BRISTOL, Connecticut, USA — It’s 1998. America, do you know what your students are wearing?
The administration of Middletown High School in Connecticut found out recently when more than a dozen students, male and female, came dressed in cross-sex apparel. The event came hot on the heels of the high school’s decision to suspend junior Bryan Giles for wearing a dress to school, and supposedly causing a disruption.
Much has been said and written about students’ rights, school decency and every other lofty principle and theory that can possibly be attached to all of it, and so I won’t contribute to the controversy by ranting that Giles’ rights were violated or that he’s a sicko with a skirt
fetish.
I’ll simply say … GET OVER IT!
I’m not sure how Middletown works — I’ll admit that right away — but I’ve got to tell you that some of things I’ve seen in my two years at
Bristol Eastern High School make this kid-in-a-dress controversy sound like an Archie comic.
We’ve got people painted like zombies on a daily basis, the occasional herd of lost hippies thick with the odor of marijuana and more bodily
piercings than you can shake a bleeding tongue at.
Maybe Middletown is a Utopian society tucked away in this vast sprawl of choke-you-with-its-normalcy suburbia, but I’m almost certain that
this school and its administration have better things to worry about.
I say if a kid wants to wear a dress, let him figure out which shoes he can’t match it with after Labor Day.
The bigger problem here, I think, is the horrid generation gap we’ve let develop between our students and administration. These people have
cable, don’t they? A dress is nothing fellas, trust me on this one.
Call us back when someone gets a silver stud caught in their zipper.