“Wearing homosexuality on their sleeves”: 60 years of LGBTQ+ t-shirts

When Eric Gonzaba came out as gay in the 2000s, his family and friends accepted him. He was grateful for the support, but it was still an isolating experience being a queer teenager in a small rural town. "I always thought I was alone, being the only gay person in Harrison County, Indiana," he said. So he was nervous the first time he wore a rainbow flag T-shirt on his college campus at Indiana University. He still remembers how he felt.

"It was a symbol that I was comfortable being myself," Gonzaba said .

Gonzaba thinks a lot about T-shirts. He's not exactly a collector, but he has an "obsession" with how queer people express themselves with the shirts they wear. "T-shirts don't tell you the whole story of a person's life, but it's an exciting place to start," he said. "What did this shirt mean to the person wearing it?"

Gonzaba, a professor of American studies at the University of California, Fullerton, began cataloging T-shirts online at Wearing Gay History in 2014. Since then, he has archived over 4,500 shirts. He finds the pieces in queer archives around the world, sifting through mothballed boxes to photograph each shirt in the collections. He puts the shirts on his mannequins, takes a photo and moves on to the next one. Photos are uploaded to his website.

When Gonzaba started archiving shirts, he thought most of the pieces would come from gay capitals like New York or San Francisco, and would mostly involve the shirts long-awaited commemorative Harvey Milk and Keith Haring illustrations.

But at the first archive he visited, in Indianapolis, he opened a box full of tops advertising gay bars or bowling leagues. "It changed the way I see my own community," he said. "These people weren't shy about their sexuality, and they literally wore their homosexuality on their sleeves."

Today Gonzaba's archive includes tops gay rodeos in Reno, Nevada, lesbian bars in Houston, Texas, and trans student groups in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and Johannesburg, South Africa.

"Queer culture exists everywhere," Gonzaba said. "When I started this project, people told me that I would find most of my T-shirts in New York, because that's where the gay movement happened. It really bothered me. This was such a slap in the face for other places.dotcomrendering.pageElements.ImageBlockElement" class="dcr-173mewl">