Maria Pulzetti said many folks will tell her that their first exposure to LGBTQ+ activism was in middle school or high school, through the national youth movement known as Day of Silence. However, these same folks do not realize a key detail about the annual event until Pulzetti informs them.
“They’re always very surprised that it’s connected to me,” she said.
Pulzetti co-founded the event while she was a student at the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1996, and now works as the Student Rabbi at the Germantown Jewish Centre in Philadelphia.
Day of Silence is a national youth movement protesting the marginalization of the LGBTQ+ community. Across the country, LGBTQ+ and ally students take a daylong vow of silence to symbolically represent the silence they face as a result of bullying and harassment. It’s held every year in April, and is currently organized by GLSEN. The movement has gone through some rebrands in recent years to meet the emerging needs of LGBTQ+ youth, but first, let’s go back to the beginning.
The first Day of Silence
Before students in middle schools and high schools across the country began participating in the national Day of Silence, it began as an idea Pulzetti conceived in 1996 when she was a first-year student at the University of Virginia (UVA). After she came out earlier that school year, Pulzetti joined a student organization called the LGBU, a community for queer students to come together. However, Pulzetti said the organization’s initiatives were largely internal — with events such as film screenings and panel discussions — but they did not necessarily reach the whole campus.
Pulzetti, along with fellow student Jesse Gilliam, received inspiration from Julian Bond, a UVA professor who previously worked as a civil rights activist and as a government official in Georgia. Bond was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was a group of young, Black college students who participated in nonviolent direct-action protests in the 1960s. This included conducting sit-ins to protest segregation at restaurants and even organizing voter registration campaigns to unlock political power for African Americans. While taking Bond’s class, Pulzetti started thinking about ways LGBTQ+ students could make their own impact.
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“I thought, ‘Well, what can we do?’ There [has to be] nonviolent resistance that would reach more people than we’re currently teaching. And for whatever reason, I thought of this idea of taking a vow of silence — but doing it in a way that would be quite visible, that people would know we were doing it. Otherwise, it’s not really worth doing.”
While only 100 people participated in that first Day of Silence, Pulzetti said it was enough to get noticed by the school newspaper, and LGBU even had a table to promote the activity in a heavily trafficked area on campus.
“We weren’t faced with a lot of hostility and harassment, and most people were just sort of curious and pretty supportive,” Pulzetti said about the general response to that first event. “We advised people to let their professors know before class that they would not be speaking, and my experience with general faculty [was that they] were supportive of that. So we were onto something that seemed to sort of strike a chord with people, and that provided a way for talking about silencing and invisibility.”
Expanding its reach
In the summer of that year, Pulzetti and Gilliam started to wonder whether other colleges would want to participate in Day of Silence. Gilliam then went on to make a website to share information about the direct action. He and Pulzetti then started reaching out to other student groups.
“We started working with other leaders around the country, and we did that for the rest of the time we were in college,” Pulzetti said.
More than 100 colleges and universities participated in 1997.
“It became really meaningful, because almost immediately, everyone had a million ideas and this has been true ever since then, from that time until now, almost 30 years later,” Pulzetti said. “The thing about this event is you can customize it to make it work for whatever your particular community needs.”
For example, students at UVA and beyond also started to organize Breaking the Silence rallies for participants to express themselves and share experiences.
“It’s been gratifying and just exciting to see how young people have taken it in different directions, or added their ideas to it and used it to address their needs in their communities,” Pulzetti said.
Eventually, the Day of Silence expanded its reach even further when GLSEN became the official organizational sponsor in 2001, two years after Pulzetti and Gilliam graduated from UVA. Pulzetti had a fellowship in Russia shortly after graduation and couldn’t participate in efforts with GLSEN but Gilliam held onto it and worked with the organization to put the movement in the national spotlight. GLSEN continues to sponsor the event to this day.
Day of (No) Silence
Day of Silence continues to go strong almost 30 years after Pulzetti helped found it but her feelings about that are two-sided.
“On one hand, I am so gratified that the structure and the idea is a useful vehicle for students to do advising and for schools to do organizing. I think that’s fabulous, and I am often quite inspired and excited when April rolls around. I also really wish we didn’t have to keep doing it,” she said. “I really wish that the world had changed enough in the past almost 30 years that there wouldn’t be bullying, silencing, homophobia and transphobia in schools.”
The current political climate has seen numerous attacks against the LGBTQ+ community, particularly nonbinary and trans people, with everything from Don’t Say Gay laws to book bans. The current needs of the community ultimately prompted GLSEN to rebrand the movement in 2024 as Day of (No) Silence “in opposition to the current attempted erasure of LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender and nonbinary people, from public life. Being silent is no longer an option.” Students now use the day to contact their board of education and legislators to stem the tide of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and anti-LGBTQ+ policy, particularly in schools.
Pulzetti said she hopes Day of (No) Silence is a useful vehicle for making change, noting her feelings as a parent.
I’m very concerned about the environment my children are growing up in, and making sure that they and their friends can continue to get health care and will not suffer because of whatever their identities are,” she said. “We’re living in a really, really difficult time, and there’s a lot to be concerned about.”
Continuing to break the silence
Pulzetti noted the importance of legislators at both local and national levels hearing from youth.
“Those voices are so powerful,” she said. “Even when it might feel hopeless, I think a story can still at least change the narrative and help people understand, even if it doesn’t change the law itself.”
While she does think youth voices are powerful, she also understands that some LGBTQ+ youth may not be ready to come out, making their safety and confidentiality a priority. However, there are still others who can speak up on behalf of youth.
“Allies, especially other children who are allies, or their parents or teachers or educators, have a really, really important role to play, because it’s not always safe for the people who are most directly impacted by discrimination to be the ones [to speak up],” Pulzetti said.
“I really think given the political climate right now, some of the greatest needs of our young people [is for us] to affirm their humanity and affirm their access to health care,” she added. “It feels like we’re almost sort of like stepping back to the real basics of making sure people can be safe. For instance, when the current administration took away the funding for the LGBTQ suicide hotline, that’s just so painful, because we know that suicidality is overrepresented in LGBTQ youth.”
Pulzetti emphasized the importance of adults, especially those who work in fields serving LGBTQ+ youth, helping youth access educational resources if their schools are not providing them anymore. She noted that while it’s “not an easy time to be a queer kid” due to elected officials attempting to silence the LGBTQ+ community, one thing remains true.
“We’re not going anywhere,” Pulzetti said.
