Happy Pink Shirt Day

Today I:

- Fully intended to celebrate Pink Shirt Day

- Realised on the way to work on the train, with great dismay, that I'd forgotten Pink Shirt Day

- Looked down and realised I had in fact accidentally worn a pink shirt - my only pink shirt! (Full disclosure, I hadn't worn it for months, so it was wrinkled and a little weird-smelling, not unlike its owner)

- Mentally high-fived myself

- Mentally high-fived myself again, because when you pull shiz this skillful, one high-five isn't enough

- Completely took the credit when I got positive feedback for celebrating Pink Shirt Day, almost as if I was the one who actually thought of Pink Shirt Day, and therefore deserved all the kudos for Pink Shirt Day.

Flippancy aside, I'd like to talk to you a little more about Pink Shirt Day. It's a movement against bullying, in all the crappy, crappy forms bullying takes, but its origin is a reaction to homophobia.

It's almost difficult to explain these days the origins of this event: that there was a time when males couldn't wear certain colours. Pink Shirt Day began in 2007, when a couple of Canadian kids stood up for their bullied pink-shirted classmate.

Because not so long ago, pink made you gay, and gay made you less. Simple.

Back in the day - and I'm not kidding - a lot of things were considered gay. (For men, of course: gay women were invisible. Thanks, provincial New Zealand.) To elucidate, I've helpfully compiled a list of the indictable gay crimes of times gone by.

1. Pink. Men didn't wear it. Gay.

2. Music. Gay.

3. Dancing. Also gay.

4. Sushi. In the early 90s, I actually read an article about whether sushi was gay. Seriously. I'm not even sure why the author suspected it. Maybe that gay sticky rice. Gay.

5. Feelings. More gay, if possible, than rice.

6. Sports that weren't rugby. Gay, gay, gay.

7. Reading things. Startlingly, searingly gay.

8. Cooking. Necessary to survival, but nonetheless gay.

9. The visual arts. Far from heterosexual. Just saying.

10. I don't need to give you ten reasons. It's just common sense. Why are you even asking? You're probably gay.

When stuff is hurtful, I laugh. It's a defense: one that I need for myself, and one that I feel I must build around my children.

Your love, as the mum of a rainbow kid, is supposed to be endlessly forgiving; fluffy and light, a love heart drawn in the margin of the text. My love is all of those things: and it is also the love of a mother who is afraid her child will be bullied. You don't need to be a rainbow kid's mum to know that fear - only the parent of someone different.

And so my love is also something else: scarred, frostbitten soldiers at their ramparts, dirty and unmoving and unsentimental. Awake throughout the night, medieval weapons in gnarled hands. Hands that, although they would prefer to be gentle, would run you through.

If you wore a pink shirt, today, in 2007, in any year between - if you will stand up for any kid or adult who needs it, any day from now - then you have my thanks.

You are the love heart drawn by hand and the soldier too: you no longer have to choose.

Because those days are gone.

Happy Pink Shirt Day.