Queer Quilting as Art, Protest and Connection: From the AIDS Memorial Quilt to the Generation-Linking Pieces We Treasure
These queer quilters' beautiful work reflect the many layers of belonging
Grace Rother's quilt is very much in process: rich shades of green in the center, with small fabric houses framing the green, raw outside edges. She calls it HOMES.
“It’s this feeling of having multiple homes and being forever long distance from somebody, always kind of homesick,” Rother explains, referencing the homes that have shaped them across the midwest: Southeast Michigan, where they lived until they were 25, then Chicago and now Milwaukee.
The quilt, like everything Rother makes, is made of recycled fabrics — old clothes and sheets dropped off in bags by friends, fabrics mailed by pen pals, the textile detritus of their own life. With this project in particular, she wants to reflect home and the different homes she’s made around the Great Lakes, a place she feels deeply connected to.
For her, a quilt feels like the perfect medium for exploring the idea of home. Associated with the domestic, quilts take up space in the places where we sleep, eat and connect. We throw them over the backs of our couches, cover our beds and hang them on the walls over our kitchen tables.
Queer and trans individuals like Rother and Cody Cook-Parrott, who lives in Michigan, embrace the idea of home as a fluid and expansive concept. A quilt beautifully embodies this notion in textile form: distinct pieces come together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Quilts offer care, warmth and love, often crafted collaboratively to foster connection, transformation, belonging and the sharing of queer stories.
As queer people, Rother and Cook-Parrott come from a tradition of quilting where this art form is a source of both connection and protest. The most famous example is the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the largest community arts project in history.
According to the National AIDS Memorial website, the quilt was conceived of in 1985 by activist Cleve Jones. At that year’s San Francisco march to honor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, both of whom were assassinated in 1978, Jones asked each of his fellow marchers to write the names of loved ones who had died of AIDS on placards. They taped the cards to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building, and realized the wall of names looked like a patchwork quilt.
The quilt became a reality from there, spurred by a desire to not let history forget the ones they loved and to force the government to take action. It quickly became a public project, and thousands of quilt squares were sewed together. The blanket, which was larger than a football field, was first displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1987. It was both a protest for dying LGBTQ+ people and a memorial in their honor.
“It’s one of the most beautiful art projects in the world,” Cook-Parrott says. “Activism and movement work is so important to me, and quilting feels like this perfect crossover point of everything I love. It’s how I anchor in my queerness and anchor in myself. There’s such a history of how we take care of each other through quilts.”
Quilting can act as a site of connection to that lineage of queer love, care and protest, as well as to direct ancestors. Rother is under no illusion that the people in their family would have celebrated or even tolerated their queerness. But they can sit at their machine and do the same physical motions their quilting ancestors have done for generations. And they can wind bobbins, snip fabric and pin pieces of cotton together just like their queer ancestors who made the AIDS quilt did as well.
“There are these little points of connection that are especially important to me because, as a queer person, I don't have the same markers in my life that the rest of my family did,” Rother says. “When I got married, it felt very different from straight weddings I’ve gone to. It’s a very particular experience to engage in civil rights you didn’t have before. And we’re not going to have children as far as I know. So a lot of the traditional markers where you might feel your ancestors aren’t there for us.”
Quilting also just feels intrinsically tied to their queerness, in part because at the same time they were sewing together random scraps of fabric in their parents’ basement in Ann Arbor as a young teenager, they were combing through the library for every gay book they could find. In an art-making practice that traditionally involves many rulers and rules, both Rother and Cook-Parrott embrace bending and breaking those rules to make something your own.
“I think queerness exists because people have said there’s one right way to do something and being queer is a deviation from that. I very much approach quilting in the same way,” Rother says. “When you deviate from that, you start to be able to express yourself and say who you are with a quilt. I think that being queer has given me the ability to say, oh, there’s always another way of looking at this because I come to the world that way.”
“Improvisational quilting specifically is about beginning to be outside the lines,” Cook-Parrott says. That’s the way they first learned to quilt, at a workshop taught by Eliza Fernand at their former Have Company space in Grand Rapids. At the time, they were a dancer longing for a practice that would create something tangible. Dancing was ephemeral; translating that language to textiles and making a functional object was a powerful breakthrough. After top surgery and changing their name and pronouns, they connect their trans experience of living outside the lines to their quilting practice.
“My literal scars remind me of the seams of a quilt and stitching myself back together. I think that's part of a trans and gender expansive experience, whether it's playing with our hair, our hormones, our clothing or our haircuts,” they say. “It's all these arrangements of the self and putting them back together. I love that gender and quilting are kind of the exact same thing in that way.”
To further put a queer spin on the artform, Cook-Parrott's approach to quilting embraces imperfection. “I think improvisational quilting is inherently queer in the way that it’s outside the lines of structure,” they say. It’s funny to them that the word for "perfect" in quilting is "straight": straight lines, straight edges. “It’s embedded in the language, and it reminds me of being gay and non-binary and living outside of straightness in my life,” they say. “I don’t have the option to have the lines match up in the way society wants them to. It just doesn’t fit.”
Making a quilt begins with assembling the fabrics that will eventually be woven together to make the quilt top. Cook-Parrott tries not to put too much pressure on the beginning stages, because they can always pivot and change. “Starting is so often the hardest part,” they say. “I just try to grab things I like.”
Rother's HOMES quilt began from wanting to piece together a lot of nice green linen they already had. When they did, it looked like an expanse of grass, like the park across from their house growing up. That inspired the houses they began to sew. The quilt is a series of fabrics, disparate pieces of textile collected from their own life and from the people with whom their life is intertwined, brought together to eventually create something comforting and whole.
Both artists are telling stories of living as queer people in the Midwest. For Cook-Parrott, who grew up in Michigan, left for years, and has returned to a small rural town in the northern part of the state where there aren’t a lot of queer people or even people their age, their practice is shaped by the leisurely pace of their life in this place and the intergenerational nature of their community.
“The lake and my swimming practice and my hiking practice with my dog all inform the slowness, too," Cook-Parrott says. "Quilting is just such a beautiful way to honor tradition and birth and death and life and love."
Rother has a much deeper relationship with regional quilt-making practices in the Midwest than the specifics of their ancestral quilt-making practices. “The Midwest has this whole tradition of Amish quilts that I feel really drawn to,” they say. “They’re in response to the landscape and they are these abstracted depictions of the land and loving the land and the beauty of the area around us. I’m totally biased, but I think the Midwest is the most beautiful place in the world.”
Cook-Parrott is researching Michigan quilt history. To share any information you have about guilds, individual quilters, lineages and practices, click here.
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