When the Shirt Hits the Fan

Here in the Decade of the Nose Ring, fashion knows no boundaries.

Given the prevalence of pierced private parts, eye-popping hair colors, hormone-alert necklines and pants that ride too low, it’s easy to argue that anything goes.

Yet when it comes to public displays of words and images, society still draws a line. Across the nation, people wearing T-shirts with religious, sexual or political messages are routinely getting bounced from schools, amusement parks, offices and other locales.

And one state, South Carolina, is even considering a ban on some shirts.

“People are trying to hide behind the 1st Amendment to make money selling what I would consider smut,” complains Mark Kelley, the Myrtle Beach, S.C., legislator who wrote the anti-indecent apparel measure. “They don’t realize what it’s doing to the minds of younger kids.”

What exactly inspired Kelley’s outrage?

“If I could blink you over to Myrtle Beach and walk you past [the tourist T-shirt shops], you wouldn’t be asking that question,” he says. “You’d see four-letter words, people in positions of intercourse. . . . I don’t think this is where our forefathers wanted the 1st Amendment to go.”

Of course, battles over the limits of free speech are as old as the republic itself, but the increasingly sexual nature of T-shirt messages is changing the debate--and the law. Not so long ago, “Party Naked” was about as raunchy as things got. Now, most shirts in that genre are unprintable here.

*

Message T-shirts have become so ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine them not existing. But undergarment historians say the phenomenon didn’t really begin until about 1970.

Before that, Americans advertised their sentiments via lapel buttons, ribbons or even pipes with bowls carved to look like politicians. Among the earliest such trinkets is a button from George Washington’s inauguration.

“The T-shirt is just a larger and more personalized version of the political button,” says Edith Mayo, a curator emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution. “If you want to get something off your chest, you put something on your chest.”

The primordial political T-shirt emerged in 1948, during Thomas Dewey’s presidential bid, but it was sized for a child. The first adult political T arrived--depending on who is asked--in either 1964 or 1968.

Aside from that, the protest decade was surprisingly devoid of 1st Amendment fashion. For much of the 1960s, coats and ties were so de rigueur that “the gesture of wearing a T-shirt at all was sufficiently rebellious that no message was needed,” says Richard Martin, curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

Still, a few such shirts did appear. The Smithsonian collection, for example, includes a shirt imprinted with a giant red fist, worn at Harvard during 1968 or ’69. And Mayo mentions a handful of late ‘60s Ts that promoted women’s liberation and the NAACP. Most were hand-decorated with spray paint and stencils or silk screen.

In 1970, however, thanks to a technological advance called “plastisol-ink heat transfer,” full-color slogan T-shirts exploded onto the national scene.

And that’s when the shirt really hit the fan.

At first, most of the censorship fights revolved around political messages--and T-shirt wearers usually won, based on a pair of Supreme Court rulings.

In one, Tinker vs. Des Moines, a brother and sister were suspended for wearing black armbands at high school to protest the Vietnam War. But in 1969 the justices backed the pupils, declaring that students don’t forfeit “their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

In the other case, Cohen vs. California, a man was jailed for entering a Los Angeles courthouse in a jacket that said, “F--- the draft.” He was convicted of disturbing the peace, but the verdict was overturned on free-speech grounds.

*

More recently, however, the content of T-shirt messages has shifted from political to sexual--and judges have been far less sympathetic.

The kinds of shirts causing trouble are legion. A recent visit to two Newport Beach T-shirt shops turned up plenty of examples, but only a handful that are printable: “Zero to Horny in 2.5 Beers,” “I Like My Coffee Like I Like My Sex (Hot, Strong and on the Kitchen Table)” and “Bite Me!”

There were also numerous sexual takeoffs on Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan and a lewd, tasteless “Oriental Delights” restaurant menu.

The primary customers seem to be teens and college students, usually tourists, store clerks say. But plenty of middle-aged and older couples stopped to chortle at the window displays.

Does anyone ever complain? Not really, says a salesman: “They gave up.”

But there has been a backlash.

The biggest crackdown on such apparel has been in the classroom. Some schools worry that allowing suggestive shirts exposes them to sexual harassment lawsuits. Others say such messages violate community moral standards.

The schools usually win, based on a 1986 Supreme Court case that upheld the three-day suspension of a Washington student who used sexual innuendoes in a school election speech.

In that case, the Supreme Court found a “marked distinction” between political messages and sexual ones. It said public schools are responsible for teaching “the habits and manners of civility” and thus could “prohibit the use of vulgar and offensive terms.”

The same logic has also been applied to defend rules outlawing shirts that advocate drugs, alcohol or tobacco. In one case, a federal judge in Virginia even barred an anti-drug slogan, “Drugs Suck,” because of the word “suck.”

Other recent student fashion cases have allowed schools to ban pupils from attending proms in the clothes of the opposite sex and to outlaw T-shirts depicting a principal in a drunken stupor, says Perry Zirkel, a Lehigh University professor of education and law who tracks such rulings.

The drunken principal cartoon indicates that students should be wary even when using humor, Zirkel says: “It’s sort of like joking [about a bomb] at the airport.”

*

But school administrators don’t always prevail.

Last year, a Cleveland principal sent home a sixth-grade girl for wearing a “National Stop Police Brutality Day” shirt that featured a silhouette illustration of a cop clubbing someone. The principal apparently deemed it “upsetting to African American students,” who misinterpreted it as a slur, says Chris Link of Ohio’s American Civil Liberties Union.

The school backed down after pressure from the ACLU.

A similar case arose in Simi Valley a few years ago when ninth-grader John Spindler was sent home for wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the American flag, in violation of school policy barring shirts with any writing or pictures.

The dress code was intended to discourage gangs, but the ACLU said it went too far. The case was settled before trial when the school dropped prohibitions against expressing “thoughts or ideas.”

It’s a common scenario. If confronted over religious or political T-shirts, most schools relent, say ACLU officials. Principals can see that free speech in those areas is strongly protected, Link says, and they realize that “if they’re pigheaded and go to court, we’d clean their clocks.”

But nobody is sure what would happen if a student wore a shirt that said “Legalize Marijuana.”

It’s pro-drug, which usually loses in court, but it’s also a political statement, which usually wins. “We’re looking for a test case along this line,” Link says.

But Zirkel notes: “Most kids are sort of apathetic about politics. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s not a message about Clinton or Gingrich. It’s ‘Big Johnson’ [slang for penis] or ‘Coed Naked [Activity Here].’ ”

As for sexual slogans outside school grounds, most go unchallenged. But in Florida six years ago, a short-order cook was jailed for 10 days for coming to court in a T that said “Haulin’ Ass” with a picture of four naked butts. And amusement parks such as Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm routinely turn away patrons dressed in clothing that park officials consider offensive to families.

Court rulings give private businesses wide latitude in controlling clothing worn by employees and customers. But there are exceptions. In California, for instance, the state civil rights act bars any “arbitrary form of discrimination” within a business establishment.

Thus, when four men wearing Nazi lapel pins were ejected from a German restaurant in Torrance 10 years ago, a judge said their civil rights had been violated.

“Obviously speech can be dangerous,” says Marjorie Heins, author of “Sex, Sin and Blasphemy” (New Press, 1993). “But the whole premise of our democracy is that suppression of ideas by the government is more dangerous. We should combat dangerous ideas with education instead.”

Heins also notes that sexual and religious messages can be meant “ironically [or] to educate, not to advocate.”

But they can nevertheless infuriate.

*

Which brings us back to South Carolina.

Kelley’s measure, which has cleared the state’s House and moved to the Senate (the governor has vowed to sign the bill), would block offensive shirts from being worn or sold in the presence of minors. “It would be OK to sell this stuff, but stores couldn’t put it where families and kids can see it,” Kelley says.

As for who defines “indecent,” he says each county or community would set its own standards.

That’s crazy, says Steven Bates, executive director of the state’s ACLU chapter: “It would make free speech subject to majority rule.”

Things could be worse. In Kuwait a few years ago, a man was sentenced to 15 years in prison for wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Saddam Hussein.