This week many lgbt students will be participating in a Day of Silence (www.dayofsilence.org). This is an attempt by students to bring awareness to other students about the silence that surrounds many of their issues. Today I talked with my students (I've been the advisor to our lgbtq group for 18 years) about their participation. They will carry the following cards tomorrow:

"Please understand my reason for not speaking today. I am participating in the Day of Silence (DOS), a national youth movement bringing attention to the silence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender people and their allies. My deliberate silence echoes that silence, which is caused by anti-LGBT bullying, name-calling and harassment. I believe that ending that silence is the first step toward building awareness and making a commitment to address these injustices. Think abot the voices you are not hearing today."

When we talked about this I brought up the silencing of lgbt authors by Amazon as an example of how silence around our issues sometimes happens. No one's fault, no one's blame. But the silence is there. We talked about what is worse yet is the second kind of silence by Amazon. The silence that refuses to admit that anyone has been hurt. The refusal to apologize for what clearly had an effect on lgbt folks. While Amazon is busy righting the wrong, they have remained silence toward our community and such silence can not be tolerated. I asked the students to join me in a boycott of Amazon until they aopologize to our community, admitting that they have offended many of us by their silence.

I hope Amazon can hear our silence, but their corporate culture seems to say, "We don't care that you've been hurt. It wasn't our fault. It was a glitch. It wasn't purposeful homophobia." But the thing they don't get is that discrimination is even more insideous when it's not acknowledged by those who participate in it, who remain silent in the face of our anger! The students understood something that Amazon seems incapable of understanding. Silence shows culpability!