Yellow: Gay Apparel

This quilt is called Gay Apparel, a bright yellow poncho and the fourth piece in my Colours of Pride series. Yellow represents sunlight in Gilbert Baker's flag: the importance of being seen and living openly.

I kept coming back to the 1970s while making this piece. Not the sanitized, disco-ball version of the seventies, but the real one, where my queer elders first started marching and demonstrating in public for the right to be themselves. The poncho form felt right for that era: dramatic, visible, unapologetically taking up space. When you're wearing a poncho, people see you. That's the point.

About the Poncho

The poncho measures 150 × 150 cm, large enough to make a statement but still functional as a garment. I wanted it to feel like something you'd actually put on to go somewhere, not a piece that lives on a hanger behind glass. The yellow is saturated and warm, the kind of colour that changes a room when you walk into it.

The silhouette is deliberately retro. I was thinking about the queer elders I never got to meet, the ones who were visible at a time when visibility was dangerous. The Gay Liberation Front marching in New York. The first Pride parades in cities where being openly gay could cost you your job, your family, your safety. This poncho is for them. Bright enough to see from a distance, warm enough to wrap yourself in.

Poncho · 150 × 150 cm · Quilting cotton