Many Boston University students showed off their purple attire on Wednesday in order to show support for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
The “Spirit Day” was created in response to the deaths of six gay students who committed suicide in the past few months.
The movement to wear purple was started by Brittany McMillan, a Canadian student, earlier this month in memory of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi, who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after allegedly being targeted for his sexuality.
McMillan told students to wear purple because it symbolizes Spirit on the rainbow LGBT flag.
“Spirit Day” spread quickly to the United States and now has more than 1.6 million attendees on Facebook.
Natalie Schiera, a junior in the College of Communication and College of Fine Arts, passed out paper T-shirts earlier this week along with other members of the student group Connective Kindness, a subgroup of Hugs Don’t Hate.
The shirts encouraged supporters to wear purple on Wednesday in support of suicide prevention.
“Handing out the reminder T-shirts that said “Accept All. Love All’ was an event through Connective Kindness,” Schiera said. “Each week we do something different to brighten people’s days or to get people to stop and think.”
On Wednesday, Connective Kindness members handed out purple yarn outside of the Warren Towers dining hall in an additional effort to raise awareness.
“This event was a little less involved and was more of a reminder that we all need to be more accepting of others and conscious of our actions,” Schiera said.
Students dressed in purple could be found all over campus on Wednesday, in what School of Education sophomore Eva Gach called “a quiet advocacy for rights.”
“I am a supporter of human rights in all cases,” Gach said. “The recent suicides have been awful…and [Spirit Day] is a nice, subtle way to see a lot of people showing support for the gay community.”
Sheva Ebhote, a College of General Studies sophomore, agreed.
“I know there’s been a lot of crimes against homosexuals recently,” Ebhote said. “I think this event is pretty successful in raising awareness.”
Though BU is generally considered an accepting community, College of Arts and Sciences freshman Kelly Miller said that it is still important to demonstrate support for the gay community.
“From what I can see, people at BU tend to be pretty open, and discrimination doesn’t seem to be widespread,” Miller said. “But it’s hard to see discrimination. People say things like “no homo,’ which can be particularly hurtful for homosexuals who may still be in the closet.”
“Overall BU is very accepting,” said Gach. “I mean, we’re in the heart of Boston. I hope that sometime in the future we can just accept gay rights and gay marriage with open arms.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
