On weekends we traveled to regional tournaments, where trophies were won and the school’s mystique was cemented.Ī common component of these tournaments was some student-mingling leisure activity-a visit to an amusement park or notable mall-but my new school famously boycotted such communal fun to stay put and practice.
We rehearsed before school, after school, and during lunch. The cornerstone of the program: obsessive practice. Once I landed, I was swept up in the speech and drama star-making machinery, which was formidable and relentless. I still lived with my parents in the loser district and made the 45-minute stealth drive to the amazing school each morning.
#High school gay sex story mac
What’s more, I’d met the coach of this triumphant school at that year’s state competition, and he slyly made sure I knew there was a spot for me on their school’s team if I could find a way to attend.Īnd so it came to pass that I convinced my parents to give custody of me to their friends Mac and Edith, who lived within the boundaries of this desirable district. At this time, I was deeply involved with speech and drama, and the move to the bigger city landed me at a perfectly good high school with a perfectly good speech and drama team.īut 20 miles east of this perfectly good school was the school with one of the greatest speech and drama programs in the nation, pumping out state and national champions with legendary regularity. My purest engagement with Texas competitiveness came between my sophomore and junior years of high school, when my family moved from the far-west town of El Paso to a larger city in the eastern part of the state.
This defensiveness shines through the state’s adopted slogan, Don’t Mess with Texas, a phrase born as part of an anti-littering campaign, but quickly taken up as the state’s spiritual motto, a preemptive warning. It’s like an inverse of the Napoleon complex, with Texas forever touchy about being so big, and so dumb. This is the state where moms hire hit men to whack their daughter’s cheerleading rivals, where marching bands have generation-spanning blood feuds, where even speech and drama tournaments are occasions for war. I want to focus on an underexplored corner of the Great Lone Star State trait known as Texas Competitiveness, chronicled most famously in the world of high-school football, where whole towns live or die under Friday Night Lights and…you know the story.īut Texas competitiveness isn’t restricted to just football. When you hear “the great state of Texas,” I expect you to conjure a whole dossier of information, all drawn from the broadest stereotypes and absolutely true: urban cowboys driving luxury trucks to daddy-daughter day at the gun range quarterbacks so fast they can outrun rape charges textbooks edited by Creationists and an exorbitant, state-wide pride in all of this because we’re Texas. This story takes place in the year 1986, in the great state of Texas.