Learn how this Euphoria Quilt is helping to preserve trans history
BY EMMA CIESLIK, IMAGE BY MADRONE MATYSIAK AND KATRINA WARD
On Saturday (1 February), the Brooklyn Museum hosted a quilt panel-making event for trans individuals and allies. The quilt is part of the ACLU’s Freedom To Be campaign, dedicated to uplifting the voices and experiences of trans, non-binary, and gender expansive individuals in the United States. At a time when the newly inaugurated president is passing Executive Orders calling gender affirming care “child mutilation” and ordering federal agencies to remove “gender ideology” from their contracts, websites, and employee organisations, the quilt-making event felt more important than ever.
The panels produced will form a quilt installed on the National Mall on Sunday, 30 March, kicking off Trans Day Of Visibility. While this visual protest may immediately recall the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt which first appeared on the National Mall in 1987 as part of the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, the Freedom To Be Quilt built on a rich history of quilt-making as a way to express trans joy and to serve as archives of queer history that could and still cannot not be written.
The Euphoria Quilt is one wonderful example, created by trans quilter Eliot Anderberg based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Anderberg taught themselves the craft during the pandemic, later discovering that several of their great-great-grandmothers were avid quilters despite growing up without much contact with folk art. They contributed to several group quilts in 2023, and with the barrage of anti-trans legislation proposed and passage in the last four years, had been intentionally exploring queer joy through textile crafts. They also sought to inspire and bring together other trans textile artists exploring their own relationships with queer joy, and so in June 2023, sent out a call on Instagram.
What does your gender expansive joy look like?
Inviting trans, nonbinary, and queer individuals to contribute 12” or 6” square blocks, Anderberg asked people to reflect on what joy meant to them, without it intentionally having to be revolutionary. “The least interesting thing that you can talk about is joy as resistance,” Anderberg noted, challenging the idea that queer joy has to serve a purpose within the community. Just existing as a trans person, either publicly or privately, is itself a revolutionary act, but “it doesn’t have to be a response to the struggles that we have,” Anderberg said. “It can be something that we have a relationship with otherwise.”
Anderberg was clear that while this quilt was partially inspired in response to the legislation seeking to strip trans and queer people of their rights, they did not want to give it that much power, nor the far-right politicians that are leveraging their authority to harm trans people. Rather, “I want people in the future to be able to see what we were up to during this time,” Anderberg said, and they want it to be a record that someone could hold. Anderberg wanted the quilt to be functional, not a symbolic action but something that a person could be wrapped in, and so all blocks submitted had to be made of machine washable fabric. “My ultimate goal is for it to be somewhere where the queer and trans people who it might be important to can look at it up close and can feel it and can touch it,” Anderberg said.
But those were the only stipulations – offering a challenge to trans textile artists who, like many queer crafters, dove into their or their family’s scrap fabric bins to create sustainably.
In the months that followed, Anderberg was overwhelmed by the response – 166 people ended up submitting blocks, representing over 40 states and five different countries, and as blocks steadily arrived in the mail in Albuquerque, they were accompanied by notes explaining contributors’ design and fabric choices. One of these handwritten notes came from Glyn Coyote, who was then living in Florida. Coyote admitted they initially dropped the ball and ended up submitting a six inch block because they didn’t have enough time to make a larger one but were intent on contributing because “I think this is just a really nice tangible way to be literally physically connected through the things that we’ve made.”
Coyote sandwiches two layers of mesh and a layer of muslin, sewing around the edges of the mesh and creating channels that they could fill with fabric scraps. They then stitched a diamond pattern across the filled mesh, similar to quilting, to create dimensionality.
In their note, Coyote apologized for the delay in sending their block but also shared how they felt the block was symbolically bringing them back home and connecting them to their community. “This block is necessarily a cry of frustration and determination. It is about being from and now navigating the superimposed settler colonial imperialist country we know now as the United States while being queer.” This block, Coyote wrote, just like coming out to themselves and their communities, was an act of queer creation, an act of fashioning themselves out of the pieces and finding how they compliment and challenge their communities.
The resulting quilt is a testament, Coyote ended the note, “to our ability to take even the smallest odds and ends, the extra, the leftover, the forgotten, the undesired, the different, and create something that is wholly and truly expansive and questioning and joyous and challenging and ultimately and totally ours.”
Coyote’s note and those of other contributors touched Anderberg and spoke to an unexpected outcome of the project – creating a tangible archive of trans joy during a tumultuous time in the United States. At first, it was never Anderberg’s intention to create an archive, but as they received handwritten notes including information about why specific fabric was chosen and specific symbols used, Anderberg and trans and queer archivist Olly Millar came to understand it was a physical collection of stories. And as Anderberg received more blocks, Millar stepped in to catalog each block and keep information shared associated with each contribution.
With this information, Millar saw an opportunity – creating a website, or ideally a public-facing database, that cataloged the individual blocks with their creator information just like the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. “The quilt itself is an archive, but making it online just makes it so much more accessible,” Millar explained, especially for researchers exploring queer quitting and the wider community that may not be able to see or touch the quilt as Anderberg originally intended. The website would also allow people to search and sort individually by blocks, creating individual pages with creator and demographic information along with digitized copies of notes that people shared for each contribution, that could be tagged based on the creator’s identities, symbols included, and materials used – creating a web of how the blocks connected to one another.
The carabiner became one of these symbols. For example, Hope Hudson – a trans textile artist based in Memphis, Tennessee, shared that they intentionally created a block with a cyanotype featuring a carabiner with keys. Like Anderberg, Hudson’s quiltmaking skipped a generation, but they admire how quiltmaking makes them feel connected to their grandmother and great-grandmother. “The carabiner was sort of my earliest sort of foray into queerness, even before I knew it was a queer thing to carry” because it was a low key symbol recognized internally by the community. Keys represented autonomy and safety, specifically having a safe home or a car to get away from an unsafe situation.
Generationally passed fabric was one of the most popular tags, as many queer community members opted to use fabric belonging to past family members or friends. Along with being environmentally and economically friendly, using fabrics like from a grandparent’s stash allowed people to honor loved ones they were not able to come out to before they passed.
But before they could move forward, Millar wanted to make sure they could get the informed consent of contributors. “Queer identity is unfortunately marginalised and not everyone wants to be out on the Internet,” Millar explained. “And so the first step for me was figuring out how to get people’s consent to share information.” Millar and Anderberg put together a form where contributors could provide their consent for specific things, including whether their gender identity, sexual orientation, and/or the notes they sent in with their blocks could be shared, and Millar was intent on getting people’s informed consent sooner rather than later, acknowledging that in this scary climate, it is important to capture information as it shared.
“A lot of people see archives as something you do retroactively,” Millar said. “Like something happens and you archive, and I really don’t believe in that as an archiving strategy. I think that it leaves a lot of holes.” Especially with queer history, Millar acknowledged that it is difficult to capture moments of queer joy because the wider queer community has faced criminal and violent persecution up through today. In the past and present, even having written information about community members, photographs of events or people living as their true selves, could be used against a person in a court of law or used to identify and out people, so having a physical archive of queerness – like the one captured in the Euphoria Quilt – is rare.
But Anderberg and Millar are not alone in celebrating trans joy through quilt-making. The Norfolk Trans Joy Community Quilt invited members of their community to contribute squares speaking to their own experiences and created a zine that documents how the quilt came to be. Similarly, Cordy Joan runs Transmissions, a genderqueer quilting project that creates quilts for trans people as gifts and also teaches queer young people how to make quilts as themselves. As Joan’s website says, this project “exists in a lineage of quilt-making as a radical act of community care and coming together, particularly for women, genderqueer and marginalised people. Quilts as survival objects; quilting as knowledge transmission.”
This past fall, the Euphoria Quilt was finally assembled block by block. At 11 by 12 feet, the quilt is visually overwhelming. While Anderberg set out to create a functional quilt – all of the blocks are made of washable fabric, they see it as a living archive that will eventually end up in a museum. For the next year, Anderberg will be bringing it to quilting bees around the country, where people can see and touch the quilt and leave their own mark, and even if they did not make a block and for those who can’t contribute physically, Millar’s online archive will bring its stories into the homes of trans Americans everywhere.
Like the Freedom To Be quilt, Norfolk Trans Joy Community quilt, and Transmissions quilts, the Euphoria Quilt represents a larger-than-life way that trans quilt-making has and will continue to serve as a form of queer archiving in a time of intense persecution and erasure.
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