This is great article about an ideal response to bullying. Bullying doesn’t stop through top-down discouragement, it stops when the bullies feel peer pressure – the very force they exert.
I read another article about how this is getting international attention, and schools are requesting more information about how to hold their own “Pink Day”. I think that’s totally awesome – what I’m afraid of is that some well-meaning adults are going to step in with the same perception of those bullies – that pink on men is only for ‘homos’, and that this is about ‘gay rights’ and thus they don’t want the schools involved.
As I see it, this is an issue that everyone potentially faces, gay or not. It is about being able to go to class without being harassed, for any reason. It shouldn’t matter whether the boy is gay or not – the bullies found an easy target in the color of his shirt, and probably would have found something else to call him if he’d worn something else.
I look back on all the time and energy I’ve spent combatting the “lessons” I learned in middle school (don’t speak out, don’t stand out, don’t be intelligent, don’t be weird), the hours of worse-than-useless therapy I was forced to go through when I finally stood up for myself, and think that maybe this one kid who happened to wear pink on the first day of school will be spared that.
I feel surprisingly emotional about it, actually.
