Cole Escola’s T-Shirt Is Asking The Important Questions

Cole Escola needs to be more famous, like, yesterday. They wrote and are currently starring in a hit play titled, Oh Mary!, a satirized, fictionalized, yassified retelling of the life of former First Lady of the United States, Mary Todd Lincoln, with many creative lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness taken. It started off-Broadway, and tickets were so hard to get that I couldn’t even really recommend the show to people because there was no way to get in. But now that the show is on Broadway, it’s only a matter of time before Cole Escola is annoyingly famous. They’re already getting photos taken by the paparazzi.

They were seen sporting funny little t-shirt that you might only recognize if you were tapped into a gay little scene in New York in the late 2010s. Right up at the collar, it says, “WHAT EXACTLY IS HETEROSEXUALITY AND WHAT CAUSES IT?” It’s a t-shirt by a designer named Willie Norris, and gay people you followed on Instagram were wearing the shit out of it in, like, 2018. It was inspired by the 1975 poster mural made by a British playwright named Alan Wakeman, who was poking fun at the way traditional culture spoke about homosexuality.

You can’t get the exact same shirt anymore, tragically. But lucky for us, Willie Norris Workshop keeps images of all their old stock on their website, and they still sell their iconic “PROMOTE HOMOSEXUALITY” shirts. Some of their old hits include shirts featuring the metafield text from a 2023 Phoebe Philo collection launch, a funny review from a New York Times Cooking recipe, and a tee that says “MY ART IS BETTER THAN YOUR ART.” Love.