The AIDS Quilt Turns 20—and Endures a Midlife Crisis

The complete AIDS Memorial Quilt as of 1992 is displayed in Washington, D.C.

(Mark Thiessen/The NAMES Project Foundation)

Twenty years ago today, on October 11, 1987, the second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was held. It was by far the largest gay-rights demonstration ever until then. Hundreds of thousands converged on the capital from around the country to call for an end to discrimination against gays and more federal funds for AIDS research. And, most memorably, they unveiled what instantly became the leading symbol of the fight against the disease, the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

The one previous gay-rights march on Washington had happened in October 1979 and had drawn about 80,000. In the eight years since, a lot had happened, especially the rise of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. AIDS had surfaced in 1981 and had already caused the deaths of more than 46,000 Americans. The government’s apparent foot-dragging on funding AIDS research enraged many, and on this day at least 200,000 showed up to make their voices heard. Among them were the presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, the actress Whoopi Goldberg, and the openly gay congressmen Barney Frank and Gerry Studds of Massachusetts. More than 1,000 other elected officials and civic, labor, and religious leaders, including some 100 members of Congress, signed letters endorsing the march.

The quilt was the inspiration of Cleve Jones, a longtime gay activist in San Francisco. In 1985 Jones had organized a march in honor of his friend Harvey Milk, the gay San Francisco city supervisor who, along with Mayor George Moscone, had been assassinated in 1978. Jones had urged participants in that march to carry placards emblazoned with the names of loved ones who had died of AIDS. He felt that showing the names of AIDS victims would make the tragedy more real to observers. After the march, several protesters attached their placards to the wall of the Federal Building, and to Jones’s eyes the result resembled a quilt. The idea for an AIDS memorial quilt came to him in a flash.

“It was like a slide fell into place,” he later said. “It’s like there was a blank screen I was looking at, and suddenly I could just see it—an expanse of placards covering the National Mall.” A quilt, he reasoned, was “the perfect symbol of warm, fuzzy, middle-class, middle-American traditional family values.”

He filed the idea away. But over the next year and a half he tested positive for HIV himself, and then his close friend Marvin Feldman died from AIDS. Suddenly, he said later, “there was no one left in my life who knew me when I was in my twenties, except my mom and dad.” The quilt, he thought, could be an “antidote” to the grief he felt. And it also could get across to the general public the scope of the disease’s devastation. He created the first quilt panel in memory of his friend, and he used his considerable organizing skills to get the word out to others. Soon panels were being added by the hundreds across the country. Each was three feet by six feet, roughly the size of a coffin; that was in recognition of the fact that because of AIDS fears, most victims were cremated instead of being buried in caskets. Many didn’t even have memorial services.

Spread across an area as big as a football field, the quilt at first consisted of 1,920 panels (stitched together in groups of eight), most bearing the name of one victim of the epidemic. Each was decorated personally by a loved one, and many bore brief but moving tributes. One read: “I have decorated this banner to honor my brother. My parents did not want his name used publicly.” Another read: “To 12 Men I Expected to Grow Old With. Nine Who Have Passed On and Three Who Will Join Them Soon.”

The cumulative effect of the panels—all the lives cut short, all the people left behind—made a more eloquent and lasting impact than anything else at the protest could have. The quilt has since been viewed, in whole and in part, all over the country. It was the subject of a 1989 Academy Award–winning documentary film, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. Today it is the single largest piece of community folk-art in the world, having grown to contain the names of more than 91,000 AIDS victims.

It has also become the subject of infighting between Jones and the NAMES Project Foundation, the organization he founded in 1987 and left in 2003. The foundation owns the quilt. Jones, still living with HIV, insists that it should be viewed in its entirety to have full effect; the foundation demurs, largely because of the cost of such a massive undertaking. The whole quilt would now cover six city blocks. It has not been viewed in full since 1996.

Many people hope for its permanent retirement. The late gay historian Vito Russo, in the film Common Threads, may have put it best: “I think what we want to see eventually is an end—a day when we can stop adding panels to this quilt and put it away, as a symbol of a terrible thing that happened that’s now over,” he said. “We forget that someday this is going to be over. Someday there’s going to be no such thing as AIDS, and people will just look back and remember that there was a terrible tragedy that we survived.”

—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out.