Maggie's Farm

Having also gone to prep school, albeit a bit later than Romney went to his, I have a pretty good idea what was really going on. I doubt the hazing incident with the student had anything to do with any "presumed homosexuality."

During the Sixties and Early Seventies, private schools were consumed with strict dress codes because they didn't want the "bad influences" of the hippy culture or any other Sixties lowlifes to invade their campuses. Supposedly you were in prep school partly because your parents wanted a "better" environment for you. So private schools, if they did not have uniforms, had strict dress codes on clothes and appearance. "Inclusiveness" was not a value then, most prep schools wanted to draw a big line between "us" and "them."

The biggest hot button item for boys was hair. At my school, your hair could not touch your collar, cover your ears or be long enough to cover your eyes. The administration of my school went nuts if your hair was too long and it was the quickest way to get you detention, or if you persisted and refused, expelled. And it was also the quickest way to get you ostracized from other students as a "rebel" and someone who really should not be at the school. And of course the time the real confrontations occurred was after a vacation period, when a student would let their hair grow during the interim. (It all seems so petty and quaint in hindsight now.)

So, when the Romney incident got exposed yesterday by WaPo, with the reference to the "hair covering the eyes," I immediately had a flashback to that whole environment and how people got so worked up about hair length. I highly suspect what was going on had nothing to do with homosexuality, it was the whole hair thing.

Doesn't at all excuse what Romney did, but again, I highly doubt the motivation was because of being "anti-gay."

The other outcome of this is that when you got to college, you ran into the "prep school rebels," the folks who, after prep school graduation, fell off the wagon and decided to totally rebel from their prep school upbringing and would wear just totally crazy stuff and went to the opposite extreme in terms of outrageous behavior.