T-Shirt Collection

Lesbian and gay political t-shirts were a common sight throughout the late 1980’s and 90’s. From ‘Nobody Knows I’m a Lesbian,’ to ‘Dike – just do her’, they were used by activists to literally wear their sexuality on their sleeves.

The fashion sprang from the 1987 Silence = Death campaign produced by the graphic design collective Gran Fury. They put Aids activism on the map with their ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) t-shirts and posters featuring bold, uppercase lettering and an upside-down pink triangle. The triangle was a reappropriation of the visual marker forcibly worn by gay men in WW2 Nazi concentration camps. (Gender non-conforming people and lesbians wore black triangles.)

It'd be a rare sight today to see someone coming out in Soho in sans serif. So the current popularity of trans rights t-shirts indicates the trans struggle to be comparatively lagging 40 years behind the wider lesbian and gay movement… Despite evidence that trans people have always been at the forefront of the Global North’s queer resistance movement.

Their popularity also demonstrates how deeply tied LGB history is to transcestry.