National Coming Out Day: Shirts That Say It Without a Speech
October 11 was a date before it was a holiday. Where National Coming Out Day comes from, and what a shirt can carry when a conversation is hard to start.
National Coming Out Day falls on October 11, and the date was borrowed rather than chosen. On October 11, 1987, a national march for lesbian and gay rights filled the streets of Washington. One year later, to the day, the first National Coming Out Day was held, and eighteen states took part in it. The reasoning behind the whole thing was plain, and it has not changed since: people revise an opinion about a group the moment they find out they already know someone in it.
What October 11 actually marks
Two organizers set it up in 1988, the psychologist Robert Eichberg and the activist Jean O’Leary, and they built it as a standing invitation rather than a demonstration. There was no march to attend and nothing to sign. The entire proposal was that one conversation, held once, in a kitchen or in a car, does more work than a crowd does.
The march it commemorates was the second of its kind, the first having been held in 1979. Both were single days that came and went. The day named after them returns every year, which is the part that made it last.
October carries a second date as well
October is also LGBTQ History Month in the United States. Rodney Wilson, a high school history teacher in Missouri, started it in 1994, and he picked October for an unglamorous reason: it sits squarely inside the school year, when students are in class and a lesson can actually be taught. Dates usually get chosen for a battle or a birth. This one was chosen for a timetable.
So the month holds two things at once, a history syllabus and a single day aimed at the present. A shirt makes a poor syllabus. It is not bad at the second job.
A shirt instead of a speech
The design that says the most with the fewest words is Be Yourself, They’ll Adjust, Puzzle Piece Tee. Four puzzle pieces sit locked together in the middle of the chest, two blue and two pink, drawn flat and clean, and a fifth has lifted out of the square and floats free in full rainbow. The joke is the word adjust. It hands the adjusting to everyone else, and it does that without raising its voice.
The same joke told from the other end is Just Fit In, They’ll Adjust, Rainbow Puzzle Tee. The pieces are the same, the rainbow one has still come loose, but the lettering is much bigger and the instruction lands flat. It is the one to pick if it needs to be read from the far side of a room rather than across a table.
For the people who are not the ones coming out
Half the audience for this day is the parent, the brother, the friend at work. In a World Where You Can Be Everything, Be Kind Tee is drawn for them. A wide circle of people stand in a green field holding hands, drawn small and from behind, with a rainbow heart hanging in the sky above the whole gathering. It is painted like an illustration rather than a graphic, and it carries into a classroom, a hospital corridor or a family Sunday without turning the day into a subject.
Follow the Light, Rainbow Lighthouse Tee does a similar job through a metaphor it never explains. A white lighthouse stands on its rock, and the lamp does not sweep one beam around the horizon: it fires outward in dozens of straight rays that fill the upper half of the chest, each ray a different color, thinning as they reach the edge. Nothing on the shirt spells out what the light is for, which is why it works.
When the day is not the point
Two of these have nothing to do with a date on a calendar. Follow Your Own Path, Rainbow Road Sunset Tee runs a rainbow road dead ahead to the horizon inside a retro sunset arch, with small dark figures walking it at their own pace and the sky stacked in warm stripes behind them. It is the design for the person who got there late and got there anyway, and the road does the talking.
Loud and Proud, Rainbow Heart Lettering Tee takes the opposite approach. The heart on the chest is built entirely out of its own lettering, LOUD across the upper left, PROUD across the upper right, AND dropping into the point at the bottom, so the shape is made by the words instead of being drawn around them. It reads instantly at a distance, which is the whole requirement in a crowd.
All of them are drawn here, printed on black, and shipped by Amazon. The rest of the range sits in Pride and Statements.
Questions people ask
When is National Coming Out Day?
October 11, every year, with no moving parts. It has fallen on the same date since the first one in 1988, because the date is the anniversary of the 1987 march, and moving it would delete the reason for it.
Is October LGBTQ History Month as well?
Yes, in the United States. It was started in 1994 by a high school history teacher and it runs the whole month, with National Coming Out Day sitting inside it on the eleventh. The two were set up separately, thirty-odd years apart in intent, and they now share a calendar page.
What do you give someone who has just come out?
Something they can wear on an ordinary Wednesday. The designs that last are the ones that do not announce a category, and a shirt worn to the grocery store has already done more than one folded in a drawer until June.