How Simple Gay Apparel Makes Good Gay Visibility

When I started working on Simple Gay Apparel, I knew I wanted to design gay visibility that was subtle and creative. I’ve since gotten a better idea of what this means. What I’ve come to center my product creation around is the following three main ideas:

1) To give you control over your visibility.

My designs range from being suggestively subtle to tastefully clever. I wanted to give you a range of choices for how out you want to be, and in what way you want to self-represent.

Sometimes you may want to be big and bold—sometimes you may want to tell people you’re “GAY AF” and that you eat pussy on a t-shirt; sometimes you may want to be political and rep the phrase “Love is Love.” However, my brand takes on gay representation from a different angle. It’s really about getting at the experiential and emotional ideas. Where is the personality below the label? Where is the experience behind the pride? This is what my brand is aimed at representing.

The kinds of questions that guide my design process include, “How can I suggest gayness without being too outright or blatant? Where can I bring nuance into a message? How can I craft designs that are suggestive, thought and emotion-provoking? How can I craft designs that give ranges of interpretation, forthrightness, and representation?”

2) To make clothing with personality.

My brand isn’t about rainbows and unicorns just for the sake of rainbows and unicorns. While I love playing with symbolism, rainbows and unicorns are never the central design idea—they are never central to telling the story. Rather, I use symbols in the construction of a larger message or story.

Not only this, but I think part of the reason that rainbows and unicorns can feel so “off” in representation is because they fail to acknowledge the existence of the long path that we drudged along before being able to finally peek our head out of the darkness and at some point, hopefully, become relatively shameless. “Rainbows and unicorns...” Where’s my darkness? Where’s my anger? Where’s my sadness? Where’s my self-deprecating humor? Where’s my ownership of the hard journey? …in rainbows and unicorns?

3) To make clothing that looks good.

Creativity and intentionality are at the heart of my design process. Basically, I’m an obsessive perfectionist who wants to get it right. Getting the quality right is one of my greatest priorities—from the graphics I design—to the clothing blanks I use—to the screen-printing jobs I do. Poorly done print jobs on cheap blanks (like Gildan) are unacceptable to me and my brand!

Originally written May 4, 2022
Moved from old website