Gay Blue Jeans Day

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.

Since many college students wear jeans anyway, celebration of this day may go unnoticed, and has not generally been well documented. Many letters to campus newspapers have criticized the choice of such a common article of clothing.Fact|date=March 2007 To increase visibility, some participants urge wearing a shirt of a specific color or a rainbow ribbon in addition to jeans.Fact|date=February 2007

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.

Campus participation

Gay organizations on the following campuses organize some form of gay pride day involving Blue Jeans Day:
* Arcadia University
* Ball State University
* Cornell University
* Illinois State University
* Princeton University
* Ryerson University
* Shippensburg University
* University of Evansville
* University of Michigan
* University of Pennsylvania
* Yale University
* Elizabethtown College

External links

* http://www.rso.cornell.edu/dash/jeans3.html
* http://www.isupride.org/history/gpaAnniversary.htm
* http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2002/10/11/opinion/5705.shtml
* http://www.yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=10072