The Dillinger Escape Plan release new merch in celebration of U.S. marriage equality

2 July 2015 | 8:04 pm | Alex Sievers
Originally Appeared In

Like most over the week, The Dillinger Escape Plan made public their joy at the (final) passing of marriage equality in the U.S. and printed new merch in honor of it, but this backfired.

Like most over the week, The Dillinger Escape Plan made public their joy at the (final) passing of marriage equality in the U.S. and printed new merch in honour of it, but this backfired.

The band's first status about the new gay-pride design (with 50% of the proceeds going to charity) was delivered with this announcement yesterday.

"The ruling on same-sex marriage the other day was a major step for the LGBTQ community, and for humanity in general, but there is still a lot of work to be done to both combat and help deal with discrimination and the horrible effects it has on people individually and collectively. FIFTY percent of the proceeds from this shirt will go to The Trevor Project, the national organization that leads in providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning young people between the ages of 13 and 24. Available for 24 hours. Printed ok athletic grey American Apparel tri-blend."

TDEP shirt

Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter

However, this came back as a "headache" of situation for the band, with artist Future Zine, who has a badge design (found below) that looks a lot like the shirt, bringing attention to the fact that the group was allegedly stealing his work. The group addressed and defended this later in the day with the following update:

"Everyone. What started as us thinking someone's badge was rad and being stoked on the gay marriage ruling, has just turned into a giant headache. When we saw the badge, we posted it in reference to the gay marriage passing. We then saw it as a good opportunity to not only take a hard stance in a scene not known for always being pro-gay(this is something we have strong feelings about...Liam's mom has been "out" for most of Liam's life so this is a cause near and dear to us), but to raise money for a good charity that links two causes that we care about. Discrimination and depression. We altered the image enough to make it legally non-infringing according to parody law. Even still, we offered to license the image. Since then we've been just getting hammered by this guy FutureZine. We of all people obviously have no interest in stealing art. We brought attention to him, we linked to his store, etc. We thought the two people clasping hands was a powerful image. We didn't think that the outline of those arms would be a big deal to someone making money off of selling predator and rambo themed badges, and an actual drawing of Bart Simpson. Not a caracature, not an interpretation, actual Bart Simpson artwork from the show(season four, episode one, exactly two minutes in). In the meantime, if you wanna go buy the original patch from him go to his site. As for us, we will continue to send fifty percent of the proceeds of this shirt to The Trevor Project, and the other fifty will now go to Matt Groening as a settlement to keep him from suing FutureZine. Irony is truly still a really dead scene. Apologies to any fans that feel like this is artistic infringement, we understand your point of view, and FutureZine, we will apologize to Arnold, Carl Weathers, John J. Rambo, Bart Simpson, and Matt Groening on your behalf. Hopefully this fifteen minutes has been worth your effort.

-The Dillinger Escape Plan"

TDEP shirt comparison

Again, in response to this, and the homophobic comments made by some fans, the band then made what they call the "gayest"tie-die shirt ever made to help weed out" the homophobes among their fan base, complete with rainbows, unicorns and all. 50% of proceeds will still go to charity. You can find the honestly very cool design below.

So after everything yesterday, the thing that still stuck out the most were the random comments we had to delete, and...

Posted by The Dillinger Escape Plan on Wednesday, July 1, 2015

You can find the one-time merch designs (for what is a very limited time) here.