In the studio, thread in hand, standing with an existential crisis of your/my queer expression at your/my side. you/i can drape little threads with that limp wrist I/you were more like “welp, I/you have got this limp wrist here, what am I/you gonna do with it” I/you cannot say with certainty if my/your limp wrist is an innate behavior or a learned signal I/you can spend the rest of this life with the philosophers, the cultural critics, the sociologists spinning wheels looking for the mysterious origins of my/your limp wrist, and even if I/you live long enough to definitively observe the birth of the limp wristed, what good would it do? When I/you sat down to draw with these ideas of queer representation on my/your mind, I/you were not worried about the true origins of my/your queer expression.

By the time these representations have reached me/you there is no meaningful way to separate them, and that crisis of inseparability is the bolt of lightning that brought this project to life.

How do you/i parse out those two very different intentions? Russo writes about Hollywood intentionally inventing visibly queer affects and gestures that are the origins of stereotypes that still do damage today, but he also writes about queers working in Hollywood who quietly embed queer wink wink nudge nudge into cinema, and trade in a subtext of solidarity. I/you couldn’t stop thinking about how much of the queer afffectation was invented for the cinematic image, and often at the service of a joke, and more often at the expense of the queer’s dignity. Vito Russo’s Celuloid Closet so solidly analyzed the way queer figures were coded into images, it really landed on me/you. It wasn’t immediately obvious that I/you would be drawing porn. Why porn, where did that impulse come from? Ok, but the books you/i were reading were about mainstream cinema, B-movies & exploitation flicks at the lowest. So thread and queer representation might have just been a coincidence?ĭood, buddy, pal, self, looking too hard at some of this is a one way ticket to paralyzing anxiety. Later on I/you would draw similarities between the drawings and old b/w film-stills, the photo negative, how thinly developed queer characters are written, the paradoxical ephemera and permanence of cinema, blah blah blah, right? I/you were studying the history of queer representation in cinema and something just kept whispering in the back of my/your mind “draw this stuff with thread” so I/you did. Yeah, there is no logical reason for that. Ok sure, thread is a loaded material in this metaphor, but Roberts’s pink fence made with their pink plastic Barbie knitting machine is a far cry from where I/you went with it. (I love this both for the metaphor and the sheer materiality of it) This is a very narrow metaphor but it resonated with me/you, I/you have carried it with me/you for a long time, and have kept an eye out for tensions between a straight thread and a twisted, looping, knotted, kinky, queer network.

Only by queering the yarn do you get to rock a rad sweater. Remember when I/you saw LJ Roberts lecture back in ‘09 or whenever? Well, they talked about the material of yarn and the act of knitting and made the argument that knitting is an inherently queer act they explained that yarn in its production and ideal form is an unbroken straight line (this is true for thread as well, and the terms yarn and thread will be used interchangeably because of this shared quality), though they went on to explain that yarn only comes into its meaning by being bent, looped, and twisted around itself.

Hand jibber