Expanding positivity: GSA to host first-ever Pride Prom at Northport High School
Northport High School GSA members (from left) Ethan and Carly Heffernan, Eve Del’Aquilla, Moth Carlson and August Frischman met with the Journal last week as they finalized planning for the first annual Northport High School Pride Prom.
This Saturday, June 6, the Northport High School GSA will host the school’s first-ever Pride Prom, a celebratory event where Long Island teenagers from various school districts can enjoy a traditional milestone experience in an inclusive and welcoming environment.
The prom’s theme is The Little Mermaid, chosen, said GSA Vice President Carly Heffernan, because of its origin story.
Viewed by many literary historians and queer theorists as a deeply personal and sorrowful representation of Hans Christian Andersen’s own romantic heartbreak and attraction to men (Andersen’s unrequited love for Edvard Collin is well-documented in personal letters to Collin, the son of his wealthy upper-class patron), The Little Mermaid reflects how the author “could never be a part of their world, almost because of how he was born,” Heffernan said. The book’s ending was tragic.
“I thought, ‘Why don’t we turn that into something fun and something beautiful,’” Heffernan said. “I’ve always liked throwing parties and bringing people together.”
And with that, the Pride Prom was born.
Focus on the positive
In 2023, a vacancy for an advisor to the Northport High School GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) opened up. Orchestra teacher Michael Susinno applied. Over the years, the club had taken many different shapes, oftentimes reinventing itself according to the times. Susinno decided, in this latest incarnation, to focus on the positive. Alongside him was then-sophomore Eve Del’Aquilla, current president of the GSA.
Positivity seems to be something Sussino gravitates toward – it’s a trademark of his personality – and at his very first meeting with the GSA, he “shared that there were a lot of negative things around all of us in the world, but if we could find a way to focus on the positive and have that be the crux of our message, that would be the thing I’d be most proud of as the advisor,” he recalled.
A self-proclaimed “talker,” Sussino has since taught himself to stay quiet at GSA meetings. He wants the kids to do the talking.
“He’s never tried to control us or speak over us. He’s always made room for our ideas and actually just helped us make them possible. We genuinely would not have any of this without him,” Del’Aquilla said.
Heffernan thanked Susinno for giving each student in the club the opportunity to learn and to grow. “A lot of things you don’t realize when you’re younger and just starting out in life,” she said. “We’ve had some ventures that have worked. We’ve had some things that didn’t. And then that leads to these bigger successes, these things we can point to and feel confident and good about and feel like, ‘Yes. We did that.’”
Now in its third year, the GSA club has really taken off, Del’Aquilla said. Members elected officers, and ran bake sale fundraisers. They’re big into “consciousness raising,” making sure to recognize National Coming Out Day with banners in the high school commons, and just increasing visibility in general.
Last year, the GSA had its own table at Northport Pridefest, “and this year we’re doing the Pride Prom, which is just unimaginable,” Del’Aquilla said.
An even larger community
Eleventh grader Moth Carlson said they first connected to queer communities in middle school, where they met Del’Aquilla in a safe space club. “That was a very small group of friends, and it felt very tiny,” they said.
But then Northport Pridefest started (Carlson is a featured speaker this year) and they joined the high school GSA. The increased visibility of the LGBTQ+ community, both in and outside of school, is reassuring, they said: “It’s really nice to have, especially in a small town, these large communities out there, even locally, that support us.”
Pride Prom, for which Carlson designed the poster, is another big step.
Heffernan spoke about how, in the past, most proms weren’t safe spaces for the queer community. For decades, the high school prom was considered a heteronormative rite of passage. It was standard practice for schools to restrict prom ticket sales to mixed-gender couples only – a student could not purchase a “couple’s ticket” with someone of the same sex. Dress codes were also enforced, preventing many gender-nonconforming and trans students from expressing themselves in a way that felt genuine, even if they managed to attend.
By the late 1990s and 2000s, Long Island schools began to see growing resistance to anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes, driven in large part by the rise of GSAs in Nassau and Suffolk County high schools. The Northport GSA knows Pride Prom will offer a safe space for students; it is the latest expression of a movement that has expanded opportunities for LGBTQ+ teens to attend prom authentically, alongside the people they choose and without fear of harassment.
Other Pride proms have been held across Long Island in the past (the LGBT Network had theirs on May 29) but travel often made them inaccessible.
Heffernan thought it would be nice to have something closer to the Northport/East Northport community just for teens, alongside Pridefest, which is more of a family event, she said. So she reached out, via the YDA, to allies in other schools, including Huntington, South Huntington, Harborfields and Commack. She also connected with people in the Half Hollow Hills, Copiague and Hicksville school districts. She researched what clubs were active, and networked.
Del’Aquilla was immediately on board and has helped with the prom’s planning and organization, securing donations to help make the event a success. Community members have pitched in to provide food, photography and decorations.
“I’m really excited, especially to have kids from other schools coming to visit us,” Heffernan said. Oftentimes, GSAs are small groups, a space for people who are already familiar with one another, she said: “Maybe you want to branch out or reach out socially, and feel part of an even larger community.”
Pride Prom, she said, was created for that.
“We have the great privilege of offering an event that’s free, that also maybe gives you the chance to meet people you haven’t met already, and form new connections and new friendships. And I just think that’s very important.”
“Looking out for people like me”
Heffernan and Del’Aquilla recently attended the Long Island LGBT Youth Leadership Conference at Suffolk Community College, an annual event designed to empower, educate and connect LGBTQ+ youth and allies across Nassau and Suffolk counties. “It was so great to see these kids who maybe had some trouble, maybe weren’t getting treated the best at school, but were so self-assured and so happy and still wanted to do well and help and go to this conference,” Carly said. “That these kids want a better future, I think it’s a great sign that things are improving.”
But it hasn’t always been easy. It’s still not.
“Being openly queer has been a good experience, but it’s also been a bad experience,” said August Frischman, a junior at the high school. “Obviously, not everyone’s going to be accepting, but you’ll very easily find the people who are, and that’s something I’m very happy that we have here. At the same time, you will meet people who are not welcoming, and it is very hard because you have to be able to push past that and realize that it’s never going to go away. It’s always going to be a problem that’s going to exist, so you sort of have to learn to live with that.”
“We get a lot of support from our community – Pridefest, the school, GSA – but, you know, we still hear the f-slur said in the halls,” Del’Aquilla said. “There’s still pushback, like, ‘Oh, that’s so gay. Don’t do that, that’s gay.’ It’s getting a little better, but it’s still bad.”
Frischman this year is in charge of other GSA responsibilities – specifically Pridefest – while the other members focus on the prom. He recalled his days in middle school, when the simple act of a teacher posting a rainbow or “You’re safe me with me” sticker on a classroom door made a difference in his day.
“I remember walking in some of those classrooms and just feeling so much safer because I know that the teacher there was there for me and looking out for people like me. So it really just helped personally,” he said.
Ethan Heffernan, a ninth grader and Carly’s brother, was especially grateful for the older students and all the work they’ve done the past few years to make the high school experience safer and more inclusive for everyone. “It’s going to be really sad to see you go,” he said to Del’Aquilla, who is graduating later this month. “It’s been really important to us and I just hope that we can continue the club, continue all the charitable efforts we’ve started, continue the Pride Prom and do it next year and the year after. It really has meant so much to me.”
Ethan, who is partnering with the media arts department to help promote the Pride Prom, noted the progress he’s witnessed during his freshman year at Northport High School. “You know, things can get better, and I think that’s something we need to remember, especially in the climate we’re in politically and socially. It’s important to stay positive and not to have this defeatist, negative mindset,” he said. “Other people will always have something to say, but you have to see the good in the way we’re progressing, because we really are progressing, even though it may not seem like it at times.”
Carly agreed, her eyes on the future. “I really would like to continue that legacy of not only becoming more positive but also expanding that positivity outwards,” she said. “I hope that circle of positivity, it just expands and expands until we can just spread the joy of seeing someone who’s like you, the joy of being supported and the joy of being known and loved and understood.”
Del’Aquilla mentioned one more hope she has for the club: a potential name change to the Gender and Sexuality Alliance. “That is what we’re trying to do,” they said. “We’re trying to make it an all-encompassing, a safe space for everybody. Not just queer students, but anybody who needs a safe space.”
Carly suggested the club make a motion to change the name in Del’Aquilla’s honor next school year.
For now though, the focus is on prom.
Carly, who is well-versed in LGBTQ+ history, referenced a quote from queer activist and writer Dan Savage that emerged during the AIDS epidemic and reflected both the grief of the era and the resilience of those who lived through it: We buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon and we danced all night.
“In a world where you’re rejected, in a world where you struggle, in a world where you need to find acceptance, sometimes you need to have that fun,” Carly said. “You need that moment of relaxation, of being at peace and being around people who understand who you are.”
The Northport GSA Pride Prom will take place this Saturday, June 6, from 5:30 to 9:30pm. Click here for more information or to reserve a spot.
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