Fricke Versus Dick

[dadadadio]

My son texted me today from UCLA.
 
What high school did you go to?
Odd query I thought, he knows my home town.
Cumberland. Why?
I knew that. You graduated in 80.
No. 1979. Why?
Do you remember Aaron Fricke?
Reading that name was like a dainty slap in the face. Oh yeah, I remember Aaron Fricke.
The prom case from 1980.
Yes. I'm taking a GLBT studies course. We're discussing that case.
That was a tough time for my town. People were divided. Media circus. Not good.
I'll call you later. I'm doing a paper on the case.
 
Decades old memories emerged from hibernation. I was sitting at my workstation staring at my PC. There was a numbing affect. I was lost in time.
 
Paul Gilbert was denied permission to attend the prom with his adult boyfriend during my senior year of high school. It was not a major issue in our school. School Principal Dick Lynch squashed the plan. Gilbert was a minor. His parents sided with the school.
 
One year later Aaron Fricke was denied permission by Dick. His date was Paul Gilbert. Fricke called in the ACLU. The school was sued. The media flocked to the high school campus like vultures. I graduated in 79 so I missed the daily barrage of vans and cameras, but I still lived in town, with friends and neighbors in high school.

 

The town was immediately divided. Cumberland is a bedroom community, suburb of Providence on the Massachusetts state line. Thirty years ago gay rights were not battled for on fields of small towns. This turned into a major case, very fast, and the people of Cumberland were not happy with the attention, including me.

 

Paul Gilbert was in an economics class with me. He was a snotty kid with an attitude. Everyone knew he was gay and most people didn't care. I did not know Aaron Fricke personally. The principle, Richard Lynch, was an authoritarian asshole. I suppose that's prerequisite for the job. My line was, "Dick Lynch's parents must have been psychics." I had to explain that joke too many times.

 

This was the first time in my life where gay rights was an issue I seriously considered. We had 2500 students in our school. There were a handful of known gays and no one really paid undue attention to them, except for a few jerk-off jocks. Since jocks teased anyone they perceived as weak, I don't think the gay kids were singled out more than any other weaker student.

 

The school was divided into two major clicks, jocks and heads. I love sports but was not in with the jocks. I was a head. Many of the jocks were jerks. I partied with a nicer, more tolerant crowd. We smoked pot, had a garage band and chased girls. I don't recall any of my people being outraged by the gays attending the prom, but we were not happy with the media circus. It was a bad time for Cumberland.

 

I blamed Dick Lynch for the whole fiasco. If he just let them go, did his job to insure security, and kept the whole event low key, I suspect the CHS class of 1980 could have pulled it off. Everyone knew it was coming. Fricke and Gilbert made no secret of their intentions. Lynch's denial set the stage for the ACLU, a judge and the media to step in. 

 

There were threats against the gay students. That alone gives the town a bad name but I think we all know every town has people like that, bigots and haters. Dick used student safety as his primary reason for denying their rights. I recall hearing a scheme where some jocks were going to beat up Gilbert before the prom, bad enough to make it impossible for him to attend. That never happened.

 

People were angry. There's always a loud hateful anti-gay faction but they were a minority. The rest of the town was split, some supported Dick, others Fricke. I recall cringing at some of the man-on-the-street interviews done in our little town. There were many bad jokes but I only remember one. Dick hates Fricke but Fricke loves dick.

 

There was a threat of students boycotting the prom, not likely, so an alternate prom was planned at another site on the same night. That also didn't happen. In the meantime our town was in the media for weeks as lawyers and a judge considered the case. Cumberland was the butt of many jokes. Our jocks put up with taunts from opposing teams.

 

Of course Aaron Fricke won his court case versus CHS because Dick was wrong. It was a foregone conclusion. The hype was totally unnecessary. He and Paul Gilbert attended the prom with a state police escort and media van motorcade. That was the last I thought of Aaron Fricke, until today. The event passed. Life goes on.

 

Until today I did not know this was a watershed case. I had forgotten Gilbert's name so I Googled Fricke. Of course Wiki delivered. Apparently Fricke v Dick Lynch is a very big event in the GLBT community. The case is cited as precedent case after case. Maybe at age 19 I missed the significance. It's funny how we can learn something we knew long ago. Old memories came out of the closet. Maybe this 31 year old case helped shape my tolerance towards gay rights issues. I don't know. I just know I've never been against them.