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During the late ’80s and early ’90s, an era when feminism was derided by conservative leaders and media personalities like Rush Limbaugh, whose term feminazi was adopted by broader culture, the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) was on a mission to take back the word feminist. T-shirts have also been used as corrective advertising. In the ’80s and ’90s during the AIDS crisis, T-shirts with messages like, “Who’s the Cure For,” and, “Woman with AIDS Dead Not Disabled,” were part of the efforts of ACT UP’s National Women’s Committee to draw attention to women with AIDS, who were left out of laws addressing the disease and excluded from receiving disability. They would often wear T-shirts featuring their organization’s name and logo to marches and other events to spread awareness. The group held regular community meetings on topics including racism and single lesbian parenting, and published Azalea: A Magazine by Third World Lesbians and the Salsa Soul Gayzette. Salsa Soul Sisters formed out of the Black Lesbian Caucus of the gay liberation movement in the mid-’70s in response to existing gay organizations neither welcoming nor supporting the concerns of women of color. Wolfe describes several of the shirts in the collection that were created by marginalized groups claiming space for themselves, including one made by the Salsa Soul Sisters, the oldest Black lesbian organization in the United States. “But pulling on the T-shirt screwed all of that forever." “If you passed, you were safe,” Wilchins described in her 2017 book TRANS/gressive. The group’s visual trademark was a goth-style shirt modeled after The Rocky Horror Picture Show logo, which marchers wore at demonstrations to encourage trans visibility and center trans issues. The Transexual Menace, the first direct action group for transgender rights, was formed in 1993 by activists Riki Wilchins and Denise Norris in reaction to widespread violence and harassment against trans people. This same shirt that was used to highlight how lesbian rights were left out of the second-wave feminist movement was later adapted to call attention to discrimination against trans people, both within mainstream gay and lesbian spaces, and in society at large.
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This attention-grabbing demonstration contributed to Friedan later apologizing and NOW pivoting to include lesbian rights within its agenda. “Yes, yes, sisters! I’m tired of being in the closet because of the women’s movement,” Jay shouted as she unbuttoned her blouse to reveal a Lavender Menace shirt. In response, lesbian activists including Rita Mae Brown and Karla Jay formed a group called Lavender Menace, reclaiming Friedan’s phrase, and famously revealed T-shirts printed with the slogan at a meeting of the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970. Friedan and others worried that association with lesbians would be bad for NOW overall and distanced the organization from lesbian causes. In 1969, Betty Friedan, a leader of the National Organization for Women (NOW), used the term lavender menace to dismiss an outspoken sect of lesbian women in the group advocating for NOW to include equal rights for lesbians within their group’s goals. (Suffragists were known for wearing white, for example, and Macy’s was even the “official headquarters” for suffrage paraphernalia-perhaps the earliest known example of what Andi Zeisler calls “marketplace feminism.”) But one particular T-shirt made waves during the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Feminist fashion extends back before the advent of the T-shirt in the late 19th century.