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:
“The gay world that flourished in the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War, a highly visible, remarkably complex, and continually changing gay male world, took shape in New York City.... It is not supposed to have existed.”
—George Chauncey, U.S. educator, author. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, p. 1, Basic Books (1994)
“True variety is in that plenitude of real and unexpected elements, in the branch charged with blue flowers thrusting itself, against all expectations, from the springtime hedge which seems already too full, while the purely formal imitation of variety ... is but void and uniformity, that is, that which is most opposed to variety....”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“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)
“Just as petals fall from drying garlands, which you can see aimlessly swimming in wine-bowls are we lovers, who now puff up our chests, but perhaps tomorrow the fateful day will shut us down.”
—Propertius Sextus (c. 50–16 B.C.)