Shall we dance?

Ah, spring. Season of robins and renewal, graduation and young love, gay pride and ... gay proms? Well, yes, actually. Over the past decade, alternative high school proms for gay students have mushroomed from a handful of events in a few big cities to a bona fide, nationwide phenomenon--not to mention a flash point in the culture wars.

Angry critics on the right scorn them for sending the signal that homosexuality is just another legit "lifestyle choice" in today's sodomitic smorgasbord of cultural decline. But well-meaning critics on the left also have a complaint--that gay proms ghettoize lesbigay youth, letting public high schools off the hook when they don't provide gay kids with safe and equal access to the main event.

Gay teens, I'm happy to report, are ignoring both arguments and voting with their dancing feet. As they boogie to Britney and snuggle to `N Sync, they seem to be telling their elders, "Keep your Kulturkampf to yourselves; we just want to have fun." And frankly, Britney and `N Sync aside, I'm with them.

There are actually two gay prom movements, both important. One is the demand by lots of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered kids to be allowed to bring same-sex dates to their traditional proms. This started making headlines 20 years ago, when Rhode Island teen Aaron Fricke won the legal right to take his boyfriend to the prom. Things have improved so much that these days it's bigger news when schools refuse to allow same-sex couples to attend--though that certainly still happens.

The Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network and the American Civil Liberties Union now routinely encourage kids to challenge discriminatory prom policies, and it's working. In a typical case in the spring of last year, an upstate New York high school principal caused an uproar when he announced an "opposite-sex couples only" policy. A few months later the school board reversed the policy. Score one for the tuxedoed troupers.

But just because gay kids are increasingly allowed to take their same-sex dates to the prom, it doesn't mean they want to. High schools remain hotbeds of homophobia, and straight kids in black ties can be just as mean as those in jeans and backpacks.

So the other big prom story is the growing movement to create alternative proms, where same-sex couples are the norm (although opposite-sex couples are certainly allowed).

This bothers some activists. By creating alternative proms, they ask, aren't we ghettoizing gay kids and letting the public schools off the hook? They concede that there may be a place for alternate proms, but only as stopgap measures until we arrive at a day when gay teens will feel fully comfortable boogying with their straight counterparts on the dance floor of love.

But those who advance such arguments should look in the mirror and ask if that's how they lead their own lives--or want to. The fact is, across America there exists a vast gay industry of discos and bars to serve the same function for adults that alternative proms do for kids. Give us safe spaces where we can dress up, get down, and do it on out own terms, with our own friends, in places where we're in the majority.

To argue that gay proms are obstacles to freedom and integration is to imply that gay discos, bars, community centers, and everything else are just as reactionary. To say gay proms are temporary stopgaps is to imply that when homophobia melts away, we'll all stop feeling the need to congregate with our own kind.

I don't think that's what most of us expect or want. Sure, we want the legal right to hang anywhere, openly and safely. But we also want the relaxation and camaraderie that can come only from creating our own spaces, dances, bowling leagues, bars, and discos. So why not proms?

I don't call that a passing phase. I call it community building. Kids are now coming out much earlier than when I was a kid--some studies say the average age is now 14 to 16, as opposed to 19 to 23 back then--and they want to create their own versions of their own community on their own terms. That isn't a cause for concern. It's a cause for joy.

Now, if we could just do something about that Britney.