Tattooed and Chained on Etsy has dozens of pieces of chain mail and scale mail jewelry for pride, and I need you to go support the hell out of them.
Ace, Pan, Bi, Genderfluid, Trans, Non-Binary, Genderqueer, and plenty of rainbows if you want the broader umbrella. And multiple options across all of them. And a few solo pieces in other sexualities! AND they can do custom pieces! I am delighted and am probably going to need so many of them.
I feel so so sorry for any lesbian who wants even a single piece of pride gear because it’s so impossible to find even the smallest thing.
Blah blah blah deactivate your lesbophobia. This shop has over 100 products and not a single one of them could put together a a couple spare red, pink, and white/silver links despite falling all over itself to cater to cishet and pretentious bi pride.
Hi there! I know it can be disconcerting to find a store that sells cool pride merch and doesn’t sell anything for your orientation or gender, so I made this blog! I try to reblog a lot of lesbian pride merch because I know it’s hard to find, so if you’re looking for some, you can look at my #lesbian tag, or #wlw or #sapphic for less specific wlw merch!
A lot of shops, myself included, have written a lot about how there’s a lot of yelling about availability of lesbian pride products but a) the lesbian pride flag involves seven different shades of red and pink that are very close together but all distinct and b) all this yelling really doesn’t translate into sales. There are a number of reasons why that ‘not translating into sales’ thing is the case, and none of them are that (in my case especially) lesbian pride merch wasn’t made available.
I am still in the red (pardon the pun) on embroidery thread colors necessary for lesbian pride merch, and that’s after I streamlined the colors down to 5 from 7 (because frankly jamming 7 colors that close together into a 2″ patch looks terrible) and every single patch on my store is available in literally every flag ever, including an ‘Other’ option if you don’t see your flag in the dropdown.
We made hundreds of different t-shirt designs available last year, including in the lesbian flag, and every single one of the lesbian pride designs timed out while selling in other flags. Heck, I’ve sold more ‘The Moon Is My Girlfriend’ shirts in bi pride than in lesbian pride. So we made the decision to go to it being a ‘custom request’ flag, like a lot of the other flags that don’t get purchased a lot. Why? IDK, probably because this flag being the ‘lesbian flag’ and not the ‘lipstick lesbian’ flag is not really well-known off of Tumblr, and most of the people who I know are lesbians and have bought from us buy the rainbow flag? Because the people who loudly declaim that they want it are screaming a lot but not buying anything? I don’t know.
What I do know is that independent creators are not unlimited fonts of money to buy supplies and create listings for things that don’t sell. We aren’t here to throw money down a hole for the express purpose of not getting yelled at on social media. Personally, I have a trans lesbian daughter to feed, a mortgage to pay, clothes to put on my trans queer disabled back, and so on.
When people have requested lesbian pride items, they’ve been made available, and I can’t think of a single small artist who, if you approached them and said ‘I’d like to buy a thing, is it possible to buy a thing?’ wouldn’t say ‘let me see if I can get the appropriate colors in my materials’ and make that thing available if it’s at all possible. Because we are here to make money, and we like to make people happy. You don’t become a small artist because you like telling people no or making them feel bad or excluded. At least, none of the people I know in the LGBT+ merch community have. We want you to buy our stuff.
But the truth is, this isn’t about whether or not the lesbian flag can be purchased: it’s about screaming at independent creators, and it’s about the fact that ace merch was offered, and that bi pride merch was offered in this post. The person doing the ‘the only reason is lesbophobia’ nonsense makes that pretty clear by calling the ace merch ‘cishet’ merch and the bi pride merch ‘pretentious.’
The people who actually want to purchase lesbian pride merch are reaching out to artists and saying ‘hey can you make this available so I can buy it?’ They’re not just randomly bitching on Tumblr. I really, really wish that this kind of behavior – especially when it includes such nakedly bigoted language against other members of the LGBTQIPA community – would simply no longer be given the time of day.
Because this isn’t about the merch, and it isn’t about making lesbian pride stuff available for the people behaving like this: it’s about being abusive toward other members of the community. That much is VERY clear from the post above, and the other posts like it.
Ask, or don’t, but frankly that kind of behavior needs to be ignored from now on. I didn’t tolerate that kind of naked tantrum from my kid when she was a toddler, and I wouldn’t let someone stand in my storefront and talk like that about other customers. You go into any storefront and you behave like that, you’ll find your ass outside faster than someone can say ‘SECURITY,’ and I don’t know why people think they can treat independent artists any differently.
(I do know, and it’s because we actually give a shit and are close enough to be swung at, but it’s a rhetorical statement and anyway we’re not required to stand still so we can be swung at.)
Anyway: stop treating independent artists this way. Independent artists and the blogs that support us: please, please, stop tolerating this behavior. We’ve explained, we’ve talked, we’ve discoursed. The people who want to actually buy something know how to contact us and treat us like we’re human beings whose time, effort, and art is deserving of respect. The people who don’t? We don’t need to see ourselves called ‘lesbophobes’ over and over by people who are just here to scream, not to support artists.
Would like to add: people need to stop telling creators what they “totally can but choose not to” make. The creator probably knows best what they can conceivably make.
I constantly see people ragging on pride merch knitters who don’t or won’t make the lesbian flag because “It’s so easy just go to the store and get the colors they have all the colors you need on one wall,” but they’re not realizing how much they don’t know about a situation.
Specific examples, if I’m going to make a hat, a basic hat with block color stripes, it’d probably run $15-20 because I’d be using relatively cheap acrylic and don’t pay myself much in labor (at that price something like .75-1.50 an hour most likely). People keep saying that it’s “so easy” to source pinks from yarn stores. I don’t know what yarn stores they go to so I can’t refute each accusation one by one, but the only similarly priced brand that I know of that might have all the right pinks is I Love This Cotton, which is a Hobby Lobby brand and I refuse to sell LGBT people LGBT merch that I made out of materials produced by homophobes. Maybe other people have lower standards but my bare minimum for making pride merch out of someone’s product is “can’t be openly, publicly, loudly homophobic.”
“There are so many colors of yarn though” yes but most of those are very expensive hand-dyed and typically made of different material (typically various wools or bamboo). If I used custom-dyed yarn your one hat would have to be upwards of $80 assuming I paid myself absolutely nothing in labor. And then I’d get reamed for upcharging for lesbians and we’d be back at square one.
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