The “Fine By Me” project is a nonprofit organization that works with students across the U.S. to develop campaigns against homophobia on their campuses and in the surrounding communities. The concept was developed in 2003 by a group of ten Duke University students led by Lucas Schaefer.
The Princeton Review had just ranked Duke at the top of a list of schools for which “being alternative is not an alternative,” in effect declaring it one of the most homophobic campuses in the country. The concern was that this ranking could quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “The fear was that it would make Duke a more homophobic place,” Schaefer recalled, “because fewer gay students would apply to the school, and it could also attract students who valued that sort of close-minded atmosphere.”
The question then was how to prove that students at Duke were more open to diversity than it might appear. The idea was to provide an easy way for people to show that they weren’t homophobic. The group decided on a T-shirt campaign and finally agreed on the simple tagline, “Gay? Fine by me.”
The students found a printer, raised some money, and organized a campus-wide day against homophobia. Over 500 students donned the shirts, including some prominent student athletes. The campaign got exposure in the local press and even The New York Times. The next year Duke dropped off the Princeton list entirely. “Did we have anything to do with that? Of course, I can’t prove it, but I think we did,” Schaefer told me. “And a student group at Duke just ordered another 500 shirts this past fall.”
Schaefer graduated from Duke last year and got involved in what seemed the only thing worth doing at the time: working on the national campaign to elect Democrats to office. On the campaign trail in Florida, he worked with a lot of people from “red” America, states like Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and this came as a revelation. It was out of this experience that he decided to revisit the Fine By Me project after the election, and to incorporate the group as a nonprofit in New York. “I came back to this because I wanted to challenge the narrative that was coming out of the election, which conservative groups were hijacking to say, ‘See, we were right all along. Americans do not like gay people.’”
Fine By Me is an antidote to this, a way for people in the Red States to repudiate that narrative. The ruling philosophy of the project is that if you change the perception, the reality will follow. The T-shirts remain the primary organizing tool for now, but the organization is also looking to run ads in local newspapers that provide a forum for people to out themselves to their community. “Ideally, these ad campaigns would be sponsored by a local native son or daughter even if that person now lives in Chicago or L.A. That way we avoid the perception of the ‘Blue-Stater’ breezing in to town with liberal politics from the coast.” To date, Fine By Me has touched down on colleges and universities in 42 states, and includes such institutions as Southern Methodist College in Dallas, the University of South Dakota, and Notre Dame.
So, can four words really change perceptions, and in turn change the reality of homophobia as it is experienced in much of the U.S.? “The ultimate success of the campaign would be if there were no need for these shirts,” Lucas reflected, “or it would be that these shirts just become part of the fabric around us, that you see somebody wearing one at a gas station in South Carolina and don’t think twice about it. Is that a stretch? Maybe. But I also think that this is a much more interesting country than the pundits would have us believe.”
For more information, visit the website, www.finebyme.org.
