“The prevailing understanding of needlework as feminine and something to be prohibited or repressed in relation to the masculine must be seen as nothing more than an extension of homophobic violence; and a real and present danger.” *

- Joseph McBrinn, in Queering the Subversive Stitch – Men and the Culture of Needlework

Sometime in the early 1980s I found myself in Chattanooga, Tennessee, my first time in that state. I’d been invited to participate in a small quilt conference organized by Bets Ramsey to coincide with an exhibition that she had curated, “Log Cabin & String Quilts,” at the Hunter Museum of American Art. Early in the course of the late 20th century quilt revival, museums noticed that quilts typically attracted large and atypical audiences. Quilts also served as a textural and visual contrast to the poured concrete hardness of the trending “Brutalist” architecture of the period, like the Hunter’s then relatively new 1975 addition.

Installation view of “Log Cabin & String Quilts” at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, TN, early 1980s. At left is a late 1970s quilt by Nancy Crow, and to its right my 1979 Poppies, an experimental log cabin variation, 56” h x 65” w. [Sold to a major corporation for an office building installation in Vermont in the 1980s, it ultimately surfaced in summer 2015 at an outdoor flea market in Waterbury, VT – along with my early Tossed Salad Quilt – in a pile of assorted quilts and other household textiles. Rescued by a non-quilt enthusiast who saw a use for them covering a temporarily damaged wall in his home. How on earth?..but that’s another blog post...] Below, the two Hunter exhibition quilts shown above, head-on and proportioned approximately.

I have few memories now of my only Chattanooga visit, but one is indelible. Enjoying Bets Ramsey’s gracious Southern hospitality, I was sharing cocktails in her home one evening, along with another house guest also there for the event. Our hostess’s warmth and charm were put into perspective by the other guest’s chill hauteur. Midway through our drinks the guest turned to me and asked, “What does your father think of what you do? Her “father” was emphasized, paused and pulled at the same time. In that instant, I was surprised by the question and I think I understood that it wasn’t quite as straightforward as it appeared to be. I had only one answer and offered it. My father was fine with what I did – presuming that to mean carrying on with sewing and fabric and quilts, and even making a living out of it! Horrors! What real man would do this? How shamed the father must feel!

Wiser and more experienced now, I might have more smartly replied “Why do you ask?” I didn’t hold on to the rest of the conversation, however it played out. The question at the time rattled me, and it stuck. It wouldn’t be the only time I was given some insight into how some people perceived me and my work. There’s no question, though, that when it comes to gender roles and expectations, an important percentage of the society-at-large, male as well as female, was then, and remains still, rigidly hidebound. They just have a thing for the concept of the “man’s man.”

Women Are? Men Are? 2003, 42” h x 98”w; digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Collection, International Quilt Museum. Photo by L. Gawel.

This quilt is a reflection on the dual masculine/feminine principles at work in each of us. I see these principles expressed as aspects of Nature. While many cultures have seen the forest and the earth as ‘mother’, I see the forest as ‘father’ and have pictured it as solid, grounded, enveloping and protective. These qualities could, of course, be as easily and appropriately applied to females as to males. I’ve thought of the ocean/water as the feminine principle, fluid but likewise enveloping, though again, the sea as a symbol of wisdom and as a life source could as easily describe the male principle. The geisha epitomizes the historical Japanese ideal of feminine beauty (not to suggest that this characterizes women in general, but that it stands for one form of the feminine ideal). I feel that both of these figures radiate a kind of empowerment, and what I see in these panels is just that: human beings empowered by these dual principles working within them.

[Trigger warning: here’s where I get political...]

I was thinking along these lines at dawn on a recent frigid morning, as I walked the pooches while listening to a political podcast ** analyzing the many whys and wherefores of the Harris–Walz ticket’s 2024 presidential campaign loss. Roughly half of the country’s voters feels that a self-admitted sexual predator, convicted felon, and proven liar is fit to serve as the US president for a second term (or at least fit enough to get their votes). Stephanie Cutter, one of the Harris-Walz campaign’s leaders, responding to a question about the president-elect’s ability to engage certain groups of hard-to-reach voters, said “It’s important to him that he portray this very masculine, strong figure...constantly picking a fight, showing that he’s going to take something on...we have to pay attention to why people find that appealing.” Indeed.

That aspirational manliness was also manifest in the president-elect’s recent choices for his cabinet nominations. These included three alleged sexual offenders: Matt Gaetz (a possible sex trafficker who, fortunately, withdrew his nomination under pressure), television personality and serial adulterer Pete Hegseth, and the disreputable Kennedy family maverick and former drug addict, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. What a lineup of morally upstanding “men’s men.” I don’t think my father, may he rest in peace, would be impressed.

Nope, what my father got was a son who liked books (a lot), who liked school (a lot), who from a young age loved artful pictures of all kinds and easily lost himself in them, who liked to draw and paint and who tried to make artful pictures himself, and who didn’t care a hoot for team sports of any kind (and still doesn’t). That was the one point on which my father’s disappointment might very well have settled, given his own enthusiasms for basketball, baseball, and football, in that order as the seasons cycled. Two of my male siblings, though, did share his fondness for sports, so he wasn’t left entirely bereft.

My parents with their sons, circa 1957. I’m the eldest, on the left; my brothers Tim, Paul, and Robert III follow. Tim, who died in 2009, came out as gay in the late 1970s. When my sister Cate, also gay, gave me this photo, she asked, tongue-in-cheek, “Who looks like the gay one in this picture?” I don’t know how I came by the fan, but it’s likely a Woolworth’s find that I used my eight-year-old’s allowance to purchase. I just liked it, and was proud enough of it to flash it in this snapshot. Going along with my mother to the fabric store when I was in grade school, feeling the draped yardage that squeezed us into its narrow aisles, appealed to me more than any neighborhood street-side ball game. When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, about the worst thing you could be called at school was “fairy,” and it landed sorely each time the slur was directed at me, as it sometimes was. It lost its sting when I eventually figured out that I would be the me that I wanted to be despite other kids’ – despite anyone’s – expectations and biases. I’ve lived by that the greater part of these seventy-five years.

[A sidebar reflection: My freedom to pursue my passions and dreams was nurtured by my parents who, despite their having been denied high school educations, and our perpetually strained blue collar circumstances, were unfailingly supportive throughout my childhood and youth; and by the many other adults – extended family members, parochial school teachers and parish personnel, and many in our immediate tenement community who paid attention to how neighborhood kids were doing and helped to keep them on the straight and narrow – that showed interest and offered encouragement. I was advantaged, too, because I was a white child growing up in a racist society that privileged or punished people because of the color of their skin. Can't overlook that uncomfortable but real detail and the differences it made in my experience.]

On good days I want to think that in the presumably more enlightened early twenty-first century, we understand that real masculinity is expressed in countless ways that don’t involve misogyny, sexual exploitation, bullying, deceit, treachery, and aggression – that list is lengthy. In the bad days of this winter of our discontent (well, for some of us it will be...), I despair that too many of my fellow citizens either don’t think those things matter, or are amused by them, or worse, admire the callous disregard for others, for right*** moral and social constructs, that those behaviors imply and embody. Where men are concerned, I’ve always felt that in the US, many men are too often enormously insecure, not least about masculinity and sexuality. That insecurity is poisonous and damaging – emotionally, psychologically, and often physically – and contributes to elevating the kind of monstrous miscreants that are soon to reoccupy the nation’s presidential residence.

Wall Series No. 4: The Erosion of Empire, full and detail views. 2004; 59.5” h x 68.5” w; digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Private collection.

I’ll step down from that soapbox now and return to more genteel, and perhaps less ​"manly", preoccupations. When I joined the university faculty in 2000, I noticed a recurring conversational “ice breaker” at faculty retreats or similar types of meetings at which folks from different parts of the institution were being brought together for the first time. “Tell us something about yourself that no one would guess by looking at you.” As puerile as it gets, but as I said, it was an ice breaker.

So...in answer to that question: I’ve always enjoyed ironing. Heating up an iron, plunking it down onto a wrinkled expanse of fabric that I spritzed with water and sometimes with a spray sizing, watching and feeling those wrinkles relax and soften and ultimately disappear – I kid you not. I love it. I find it meditative and relaxing. Put in ear buds, tune in some interesting classical music or a recorded book or a recent podcast, and time focuses on that small area of padded board and the fabric draped across it. Unseemly time sink for a “real” man, you say? Balderdash!

I’ve even created a quilt to honor the nobility of what’s always been, for me at least, a satisfying and rewarding household and studio task.

Home Economics, 2005, 126.5” h x 84.5” w (321cm x 215cm); digitally-developed & digitally-printed cotton; reactive dyes; machine-pieced & machine-quilted. Collection, The Racine Art Museum, Racine, Wisconsin. Photo by L. Gawel. Detail views below.

It took me nearly two years to work my way through Joseph McBrinn’s Queering the Subversive Stitch – Men and the Culture of Needlework, though that wasn’t the author’s fault. I unfailingly have five or six books going at a time, new ones quickly replacing those I finish, so the process is organic and peripatetic. That a little went a long way, that I needed to set it aside after a few pages or a chapter and reflect on what I’d read, also factored into my slow progress through what reads like a dissertation, albeit a very original and revealing one.

In a chapter titled “The mesh canvas: Amateur needlecrafts, masculinity and modernism,” McBrinn references feminist author Rachel Maines and her studies of the contexts of handiwork and fiberwork in the industrial age. “In the needlework of the 1970s,” he writes, “Rachel Maines detected a dichotomy where women working with such crafts fell into two distinct categories, that of artists positioned as oppositional, vanguard and modern, such as Judy Chicago or Miriam Schapiro, and the ‘quieter but firmer voices of the mainstream,’ or the middlebrow ‘like the embroiderer Jacqueline Enthoven,’ author of several popular books. Any man who took up needlework in the 1970s,” he continues, “may have aspired to the first but definitely belonged to the second camp. Maines, with her encyclopaedic knowledge of needlework, suggested a few, including ‘art critic Jonathan Holstein, weaver-writer Jack Lenor Larsen, sculptor Claes Oldenburg, quilter Michael James, banner maker Norman LaLiberté, football player Roosevelt Grier, and actor Henry Fonda.’ “ ****

McBrinn’s footnotes in that passage from his book pointed me to Rachel Maines’ 1980 article for Women Artists News, Reassessing the Heritage of Art Needlework,***** where Maines appears to acknowledge the advocacy of men, myself included, in expanding both acceptance and respect for the needle arts. Not sure I “get” the “second camp” business (middlebrow? hmmm...need to think on that...) but I’m fine with the company Maines had me keeping. Man enough for me.

In very good company with the artist Miriam Schapiro, February 2003, during the International Quilt Study Center’s first symposium, Wild By Design, at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. A longtime admirer of her work, I was definitely a bit star-struck on this particular occasion. A terrific artist and icon, and a lovely person.

_____________________________________________________

* McBrinn, Joseph. Queering the Subversive Stitch – Men and the Culture of Needlework. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, ©2021, p. 161.

** The podcast in question was the November 26 edition of Crooked Media’s Pod Save America, hosted that day by Daniel Pfeiffer and featuring members of the Harris–Walz campaign team including Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter.

*** as in correct, proper

**** McBrinn, p. 110.

***** [https://www.academia.edu/5042535Reassessing_the_heritage_art_of_needlework_1981]