On Thursday, October 19, which is celebrated nationwide as “Spirit Day,” the Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) asked the Deerfield community to wear purple in support of LGBTQ+ youth. The GSA supported this initiative by passing out purple Deerfield socks in the Dining Hall lobby after meals. Along with wearing purple, the GSA also asked students to sign an anti-bullying pledge that was hung in the dining hall lobby on Spirit Day.
GSA leader Lillian Regal ’24 said, “Spirit Day was started in response to high suicide rates among high schoolers who were bullied for either being gay, or because people thought they were.” She elaborated, saying, “It was a Canadian teenager who started the idea to wear purple to support for queer youth and stand against bullying in schools in particular.”
Regal referenced the Gilbert Baker flag (commonly known as the rainbow flag or pride flag), saying, “The original rainbow flag had eight stripes, and they all had specific meanings. The purple is ‘spirit’ — that’s the meaning associated with it.”
River Ordonez ’24, another GSA leader, added, “Purple also relates to lavender and the Lavender Scare.” (The Lavender Scare was a mid-20th century wave of persecution against gay and lesbian people, coinciding with McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare.) “We decided that it would go nicely with the Matthew Shepard concert and our slideshows,” Ordonez continued.
Regal credited Director of Inclusion and Community Life Steven Lee as the “spark of the idea,” recalling that “we showed up to the Alliance Leaders’ meeting before school started, and Mr. Lee was just like, ‘Spirit Day?’ So it was really his idea; it was his idea to do the socks. We collaborated with him in terms of thinking about messages to the school.”
While Spirit Days have been celebrated at Deerfield in previous years, this was the first time it was initiated as a school-wide event.
This Spirit Day was underscored by the Matthew Shepard Initiative. Regal said that the Matthew Shepard concert served to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death.
Ordonez agreed with Regal, saying, “We just thought it connected so well, especially with the purple and the socks representative of standing up to against bullying against LGBTQ+ kids, and connecting Matthew Shepard’s impactful story to it.”
In addition to the Matthew Shepard concert, sports teams were asked to wear the purple socks to their games. Socks were passed out Tuesday after sit-down in the Dining Hall, and were worn at Saturday games.
Referencing the anti-bullying pledge that was hung in the Dining Hall lobby for students to sign, Ordonez said, “We planned on using that to show the administration at Deerfield how important these issues are to people on campus and have it as a physical thing where you can see how many signatures [there are] and [how many] people care and want change to happen. I think we’re also bringing that back for pride prom.”
Regal emphasized that everyone has the right to feel safe in the Deerfield community communities regardless of their sexuality and gender. She said, “The next step in order for Deerfield to be safer is getting people to think about the unintentional jokes they make. Deerfield is a place where we don’t have to worry about physical harm, but stuff still does happen.” She also shared that dorms can be particularly exclusive settings.
Regal noted the importance of visibility through events like Spirit Day, saying, “An important part of Spirit Day is normalizing being queer, and normalizing we are just people, because I think a lot of what we see sometimes is viewing queer people as this weird new thing that people don’t know how to exist around. A lot of that just comes down to accepting that people are just people who want to live their lives.”
Ordonez added to this message, saying, “There’s this idea of remembrance and supporting people; we aren’t bringing up these sad facts to just put it out there, but it’s to acknowledge that it’s still happening today, and it’s important that we focus on these issues, change them in any way we can, and find ways to support the people we love.”