In April, wear blue jeans to support gay rights—so says history!
One of our earliest Calgary Gay History Posts was about Blue Jeans Day at the University of Calgary in the early 1990s. However, we recently discovered details about how the event echoed a gay liberation initiative first begun at Rutgers University by the groundbreaking Rutgers Student Homophile League.
The first Blue Jeans Day occurred in 1970 at Rutgers (although the first advertised event happened in 1974). Blue Jeans Day was traditionally held on a Friday in April and, by the late ’70s, had spread to dozens of campuses in Canada and the United States.
Vintage Poster, Campus Unknown
When it was resurrected at colleges in the late 1980s, the event migrated to October to align with National Coming Out Day. Although we have yet to find evidence that the U of C hosted Blue Jeans Days events in the ’70s, we found them on many other campuses.
1978 Poster from the SaskatchewanArchives
International Blue Jeans Day was often declared at the University of Saskatchewan with little advanced notice. The event forced heterosexuals to find something else to wear! This hilarious event was held by the Gay Academic Union, which existed from 1975-1982.
1992 was a tumultuous time for the LGBTQ2 community. AIDS deaths in Calgary were exponentially rising. Its response, Queer Nation (We’re here, we’re Queer, get used to it!) was also in the ascendent. Opinion polls stated clearly that the majority of Canadians did not support our rights.
If you were an out, undergraduate student at the University of Calgary, you were quickly conscripted into a culture war—I remember a lot of shouting on campus and gay bashing in the Beltline.
Our club at the University was called GLASS, which stood for the Gay and Lesbian Academics Students and Staff Society. GLASS was supposed to be a social organization but its very existence then was political. GLASS members—virtually all students and no staff—were foot soldiers in our human rights struggle.
On June 17, 1992, a poster was found tacked to the GLASS office door. It was an invitation scrawled in black sharpie: “FAG & LESBIAN BASHING. JUNE 30, 8 AM UNTIL MIDNIGHT. PLEASE COME, NEED VICTIMS.” The date and address listed were for Calgary’s 1992 Pride Parade & Festival at Tomkins Park.
From the U of C archives, GLASS file
In a press release the next day, Greg Lane, Co-chair for GLASS wrote: “Lesbians, gays and bisexuals live in a continual climate of potential violence. I am deeply concerned about these tools of oppression.” He noted that it was not the first time that GLASS had been targeted on campus.
In a move of solidarity, student politicians from the Students’ Unions of U of C, SAIT and Mount Royal College, all swiftly and publicly condemned the action of the unknown poster author, who was never caught, despite police involvement.
That October, GLASS held its second Blue Jeans Day, a borrowed gay liberation intervention from the 70s. It was rediscovered by many campuses in the 90s to coincide with National Coming Out Day. The idea was to wear denim if you supported gay rights. Blue Jeans Day became an explosive event in 1992 that was vociferously debated both in campus media and at many social gatherings on campus.
Gay Blue Jeans Day Poster from 1973, University of Melbourne Archives
Despite the vocal opposition, on October 9, 1992, Blue Jeans Days proceeded. Many varsity queers and their allies were cloaked head to toe in denim: our pride armour. Many others were pissed off and denim-less. It was an angry moment.
FFWD to 2022. Calgary Pride is back in person after the pandemic and will likely top 100,000 participants again. A decisive majority of Canadians support our rights. So much has changed, yet here we are in another angry moment in history, like the irate Valbella email sent to Canmore Pride.
Is this a call to arms? How did we get through this last time? Where can future pacific days be found? These are my questions—without answers yet—30 years after 1992.
Calgary Gay History 