Queer Design Club

It started out with drawing birds and messing around with watercolor, ink, and graphite. From studio to screen, I love celebrating the little details and nuances of the natural world and queering up culture. And I teach folks how to fly fish!

How does being queer inform your work?

Embracing my queerness required a lot of unlearning, unpacking, internal reckoning, and radicalization. It has helped me reclaim power from expectations, assumptions, and other fear-based categorizations we hold and our society perpetuates. I show up with humble curiosity and co-create cultural spaces where people can show up as themselves. I love learning, celebrating the little details and nuances that make all of us beautiful in our own expansive and fluid ways, and am excited not necessarily knowing what comes next. As long as I am intentional and thoughtful in my work and communication, we can hold creative space where reciprocity, mutuality, open dialogue and radical honesty show us the way.

What are your favorite pieces of queer visual culture?

I love a sneaky nod to queerness popping up in an unassuming way. Lesbian culture is known for icons and graphics to communicate identity, and the lineage and legacy between generations reiterating from past to present moment is a testament to our resilience, our history, our lore. It’s also a promise to keep disrupting to achieve more just and equitable spaces for every body. We need that accountability, and sometimes the reminder to have some fun while we do it.

Which other queer people inspire you?

Drag is beautiful, the diversity of queerness is never ending, and I’ll forever re-read the words of bell hooks and Audre Lourde. And while I can’t confirm it beyond a suspicion (everyone’s a little gay…right?) I love that Maine’s first Registered Guide was Cornelia Fly Rod Crosby. Her legacy helped me feel at home fly fishing knowing she had done it with wild gender norms, still made space for her own quirks, and created fly patterns that are still in use today.