"Fine" T-shirts make change.

Shortly after graduating from Duke University in Durham, N.C., last year, Lucas Schaefer worked for the campaign to elect John Kerry for president. After Kerry was defeated, Schaefer decided he needed to get back to his college activist roots. "I saw that conservative groups were hijacking the results to say, 'See, we were right all along. Americans do not like gay people,'" Schaefer says. "I wanted to challenge that."

So the gay 22-year-old from Newton, Mass., helped launch Fine by Me, a new organization (nearing nonprofit status at press time) helping students across the U.S. fight homophobia on their campuses. The concept was conceived in 2003 by Schaefer and nine other students at Duke. The Princeton Review had for years ranked the university near or at the top of its list of schools where "alternative lifestyles [are] not an alternative"--a de facto ranking of the country's most homophobic campuses. In response, the students printed up thousands of shirts with the slogan GAY? FINE BY ME. Hundreds of people at Duke, including two members of its renowned basketball team, donned the shirts in a campuswide show of support. News media around the world picked up the story. The next year Duke fell off the Princeton Review list.

Schaefer's venture has become a phenomenal success. Fine by Me has distributed almost 25,000 shirts to universities and high schools in 43 states. The project's goal is simple: Change the perception, and the reality will follow.

But the project is facing some organized opposition. At a daylong Fine by Me awareness campaign at Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Flossmoor, Ill., on April 19, one local church printed up its own T-shirts that read CRIMES COMMITTED AGAINST GOD. "It divided our school," says Alissa Norby, who led the Fine by Me contingent at Homewood-Flossmoor. "It also encouraged people to make their own shirts, some of which said GAY, BURN IN HELL and GAY, NO WAY."

But Fine by Me proponents far outnumber opponents, Schaefer says, and now even business owners are buying them for employees to wear, including Raleigh, N.C., law firm Hass & Parker.