Crushes began with a question: What would my adolescence have been like if being gay had simply been ordinary?
I grew up in the religious South during the AIDS crisis, in a world that offered very few possibilities for imagining a future that included love, partnership, or family. I had crushes like any teenager, of course, but those feelings came with fear, shame, and the sense that the life I wanted might never be available to me.
For this series, I returned to the images that had captured my imagination as a young man: football players, cowboys, boys dancing at raves, and photographs from XY magazine. Some represented the boys I might have fallen for. Others were archetypes of masculinity I was drawn to but didn't quite understand. I began reconstructing these figures in fabric, creating portraits that exist somewhere between memory, fantasy, and an imagined past.
Quilts are traditionally objects of inheritance, made to be kept, cherished, and passed down through generations. There's something moving to me about using that tradition to create heirlooms for moments that never occurred. These quilts don't document the adolescence I experienced. Instead, they imagine one in which having a crush on another boy didn't have to become a crisis, and the possibility of loving someone, and being loved in return, was never in question.
