Archer girls celebrate International Day of the Girl annually, but each year the celebration looks a bit different than the last. This year, leaders of the Girls Empowering Girls Club, Honor Education Council and Gender Sexuality Alliance decided to celebrate the 29th annual National Coming Out Day in addition to International Day of the Girl.

Both holidays fell on Wednesday, Oct. 11. Since there was no school that day due to the PSAT, the on-campus celebration took place two days later on Friday, Oct. 13 during lunch.

Rainbow flags, stickers and hearts decorated the courtyard. Girls sang and danced to songs like “Dancing Queen” by ABBA, participated in a pin making activity, wrote answers in response to questions on posters and painted a Wonder Woman mural made by Rose Shulman-Litwin ’18. There was also a fundraiser bake sale to benefit the LA LGBT Center’s Audre Lorde Lesbian Health Program.

Isabel Kuh ’19, an executive board member of the Girls Empowering Girls club, helped plan the celebration. She thought it was important to also celebrate National Coming Out Day to provide a broader platform and more inclusive environment for students who might not identify as female.

“Being a girl is a large part of Archer, but not everyone necessarily identifies with that,” Kuh said.

Kuh also stressed that many Archer students fall broadly along the spectrum regarding gender and sexuality.

“There’s a large amount of students at Archer who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community, so it’s incredibly important to make them feel heard and their identities supported. In GSA, we talk a lot about what it means to be queer at Archer,” Kuh wrote in an email interview.

Kuh believes that Archer should integrate conversations from diversity and identity clubs on campus into the curriculum.

“The various diversity/identity-based clubs at Archer have really great conversations about different identities…but I think we should definitely extend some of those same conversations into actual classes and the curriculum itself,” Kuh wrote.

Click the photo gallery to see highlights from the celebration.