It’s Pride Month Eve here in my time zone. Next year will mark the quadragennial—forty years—of my first coming out. On a late spring day in 1987, I stood in front of the mirror in my dorm’s bathroom and said, “hello, gay person.” That self-acknowledgement, after years and years of hoping and praying that I might one day wake up and be attracted to women—even after spending those selfsame years and years both lusting after and lusting with other men—drew the first curtain on my (unconvincing) performance of heterosexuality.
If only a mirror confessional had been sufficient. Coming out is an exercise in recursion. Even now, moments of micro-comings-out persist. To the caller who identifies Hiro as my wife. To the real estate agent who wonders what my relationship to Hiro is.
After spending some time away from Twitter, I checked in this past week to remember that Twitter still fosters great community for non-Japanese residents of Japan. In doing so, I can across the results of two polls.
The first, conducted by Dentsu, noted that support for marriage equality has passed the seventy percent mark in Japan. That survey also asked (anonymous) respondents to identify their sexuality, and for the first time in the history of such surveys in Japan, the number of people who admitted their queerness entered double-digit territory.
A similar survey on marriage equality attitudes across Asia conducted by Pew Research in 2023 placed Japan first for favorable responses. Higher than the two countries where marriage equality is now the law, Taiwan and Thailand.
Why, I hear you ask, is marriage equality not yet a thing in Japan, if public support is so strong?
The simplest answer, to my mind, is the lack of a broadly popular progressive political party in Japan. Even younger people in Japan skew conservative when in the voting booth.
However, I (and many others in Japan) still believe that change is imminent. A Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality will arrive later this year or early in 2027 and, based on the majority of lower court rulings, the possibility that the Supremes will find the lack of equality to be in violation of Japan’s constitution, either because it denies equal access to the law or because it denies equal access to matrimony.
Unlike the system in the United States, however, Supreme Court rulings in Japan will not immediately change the law. It will be up to the Diet to do so, but legal drafts for such changes have been in the files of Home Affairs Ministry officials since the 1990s. No tabula rasa excuses!
If you’re looking for a wardrobe upgrade (or stickers, magnets, greeting cards, or even throw pillows) for Pride allow me to tempt you with some of the different collections from my shop on Threadless. (All of the t-shirt screenshots, below, represent just one of the many colors each design is available in. And all of my Pride products benefit different queer community organizations, including The Trevor Project.)
The Japan x Pride collection mashes together Japanese design elements with pride colors. My best-selling t-shirt, Neko Pride, is within this collection.
The My Unicorn People collection incorporates a side stripe of different pride flag colors with a dancing unicorn at top.
The We Are All So Exhausted collection pairs identities with varying states of physical and mental exhaustion, because gestures broadly at the world around us.
The Curlicue Symphony collection superimposes pride-inspired gradients on a beautiful curlicue pattern.
The Pride Cat Waves - the Black Cat Version collection combines a traditional Japanese wave pattern with a stylized black cat and pride-inspired gradients.
The Pixel Hearts collection takes the colors of different Pride flags and converts them into eight-bit pixelized hearts.
And the Pride Bursts collection once again uses pride-inspired gradients, but this time imposed on a bold graphic print of expanding dotted circles.
Within my personal collection of design resources, I have color palettes for more than a dozen different pride flags, including trans pride, bisexual pride, pansexual and poly pride, three different lesbian pride variants (sunset, lipstick, and butch), multiple gender-variant prides (genderqueer, agender, neutrois, demiboy, demigirl), different ace spectrum prides (asexual, aromantic, ace-aro, lithromantic, demisexual, and demiromantic), bear pride, leather pride, MLM pride, queer pride, and five variations on the rainbow flag, including the 1977, 1978, and 1979 versions, the Philadelphia Pride version, and Daniel Quasar’s Progress Pride version. If you’d like one of my designs, above, created in Pride colors I haven’t yet added to the collection, drop me a line and I will add it post haste.
One final note. Everything in my Threadless store is on sale until 5PM, CDT, Tuesday, June 2nd.
