The AIDS Memorial Quilt

The quilt on display in Washington.
(credit: Wikipedia)

With World AIDS Day being this week, we thought it would be an appropriate time to reflect on the efforts of an important, ongoing project: the AIDS memorial quilt. The quilt, which is known as the largest collaborative project of its kind, began in the 1980s with a group of people who hoped to bring attention the disease that, even today, affects 1.2 million people in the United States, with one out of every seven people unaware of their infection.

Activist Cleve Jones, who began the project in the 1980s.
(credit: LGBTHistoryMonth.com)

San Francisco activist Cleve Jones paved the way for the project in 1985. According to the quilt’s official website, Jones was shaken by the deaths of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. While planning a march to memorialize their lives, he also learned that at the time “1,000 San Franciscans had been lost to AIDS.” During the march, an outpour of support surfaced through the creation of placards, representing individuals lost to the disease, hung on the walls of the city’s federal building. The end result looked, they realized, a bit like a patchwork quilt.

“By November of 1985, almost everyone I knew was dead or dying, and a few days before Nov. 27, I was walking up and down Castro Street with my staple gun putting up posters reminding people of the [annual] march [to honor Harvey Milk and George Moscone], and I picked up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle, and there was a headline saying that 1,000 San Franciscans had already been killed by AIDS. I remember standing on that corner of that intersection and looking around and grasping for the first time that of those thousand, virtually every one of them had lived and died within six blocks of where I was standing, and there was no evidence of it.”

— Cleve Jones

Panel 5646 of the AIDS quilt.
(credit: hollywoodremembers.com)

Thus the NAMES Organization was born in an effort to create an actual memorial quilt for those lost to AIDS, with panels sent from far and wide to their San Francisco workshop. “More than 48,000 individual 3-by-6-foot memorial panels —have been sewn together by friends, lovers and family members,” says the NAMES Project Foundation. By 1992, it had contributions representing every state in America as well as 28 other countries – it was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and the subject of the 1989 Oscar-winning documentary, Common Threads: Stories From The Quilt.

The beautiful thing about this project is its organic, ongoing collaborative effort. The quilt’s humble beginnings were in one man’s passion to simply educate the public on the impact of AIDS and to remember those it had taken too soon – a goal that, due to its inspiring honesty and integrity, will no doubt lead to other exciting ventures for the project.

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