Reported by: Jessica Noll
Web produced by: Jessica Noll
BRACKEN COUNTY, Ky. -- Senior Clay Edwards’ photo won’t be in this year’s Bracken County High School yearbook. He’ll be listed as “not pictured.”
For Edwards it wasn’t missing picture day or a case of the flu that kept him out of his last yearbook and the class of 2009 composite – it was a dog collar and makeup, and his refusal to wear a faux tuxedo pullover, an unwritten school policy, that all of the other senior boys wore.
His mother Karen Edwards, who grew up in Bracken County, Ky., blames her son’s omission from the yearbook on a “country-bumpkin” mentality.
“People gawk at you like you spawning another head,” said Clay of his appearance.
The 17-year-old is what is known as Gothic: black clothes, black nails, black eyeliner, black lipstick.
But the teen, who has had to serve in-school suspensions for being a “distraction,” said he doesn’t dress the way he does to get attention. It’s just who he is.
“I do what I do because this is what I want to be. I don’t care what people think,” said Clay, whose fashion idols include Madonna, Marilyn Manson, Boy George, Cher and Pete Burns.
The budding fashion designer/artist said that he toned down his normal appearance for his senior pictures. He said that he was wearing purple eye shadow, blackish-purple lipstick and drawn-on eyelashes, accessorized by a dog collar.
When he showed up for the photo, he said he was told to wash off the makeup, remove the collar and put on the tuxedo wrap.
“To take off the makeup and the color is taking away a part of who I am,” said Clay, who said he was told it was required and expected of him.
According to Jenny Ray, the high school’s principal, the dress code for yearbook was instituted by a vote to wear the currently required outfits by the class of 2004. That dress code has remained.
“It instills a formality – the importance of graduation and the formal event that it is,” Ray said of the senior photo mandate. She said that the senior composite would hang in the school forever and that any student who does not comply with the dress code, isn’t included in the composite or yearbook.
“It’s become a tradition. It’s always been an honor thing.”
It is not; however, part of the published dress code Clay’s mother said.
“It is supposedly policy that seniors wear the drapes, but it is not in writing and they used to have a choice of clothing and photographers in years past,” said Karen.
Clay points out that the dress code in the student handbook says nothing about the faux tux. “(It’s) not set in stone anywhere that you have to wear that thing – that half piece of velvet.”
Clay, who fashions his own clothes, questioned why he would want to be in a faux tuxedo front in a photo forever, if that isn’t who he really is.
He and his mother think to require formal wear is wrong and a breech of his rights, but his principal said it’s not about freedom.
“[It] has nothing to do with a freedom-appropriate right,” Ray said.
In the yearbook or not this year, Clay said he just wants to see change for future students at Bracken County High School.
“I want to see some major changes made,” he said. “I want everyone to have an opinion and to be heard.”
