Violet and gold, Elijah Enderle's nails matched the tie he wore to prom.
They also matched the crown he left with after his peers at Cape Girardeau Central High School named him prom king.
"A totally planned coincidence," he joked.
Outgoing, athletic and attractive, Enderle fits the conventional template for Midwest prom king in plenty of ways -- just not that hetero-normative one.
Enderle is openly gay. Cape Girardeau is broadly conservative. But Enderle said being the school's first-ever male dance-team member and wearing makeup didn't hurt his chances in the quintessential popularity contest. He was voted king and honored as such Saturday night.
He said he received grief from some of his peers and from some adults. But he said he's used to people who don't understand. There are plenty of them. But he's got plenty of friends who do.
In Enderle's experience, if the politics surrounding sex and gender identity seem to grow increasingly pitched, teens aren't picking the same fights.
The way he describes his school, most students care little more about sexual orientation than the shrug emoji. He said people tend to do what they like and let others do the same.
"I like nails," he said, clicking his together twice. "I think they're pretty."
So his are purple, simple as that, even though there aren't many other LGBTQ students at Central, he said.
In fact, that's one of the things he said helped him become comfortable with his own identity.
"Well, if I'm gonna be one of the five gays in school," he said with a shrug, "I'm gonna be the most poppin'."
With a week and a half left of high school, he's staked as good a claim as any to the title. And prom, he said, was great -- way better than the preparation for prom.
"It was horrible," he said, only half-joking.
The process of finding a date was so exasperating, he said he nearly skipped it entirely.
"I was like, 'It's fine, I've been to prom two years already,'" he recalled thinking before learning he'd been named to prom court. "[Then] I was like, 'Oh my god, now I have to go.'"
To Enderle, the real measure of progress isn't anyone's conscious acceptance of his identity.
Rather, it's the degree to which his peers just don't care.
That lack of pretension, he said, only made the win sweeter; more genuine.
It wasn't a concession, he said. It wasn't patronizing. They didn't vote for the gay kid.
They just voted for Elijah.
tgraef@semissourian.com
(573) 388-3627
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