QUILTED: about the progression of our rights, queer elders speak

In 2025, I travelled across Canada, speaking to groups about my activism through quilt 

making, and about the progression of Queer rights in Canada during my lifetime.

As I travelled, I also interviewed a diverse group of Queer elders.

I placed an emphasis on the LGBT Purge during presentations and when selecting 

interviewees.

This exhibition of 19 quilts and 11 quilted banners is the culmination of those travels.

l've sorted what I learned from 65+ interviews into 11 quilts based on Supreme Court 

decisions and legislative acts of Parliament that advanced Queer rights.

Additional quilts use a variety of techniques and deal with …

• explaining the LGBT Purge, 

• stories from the LGBT Purge told by survivors

• the text from the Prime Minister’s 2017 Apology to 2SLGBTQ+ Canadians, 

• a commemoration of Canada’s first Nation-wide Pride March in 1971, 

• an outline of the impact of the 1980s on Canadian Queers, 

• an opportunity to remember those lost to HIV/AIDS, 

• a whole-cloth quilt to act as a ‘title page’, and 

• an explanation of the role played by the Judicial Branch of Government in protecting 

the rights of minorities in Canada.

As a Queer elder myself, I know that no other generation of Queers has lived through the 

advancements in their rights that we have. 

This project ensures that the collective voice of our generation lives on long after we are 

gone. 

Our stories matter. Queer history, told by Queer elders, matters!

We can’t let the stories from this generation dwindle away as this generation of Queer 

elders disappears.