Students show support for gay rights on Day of Silence

On April 17, 2015, the Gay Straight Alliance hosted their annual Day of Silence in Room 316. Members of Gay Straight Alliance across the nation banded together in recognition of the lost rights of the lesbian, gay and transgender community. Senior Natalie Jares, secretary of GSA, presided over the Day of Silence lunch.

“The Day of Silence is about choosing to be silent in honor of those who have been silenced because of LGBT bullying,” said Jares. “A lot of groups do it to show their support. A lot of schools do it together; it was even on the Sharpstown High School bulletin. All the schools do it on the same day because it is an event organized by GLSEN, the gay, lesbian, and straight education network. It is trying to get people in school systems to participate in LGBT education.”

The Day of Silence was almost like a standard luncheon held by a club, except that every member was completely silent. That is not to say that the room was silent; to the contrary, the air was filled with the sounds of scratching pencils, relaying conversation, and tearing duct tape, covering members’ mouths. The tape in particular had significant symbolic meaning for the LGBT community.

“Some people put tape over their mouth to give a visible aspect to their silence,” said Jares, “because, if you’re not talking, some people might not understand exactly what you are doing, and also it helps remind yourself not to talk, because it is easy to slip up.”

The tape represented the social oppression of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and gave a physical manifestation of their suffering. Despite this, GSA does brighter, more positive expressions of their uniqueness during other events.

“We had a LGBT movie night a while back, and it was a lot of fun,” said Jares. “We do a tee-shirt tie dye every year, and we are going to do it again in a few weeks, where we get white teeshirts with black print and tie dye them. We always have parties for different LGBT days, such as International Transgender Day of Visibility, National Coming Out day, and other days like that, and we try to celebrate every little holiday.”

Celebrating each individual holiday epitomized the goal of the Gay Straight Alliance. The LGBT community is fighting for equal representation of everyone, no matter what particular category someone identifies as. This was reciprocated at the Day of Silence, where an episode of the show Steven Universe was shown during the luncheon.

“I showed Steven Universe because it had a lot of representation in it, said Jares. “There is a lot of diversity in it, and there are a lot of characters that you could say are gay. the crystal gems in the show are technically genderless as well, so they don’t fit into the gender-binary, and it’s just a good show overall. the creator made it to have a lot of representation in it.”

Jares understood that society was far from accepting all people as equal, but she did not see the Day of Silence as a failure for not having mass participation. For Jares, social change, no matter how slow, was still progress.

“The Day of Silence was pretty nice this year,” said Jares. “We have had a bigger turnout of people doing it before, but it was pretty effective because it started conversations about gender issues.”