Well, well, well. How times do change.
The homecoming queen wore a tux.
Her classmates said wear a dress, just this once, but Luz Duarte doesn't wear dresses -- or even girls' pants -- and she didn't think the school-wide homecoming assembly was the place to start.
"You know, what? No," she said.
"If I'm going to go up there, I'm going to go as myself."
That approach has worked surprisingly well for Duarte, 18, a senior at West Leyden High School in Northlake and one of the first openly gay students in the Chicago area to be elected homecoming queen.
When she told her classmates she was gay in 7th grade, the reaction was mostly positive.
"Everybody thought it was cool. They had never met a gay person," Duarte says, and their response was, "Ohmigod! Are you serious?"
The interest wasn't all good. "They made me feel like I was an alien from outer space and they wanted to dissect me," Duarte says.
But, still, too much attention was better than the loneliness and depression she experienced when she kept her sexual orientation to herself.
"When she came out, it was like a flower blossomed," says her mother, Maritza, a credit union manager.
