Saturday’s gift: a 12-panel queer quilt (roughly 6 x 3 ft), made mostly of old queer t-shirts of mine (some political, some playful, some artistic), assembled into a quilt by Janet Salsman, with the collaboration of Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky and Kim Darnell:
(#1) Eleven t-shirts, plus a homoerotic shirtless cowboy panel
The panels have background fabric in the six colors of the rainbow Pride flag, and the framing fabric (and backing fabric) is Rainbow Swirl bunting:
(#2)
The photo in #1 is of the quilt as hung on the front of a set of bookshelves in my living room. At the moment, this display makes it impossible for me to get at my little library of books on grammar, style, and usage; but eventually the quilt will go onto my bed.
The panels, top to bottom, left to right:
1.1 Digital Queers t-shirt from 1993: We’re here, we’re queer, we have e-mail. DQ was founded in San Francisco in 1992 by Tom Rielly and Karen Wickre as a national nonprofit network of gay techies; it eventually merged with GLAAD.
1.2 Pansy t-shirt, playing on pansy ‘male homosexual’. Posted about here.
1.3 Read My Lips t-shirt, reproducing the Gran Fury poster, which I posted about here.
2.1 Queer Queer Queer t-shirt from Don’t Panic, which I posted about here.
2.2 shirtless cowboy fabric: discussion below.
2.3 paradoxical Nobody Knows I’m Gay t-shirt by Don’t Panic
3.1 Keith Haring NCOD poster, which I posted about here.
3.2 rainbow QUEER t-shirt, which manages to squeeze six colors into five letters
3.3 t-shirt for the OUTiL (Out in Linguistics) group, originally (1991) a mailing list, re-constituted in 2012 as a Facebook closed group. The shirt, designed by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, has big letters O, U, T, composed of small instances of the word LINGUISTICS. Seen above in pink.
(#3) Close-up of the OUTiL shirt (in purple)
4.1 official t-shirt for the 1996 motss.con — an annual gathering for LGBT people and their friends in the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss (members of the same sex) and its successor Facebook closed group soc-motss — in Chicago. motss.con.XXX (yes, #30) was held recently (July 13-17) in Thurmont MD, Gettysburg PA, and their environs.
4.2 I ♥︎ 🐓 (conveying ‘I love cock’) t-shirt from CafePress. Other suppliers provide I ♥︎ Cock, I ♥︎ Dick, and I ♥︎ Penis shirts, even I ♥︎ Big Black Dick. Plus straightforward I Suck Cock and Cocksucker shirts (and rebus 🐓 🍭 ‘cocksucker’ shirts, with a lollipop, aka a sucker).
4.3 The Harry Hay Documentary Project t-shirt. From Wikipedia:
Henry “Harry” Hay, Jr. (April 7, 1912 – October 24, 2002) was a prominent American gay rights activist, communist, labor advocate, and Native American civil rights campaigner. He was a founder of the Mattachine Society, the first sustained gay rights group in the United States, as well as the Radical Faeries, a loosely affiliated gay spiritual movement.
… Hay was the subject of Eric Slade’s documentary film Hope Along the Wind: The Life of Harry Hay (2002).
The documentary was supported in part by t-shirt sales.
Quilting fabrics. Back to panel 2.2. From The Selfish Seamstress site on 5/7/10, “Oh, those sassy quilters!”:
If you’re a quilter, maybe you already know about this. In fact, I might be the last person in the entire sewing universe to have discovered this, but since it’s new to me, I figured I’d share it. Hey everyone, did you know that there’s a not insignificant market for homoerotic beefcake quilting fabric? And oh, they are giggle-worthy indeed! I guess it’s not surprising, because you can get pretty much anything on quilting fabric. But I’d be curious to see a quilt actually made from these though.
All the usual hot ‘n’ heavy fantasy suspects are available for your sewing pleasure, including your chiseled, shirtless motorcycle cops…
Your oiled-up construction workers/handymen types…
Buff and bronzed cowboys:
(#4) Close-up of 2.2, including saguaros and agaves, big red manly trucks, and buttes
A couple of rugged lumberjacks…
The ever necessary ripply-bodied firemen (obviously the one on the left is doing the quick change into his gear on his way out to battle an inferno, not stripping for you. Get your mind out of the gutter!):
(#5) Shirtless firemen and their gear
And lastly, the surprisingly tame and clothed package delivery guys for those of you who prefer a little mystery with your naughty quilts…
EDZ encountered the shirtless cowboy fabric some time ago and bought some, believing that she would eventually have some use for it in making stuff for me. Smart move.
July 1, 2019 at 8:34 am |
[…] loving Arnold Zwicky’s “Queer Quilt.” This quilt was made for him out of his old t-shirts, including a vintage Keith Haring print, and […]