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Senior Portraits Always Suck
Posted by Meredith on Feb 25, 2005 at 06:52PM in News Reports - permalink

Everybody's high school senior portrait always looks terrible, but they're still fun to look back on after time has passed. Kelli Davis, a senior in Florida, won't get that opportunity. Her picture was pulled from the yearbook because she was wearing a tuxedo - "boy's clothes." Supposedly the rules she broke weren't about being a lesbian, they were about clothing - but the school officials apparently don't realize that those two can be inextricably linked for butch women. Most of the parents who attended a school board meeting about the issue supported Davis's right to wear the tux, but some parents supported the principal's decision. One of those was Karen Gordon, who gave this terrifying, Orwellian statement:

When uniformity is compromised, then authority no longer holds.

The "drape" senior girls wear for in-school portraits is silly anyway, and I heartily endorse going elsewhere for pictures. My parents took me to a glamour photographer in the mall, where I wore a dress because that suited who I am. Kelli Davis's parents took her to a photographer and she wore a tux, because that suited who she is. She wasn't breaking the rules on purpose (there is no formal dress code there, by the way), she was just living her life. Such rules are absurd in the twenty-first century anyway - how on earth can they tell her not to wear "boy's clothes" when there's no such taboo in the rest of society?

Unfortunately, the school board didn't reverse the principal's decision, and Kelli Davis's picture will not appear in the yearbook.