DALLAS - At 64, Portia Cantrell’s memories of her teenage years are vivid, but not good.
“You had to hide who you were, always,” she said. “To think that you’d go to prom if you were a girl with another girl, or if you were a boy with another boy, that was unthinkable.”
Cantrell leads a support group called the Silver Pride Project. It is for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender senior citizens in Dallas.
On Saturday night, Silver Pride will host its annual Senior Prom.
“Everybody who will be there is in the same boat. We don’t like music that’s super loud, we want to be able to move around without worrying about tripping and falling and breaking a hip, and we just want to have fun,” she said. “We want to go back in time. Not really go back in time and relive the bad times, but this is kind of like a re-do of our youth and that’s what it’s about. Correcting what went wrong in our lives, at least for one night.”
Cantrell’s second chance at prom will be a first chance for a young couple from Tyler.Merary Melchor is a senior at John Tyler High School. She said she was not allowed to buy tickets to her prom. She planned to take her girlfriend Sydney Aparicio, a freshman at another Tyler school. Aparicio’s mom said the high school gave them a variety of reasons for the couple not being allowed to buy tickets, including telling them that Sydney was too young, and that they missed a deadline to register – a necessary step because Sydney attends another school.
“It’s been about three years that we’ve been together, and we’ve always talked about going to prom together,” said Sydney.
When Cantrell heard about the teen’s story, she stepped in to help.
“So, the first thing I did was I cried, and then I got myself together and I got mad,” she said. “I told them I wanted them to have the dream prom that they said they wanted to have.”
She invited the girls to her prom, and they said yes.
“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” Cantrell said. “How would you feel if it was you and your boyfriend, or you and your husband? If we just stopped and put ourselves in another’s shoes, I think the world would be a much better place.”