JUNE 6, 2011, 2:36 PM
A Prom for Students Who Don’t Want One By COREY KILGANNON
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Dijon James, 17, and Jo Doodle, 17, showed up for their prom on Friday night looking as if they had just come from a skate park. Both teenagers, who attend high school in Harlem, wore dressed-down skateboarder chic, in skinny jeans and sneakers. They munched on food from McDonald’s and leaned against the tall marble columns in front of the New York Public Library’s main branch, at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan. Just inside, in the majestic, marbled Astor Hall, library workers were preparing for the annual anti-prom, an alternative prom hosted by the library for teenagers who do not — perhaps because of sexual orientation, style of dress, social cliques or other reasons — fit into the conventional prom routine, with its expenses and conventions of tuxedos and corsages and limousines and catering halls, and golden boy-and-girl couples. “Some kids come because of their sexual orientation, or the way they dress,” Mr. James said. “We’re just coming to have a good time.” Mr. Doodle, who attends the Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and Mr. James, who goes to Frederick Douglass Academy, both of which are in Manhattan, said they were bisexual and not interested in the conventional prom attended by many of their classmates. Mr. Doodle wore a snowboarder’s knit hat, two loop earrings in his lower lip, two wallet chains hanging from his belt and high-top Airwalk sneakers. “He’s kind of an emo-skate punk,” Mr. James said. There were no simple stereotypes and certainly no old-fashioned categories, like jocks or nerds or greasers. In walked two 18-year-old seniors from Staten Island, Jasmine Mansour and Gisebell Antonetti, whose outfits had elements as varied as Hansel and Gretel and Cruella de Vil.
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