Gay Blue Jeans Day, alternatively National Gay Blue Jeans Day or just Gay Jeans Day is a celebration frequently advertised on college campuses in the United States in coordination with World AIDS Day, Gay Equality Day, Gay Pride Week, or National Coming Out Day. Students are encouraged to wear jeans on a particular day to communicate their support of gay rights.
The organizers of Gay Jeans Day at CMU analyse the action in this way.
- To let GLBT students on their campus know there is a supportive community.
- Jeans are chosen for this event because most people have a pair, and because deciding what to wear causes everyone -- no matter what their sexual orientation -- to think about how other people will react to their choice of clothing.
- Allow straight people to think about how others will react to their perceived sexual orientation, and to experience having to alter their normal behavior to avoid being perceived as gay.
During campus debates in the early 1990s about such Jeans Days, the Lesbian and Gay Alliance at Bowling Green State University published a letter to the local newspaper indicating that part of the logic of using a common piece of clothing such as jeans was to demonstrate that, when jeans indicated participation in affirming such rights, people would deliberately wear another form of clothing in tacit protest.
Many supporters of the protest argued that the protest was effective because it forced heterosexuals to do something to actively engage in homophobia (wear something else that day), or wear their usual attire (blue jeans) and become possible targets of homophobia themselves, and that many people unaware of the protest might wear blue jeans and be educated by becoming targets of homophobia Others argue that the protest simply forces everyone to examine their own personal relationship to homophobia by leaving no space to be uninterested.
Famous quotes containing the words gay, blue, jeans and/or day:
“Joyce for all his devotion to his art, terrible in its austerity, was a lad born with a song on one side of him, a dance on the other—two gay guardian angels every human ought to have.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)
“There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.
There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“When children dress like adults they are more likely to behave as adults do, to imitate adult actions. It is hard to walk like an adult male wearing corduroy knickers that make an awful noise. But boys in long pants can walk like men, and little girls in tight jeans can walk like women.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The day has gone by into the dim vista of the past when idleness was considered a virtue in woman.”
—Caroline A. Huling (1857–1941)