Yale Drops "Sissy" Shirts

To stoke up student fervor for their annual football game with arch rival Harvard, Yale students voted to sell a t-shirt using a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald: "I think of all Harvard men as sissies." On the back, the students added: "WE AGREE." But after complaints from a campus LGBT group, the shirt has been dropped.

The LGBT Co-op first heard about the T-shirts from a member of the Yale College Council, LGBT Co-op Coordinator Rachel Schiff ’10 said. She followed suit by contacting the dean and master of her college — Silliman — to encourage dialogue among the Co-op, administrators and FCC. Ou said Wednesday that he first heard about the winning T-shirt design when FCC brought the complaints to him. In response, he told the FCC chairs to meet with the concerned students face to face. Shortly after he told FCC to respond to the co-op’s concerns, Ou said, he told Yale College Dean Mary Miller about the issue, and she decided to pull the design. “What purports to be humor by targeting a group through slurs is not acceptable,” Miller said in an e-mail to the News. Still, FCC representatives had concluded they would not make their final decision until they met with the co-op. “Independently of Dean Miller’s decision, our primary concern was that no one was hurt, offended or felt uncomfortable with ourT-shirts,” Levin said. After that discussion, he said, representatives decided to withdraw that design and opt for a different one, featuring a white ‘H’ in the front inside a transluscent white circle, with a white line slashed through it.

Freepers react:

-"F. Scott Fitzgerald called them sissies because had he called them faggots he would have had to have gone to re-education camp."
-"How about a shirt that says “I think queers are filthy and disease ridden”......"
-"These kids need to learn that the queers and weirdos among us wake up in the morning looking to be offended. They know they're perverted, and live life feeling guilty, as they should."