The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Breukelen, Boswyck, and Midwout during the 41^st Year of the Stonewall Era (based on a 2010 drawing by Daniel Rosza Lang/​Levitsky with 24 illustrations by Buzz Slutzky on printed pin-back buttons)

L.J. ROBERTS: My name is L.J. Roberts, and I made the piece the “Queer House of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Brooklyn, Bushwick, and Midwout During the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era.” We’re sitting at Glitter House right now, which is a queer collective house in Brooklyn, and I am an artist that makes knitted and quilted and embroidered installations.

I moved to New York in 2009 and found this really incredible, creative, artistic, performance, film-making community of queer people living in Brooklyn. And so the map is quite large and you can approach it. It’s knitted mostly on children’s toy knitting machines including a Barbie knitting machine from 1974, which is kind of the crux of the machinery I use, and also Cool Quarter, which is a pink sparkly machine.

BUZZ SLUTZSKY: So, for this piece I did the illustrations on the buttons of all the queer houses, and I basically asked people in the queer houses, you know, what were the images they wanted so see on the icon of their house. I either did that or I just literally drew what their house name was.

DANIEL ROSZA LANG: So I made the map that L.J. based this piece off of, for the program for the first queer house field day, which is a community-building that the collective has done for the past few years as a way of bringing folks living in the set of queer collective houses that have been formed in Brooklyn for the last number of years. So, I made the map to make visible the geography of the queer collective houses of Brooklyn right now and to connect this moment to queer history and the underlying history of Brooklyn.

L.J: I’m really excited to be part of the Brooklyn scene right now and that feels like we’re all working together to kind of continue on this queer tradition of making art in New York.