A Single Moment On Prom Night Made Me Rethink Everything I Knew About Men

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21 hours ago

Adam and I pulled into the shadowy parking expanse of Mr. Biggs Family Fun Center, the spot we'd chosen to change our clothes before the after-prom party.
It had been the best dance of my high school career. There were no hands where I didn't want them, no awkwardness. This night was different. Adam and I were friends. When we weren't laughing, we were dancing, our hands joining perfectly like the two pieces of a split-heart necklace before he'd spin me away.
Three years earlier, when I was 15, on a sunny day in May under Colorado's breathtaking big sky, my dad had died unexpectedly of a heart attack. I distinctly remember the sound of the screen door slapping shut as flip-flop-clad friends marched in and out and across our tile floor carrying cards and flowers and casseroles.
It was mostly women who surrounded me after my dad died, and now my mother, my sister and I were the only three left in the house. My aunts and aunt-like figures were also often there to sort our mail and take us to church or clothes shopping.
Aside from my dad, my childhood had been filled with very few examples of safe, strong men, and now with my dad gone, they had begun to scare me.
Adam jumped out of the same old Volvo I'd seen him jump out of a hundred times, then lifted his dress shirt up over his head, not even bothering to unbutton the buttons. The highway droned above us and the gray-cold light from a buzzing street lamp at the center of the lot highlighted the peaks and valleys of his unmistakably masculine back. My throat went dry.
This was Adam — my first friend to arrive at my house after my dad haddied. He didn't recoil when I couldn't stop crying, and, instead, placed our favorite movie, 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off,' in the DVD tray of my 11-inch television and sat on my trundle bed to watch it with me. As the credits rolled up the tiny screen, I asked if we could watch it again, and without hesitation, he picked up the remote and restarted it, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to do on a gorgeous late-spring day. This was Adam — the only boy whose hug never felt spoiled by hormones.
But hadn't I trusted my dates in the past? There was the boy I took to MORP, who'd sweatily groped me from behind all night, and then told people we went 'all the way' at school. There was the senior who took me, a mere sophomore at the time, to his prom, then drove too fast, danced too close and kissed too hard.
Gender roles in conservative Colorado Springs when I was growing up in the early 2000s were strict, severe and inescapable. But it wasn't just in my hometown — all across the media landscape, young women were being ridiculed for being too sexy or too prudish. There was no way to win. And if it wasn't women serving as the butt of jokes or having their identities policed, it was gay people.
When Adam and I played tennis on the local courts — screaming and prancing as we gave our best Sharapova and Williams impersonations — men in trucks would yell at us. We knew who each word was for — at school we'd heard 'slut' and 'fag' too many times to count. But Adam had never claimed to be sexually attracted to anyone except Shakira. If what they yelled from their car windows about me wasn't true, why wouldn't I extend the same logic to what people said about my best friend?
I'd had a long-term boyfriend until a couple months before prom, so Adam and I never had the chance to consider each other as anything more than friends — except for maybe what others saw: a fruit and his fly, a fag and his hag. As I caught a glimpse of him changing just feet away from me, his shirtlessness and my singleness seemed to suddenly amplify what I had hardly thought about when we were previously alone together: Adam was a boy.
Other boys snapped my bra straps against my shoulders in class, grabbed my sides aggressively in the halls, pushed my head into the water at the pool, chased me, poked me, kissed me and groped me both at school dances and outside of them.
Alone with a boy, my past traumas hummed up toward my heart in a flurry of fear. Maybe, I thought, he does 'like-like' me. Maybe he is no different than the others. Maybe I am not safe.
At the end of junior year, after I was assaulted in an older boy's car outside a house party, Adam was the only one I told about it. We met up on our favorite walking trail to go to our favorite local art museum,and no matter what we did that day — skipping, talking, standing in front of a piece of art — he maintained a loving space between us. You can keep that, he seemed to say, meaning my body. No boy had ever given me a gift like that.
But here we were alone, in a way we'd never been before. Not alone on the tennis court, or the art museum, or the creek trail, our pants hemmed with dust.
Now we were alone... on what felt like a date. Now we would undress and he would peek, looking to see if he liked what was under the satin hand-me-down dress that made me feel like Andy in'How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days' at the start of the night, but now made me feel like what those men had called out their truck windows. Now Adam was stepping out of his slacks and casually throwing an 'almost ready?' over his shoulder.
I heard myself offer a frail 'yes' as I pulled my dress over my head, heart pounding, shoulders folded close to my chest in hopes they could fully collapse inward to hide my entire body. I spun around awkwardly to grab my tank top, but it was tangled in my tote bag. My breasts threatened to escape the shield of one arm while the other dug deeper for my shirt. But when I glanced up, cheeks burning with embarrassment from my nakedness, I found Adam fully absorbed elsewhere.
Adam was not looking. He was not even trying not to look. He was humming along to the Wham! song from our collaborative burned CD that was spinning in the car stereo. He looked up at the moon as he buttoned his jeans, his chest relaxed and exposed to me. I dropped my arms.
Looking back now, I know this is when I was certain Adam was gay. In the same moment, I was unexpectedly liberated. The moonlight fell on his bare chest and on mine. We were free to just be in each other's presence — a boy and a girl, unbothered and completely safe.
We finished getting dressed and approved each other's afterparty looks, grinning at the magnificence of being a slut and a fag together on a fun night. When we reached the door of the event, I could feel his love as he ushered me in with a phantom hand held just a few inches away from my back.
Eighteen years later, Adam and I are still best friends. We've seen each other through failed relationships, sexual harassment and homophobia while working crappy bar jobs, and dangerous encounters on NYC nights. He hasn't been able to protect me from every negative run-in I've had with the opposite sex since high school, but he's always been there to say the things I needed to hear: 'You're worthy,' 'You'll be all right,' 'They'll be sorry,' 'You're so strong,' 'I'm proud of you.'
I'm now married to a good guy — the kind I wasn't sure existed before prom night. Through Adam's example, I learned what a safe man does and doesn't say, what they do and don't do. He has been one of the strongest, most constant male figures in my life and has taught me a good man might be hard to find — but once you do, you should do everything you can to hang onto him.
A Brooklyn-based writer and educator, Sammi LaBue is the founder of Fledgling Writing Workshops (Best Writing Workshops, Timeout NY) and basically obsessed with the feeling of having an idea and writing it down. Some of her nonfiction work can be found in BuzzFeed, Slate, Literary Hub, The Offing, Glamour and beyond. You can find her writing portfolio here and join her Substack for opportunities to write with her. Her latest project is a recently finished memoir written in collaboration with her mom titled 'Bad Apples.'
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