Column: It's time to bring back 'Blue Jeans Day'

In a senior year trailing in the wake of anti-queer violence, anti-trans legislation and — as of writing this — whispers of an executive order to roll back LGBTQ rights, a girl’s gotta find solace somewhere.

For me, that’s taken the form of enrolling in courses that focus on LGBTQ culture and history in America. It’s also culminated in many an afternoon in the sanctuary of a quiet library room, thumbing through archives of old publications. It’s a brief moment of escape. An excuse not to respond to texts and emails. A source of useless trivia knowledge.

Most recently, I’ve delved into old issues of The Daily Tar Heel and Lambda, one of the first student-run LGBTQ publications in the country. In their pages, I’ve found everything from coverage of North Carolina drag culture to personal accounts of the AIDS epidemic to advertisements for queer self-defense classes in the '80s.

But perhaps my favorite gem I’ve found in these afternoon excursions is the past observance of “Blue Jeans Day.”

Starting for UNC students in the late 1970s, Blue Jeans Day was a Gay Awareness Week event hosted by the then-Carolina Gay Association. For one day, students were told to wear the common piece of clothing as a public declaration that they identified as queer or as an ally to the community. By the '80s and early '90s, the holiday was observed on college campuses across the country.

Organizers aimed to show people how common queerness really was on campus — while also turning the tables on straight students who didn't usually have to think about the social implications of how they acted or dressed. The day was one-part visibility exercise and one-part lesson in privilege.

And given the campus climate that CGA was operating in at the time, you can’t really blame them for conceiving the observation.

In a 1978 DTH survey, almost 58 percent of students polled were against allocating money to CGA. The organization’s announcement for Gay Awareness Week on the Cube was defaced with messages like “SODOMY IS A FELONY IN N.C. … ARREST FAGGOTS.”

In a guest column for the DTH on April 10, 1986, Jim Duley claimed that one year, students publicizing Gay Awareness Week were “met by club-wielding fraternity brothers” and that year after year, posters were torn down and destroyed.

In a time of repeated vandalism and harassment, Blue Jeans Day was a tongue-in-cheek, subversive response — a way for one Lambda writer in 1984 to say “the hell with the world” and for straight peers “to experience some of the anxieties that gay people face every day.”

And it worked, to an extent. On March 25, 1983, the DTH editorial board estimated that hundreds, maybe thousands of students went out of their way to wear khakis or corduroys. In 1989, columnist David Starnes wrote of students “wearing shorts, khakis, skirts — anything but blue jeans” on the "one day of the year when most of UNC makes a conscious effort to leave the Levis" in the closet.

But, like all good things, Blue Jeans Day eventually ran its course. In a 1993 piece for Lambda, the queer student group on campus (which at that point was renamed B-GLAD) announced its decision to do away with the holiday, saying that straight students had, finally, just begun to ignore it.

But we should all remember Blue Jeans Day for what it was: a brilliant display of pettiness by The Ancestors. It spurred more printed vitriol and point-missing than any late-night show or opinion piece any of us have shared on Facebook.

And after 24 years, I contend it deserves a chance to come back in style for a broader and more inclusive queer movement.

If I may, I suggest Patagonias or spirit jerseys this time around.

@dannynett

danielnett9@gmail.com