It’s either a brilliant publicity stunt or one of the gutsiest t-shirt sellers on the Web really lost his nerve. The proprietor (undertaker?) of TshirtHell.com is closing up shop because he’s tired of dealing with hate mail.
As a Web writer whose been on the receiving end of more than a few nasty comments, I can say, if you give in to hate mail the terrorists win. Regardless, “Sunshine Megatron” is just tired of it all.
Aaron Schwarz aka Sunshine Megatron
If this is the first you’ve heard of TshirtHell, it’s been “where all the bad shirts go” since 2001, and offers for sale purposefully offensive and satirical shirts donning messages like “It’s not gay if you beat them up afterwards” and, with pole-stripper graphic, “I support single moms.”
Megatron, nee Aaron Landau Schwarz—his new name was the result of an online renaming contest that stemmed from apparent maternal issues as expressed at his blog—has posted a farewell letter on his site saying he “didn’t feel like dealing with idiots anymore” and would shutter the business on February 10.
Receiving an apparently tremendous amount of hate mail after releasing the shirt about beating up gays, Megatron/Schwarz is upset with people not understanding the irony and social commentary inherent in his t-shirts.
“I’m just going to stop making shirts,” he writes. “It’s not enjoyable anymore and I have enough money to move on to something more rewarding. Maybe I’ll start my own hooker farm or maybe I’ll practice sleeping. Whatever I decide to do, it will be better than this.”
Sunshine…sigh…Schwarz…he says the site still sells about 3,000 shirts weekly, but also says expressly the business is not for sale to interested venture capitalists or other investors for fear they won’t do the site justice. 
For what it’s worth from an entry likely heavily targeted for editing, Wikipedia reports the TshirtHell owner was once poisoned by someone offended by his shirts. If so, that could be a clue as to the level of hate mail Schwarz receives.
