were contacting them. For some states, they had local people to work with. For others, those in Texas were offering what advice they could.

There were about a dozen other significant volunteers now, including both Dannys, who were freshmen at t.u. There were almost thirty people who were volunteers at some level, including nearly everyone who’d gone to a prom in Texas after consulting with PROMISE last year.

Some school districts had just given in. Besides Spring Branch, the Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and (amusingly) Beaumont school districts had set a policy that same-sex couples were welcome at all school dances. That one brave couple in Beaumont had accomplished more than they might have hoped!

On the other hand, that left around a thousand school districts that didn’t have a policy. Many of them might have no gay kids who felt safe coming out at a prom — or at all. But there were plenty of big ones who were ‘on the fence.’ Some districts — Waco, for instance, but many small-town districts, too — might well need to be sued, and PROMISE wasn’t getting involved with that.

Nationally, there was no state that had made a state-wide policy yet. Some California schools had an ‘everyone welcome’ policy, but some (especially in Orange County and in many rural areas) were very much the opposite, threatening suspension for anyone trying it in their area. This was, after all, 1986 California, not the much more liberal version I remembered. It was hardly conservative, but it wasn’t a ‘hotbed of liberalism,’ either.

Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Hawaii were the most liberal thus far, with state-level ‘guidance’ encouraging schools to welcome same-sex prom-goers. Thanks to James Behrens, his daughter Emma, and Emma’s girlfriend Kelly, Connecticut had the most-developed state PROMISE chapter behind Texas, with eight active volunteers total (four of whom were straight friends of Emma and Kelly).

The rest of us would help as needed, but Angie, Paige, Cammie, and Mel were the real volunteers in the house, and they would be busy off and on throughout prom season.

Tonight’s plan wound up involving both Darla and Amy, too. The student chapter of the National Organization for Women was partnering with the Society of Professional Women (also the student chapter, I was pretty sure) to present a talk called ‘Changing Perspectives of Women Executives in the Past 20 Years’. Given that we knew quite a few potential future female executives, this seemed like an obvious choice.