By now you’ve probably heard of Constance McMillen, the 18-year-old senior at Mississippi’s Itawamba High. Barred by the school board from attending her senior prom with a female date while clad in a tuxedo, her “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!” refusal to be shown the door ultimately lead the board to call the whole dance off.

Yes, it sounds like something along the lines of Footloose, and typically whenever a long-in-the-tooth council of elders decides to put otherwise good kids on a stranglehold of a short leash, there will be push back. A girl going to a dance with another girl? In pants? The next thing you know, these little tarts will want to ride horses with their legs spread, or not be traded away into sexual slavery by their families for six gourds of milk and a goat. Calamity!

The thing is: it’s getting increasingly tougher to sideline a kid like this. McMillen’s Facebook page has drawn thousands of supporters, and though her detractors would like to depict her as Divine having a Christmas cha-cha heels hissy fit, this girl doesn’t fit the bill. She’s a cute, earnest, likable, panda-eyed doll — able to at first blush to pass as a girl you’d find at any high school. We understand that all the Concerned Mothers of America really need teenage lesbians to have magenta mohawks and slave bracelets so that they can identify them on sight, but as an underclass the gays have just always been so inconvenient in their insistence on being attractive and articulate. It’s all part of the agenda.

What really makes this girl formidable, though? Family — you know, that stalwart institution that we have no respect for because we’re not born so much as we are hatched like Sleestak embryos in the Lost City. Connie’s father Michael McMillen — apparently one of those single fathers I’ve seen on TV — has stood front and center with his daughter rather than give her the hook. He only looks like a hard-ass who could snap a spine like a breadstick. And that’s significant. It’s no longer necessarily a given that every gay kid will be gutter-bound when they become a Ma Vie En Rose inconvenience for the neighborhood. Here, the almighty father — the man who traditionally is supposed to give the “Not in my house!” ultimatum — is instead telling the pillars of the community to back the hell off his daughter as the ACLU and the Family Values coalition-of-the-moment weigh in.

“What about the rights of the other students that do not share her lifestyle or the way that she wants to live it,?” asks one dumb-ass rube who just had to use the “L” word when siding with the school board. You just know it’ll all play out like Carrie or Jawbreaker if two girls shimmy to Lady Gaga on gymnasium parquet. If I may, though: where is this alternate reality that we can hurl kids like this into so that they can have formative experiences while simultaneously not managing to disrupt the status quo? McMillen’s saga may not be the most egregious or systemic example of discrimination, but it is indicative of the folly of segregation and how legally untenable it is to maintain.

In order to keep one trouble-making malcontent out of the prom, the school board has to come up with a by-the-numbers justification about decorum or “safety,” (because all teenage dykes stash razor blades in their beehives — and they will cut a bitch), weather a local scandal that goes national, face a law suit, call the whole thing off when the heat is on, and then hold its head in its collective hands as a New Orleans hotelier offers to bus the kids in for a free alternative prom. The real reason we ditched our Puritan duds with all those stupid buckles and stopped hanging all the wayward wenches: it’s just so much fucking hassle with all the noose-making and the dunking and all that wasted produce thrown at girls in stockades.

It’s not like we aren’t capable of restraint. Not once while writing this did it even enter into my mind that McMillen Sr. is a crew cut muscle monster who I’d go ass up for so he could put me over his knee while I call him Daddy.

Not once.

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