T-Shirt Hell Is Calling It Quits

I never heard of these guys, but apparently they've been around for a while and are now shutting down their operation for reasons of righteous pique. I read the founder's corporate suicide note and viewed some of their products.

Satire is always a tricky proposition. One might say: "The novelty t-shirt is not a fit medium for satire. People who wear novelty t-shirts are morons. They will sport a shirt with a slogan that says It's Not Gay If You Beat Them Up Afterwards with no sense of the garment's attendant irony."

The argument can be persuasive, depending on whether you do or do not personally wear novelty t-shirts. Clearly, the t-shirt in question is one that is capable of working on many levels. The person wearing it could be entirely literal and sincere, wearing those words to let the world know: "I endorse the idea of having homosexual sex, then repudiating the homosexual content of the act and expiating my guilt via brutal reprisals against my partner."

True, few who would with sincerity secretly subscribe to such an attitude would then have to balls to own up to it, right on the front of their shirt!

Another person might wear the shirt in a less personally literal way, while still subscribing to the slogan's literal content: "I like to make fun of gay stuff, and it's fun to joke about beating up gays."

So many more interpretations are possible. Literal:

"A satisfyingly violent denoument can render the morality of most questionable acts irrelevant."

"It is in fact not gay, if the only reason you engage in homosexual activity is to heighten the pain, anguish and betrayal felt by your spurned and brutalized partner after the beatdown."

"Beating them up afterwards totally voids the lighthearted, carefree and joyous aspect of what had gone before, that could otherwise have been called 'gay'."

Ironic:

"I use a shocking slogan to make people question their own attitudes, and to point up the violence simmering beneath the surface or our so-called social mores."

"I use this shirt to poke fun at the closeted gay-bashers who do really exist and who really do feel this way, but who would not be so bold as to put it right on a t-shirt, unless of course it became socially acceptable for them to do so by passing it off as satire."

"I'm secure enough in my heterosexuality and liberalism to jokingly hint that I might in fact be a gay-bashing closeted homosexual."

What can I say. It's a complex issue. And a complex shirt!