Gay? Fine By Me
The Gay? Fine by Me t-shirt Project began at Duke University in Spring 2003. The idea sprung from a dinner conversation between ten friends, both gay and straight. The Princeton Review had recently named Duke the most gay-unfriendly school in America (“Alternative Lifestyles are Not an Alternative”), and they wondered if most people at Duke were really homophobic, or if that was just the perception.
They speculated that the perception was actually feeding the homophobia; if Duke Students thought it was more publicly acceptable to be homophobic than to condemn homophobia, they wouldn’t condemn it. On the same note, while they didn’t believe the Princeton Review’s ranking was true, they were all sure it would mean less LGBT students would apply to Duke in the future. If the Princeton Review was wrong to rank Duke at #1, maybe the reputation they gained from it would actually make the student body more gay-unfriendly over time.
So, they figured that if they changed the perception that Duke was homophobic, they might change the reality in the process. As a group they came up with the idea to distribute t-shirts with an anti-homophobic message and see how many students would wear them.
After figuring out a slogan, they set about fundraising so the shirts could be given away for free. By the next day, they had secured enough money to order 500 t-shirts. The shirts ended up going so quickly that other student groups and administrators made donations to the cause, and after 10 days they had over 2,000 students, staff, professors, and community members owning and wearing the shirts. The shirt drive happened to fall on a recruitment weekend for prospective freshmen, so there were even dozens of soon-to-be Blue Devils publicly condemning homophobia.
In the months after Fine by Me hit Duke, these students decided to spread the t-shirt project to other schools. The response was tremendous. In 2004, Duke University did not appear anywhere on the Princeton Review’s homophobia list.
Adapted from the Fine by Me website
Williams College has joined the movement! Gay? Fine By Me t-shirts have been available for free through the MCC (Jenness House), the Office of Campus Life (Paresky, second floor), and the Dively Committee since Spring 2006. So far, 300 shirts have been distributed on campus, and the shirts will be available again next Fall ('07)