Even the word had power for me. Quilts.

October 11, 2016 6:54 AM

Twenty-nine years ago, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was unfolded on the Mall for the first time, with 1,920 panels. Today, it has grown to more than 49,000.
posted by roomthreeseventeen (11 comments total)

It weighs 54 TONS.

That's a lot of grief, pain, and hope.
posted by BlueHorse at 8:04 AM on October 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

I still remember the first time I saw it...it was so incredibly large, and people had put so much love into the panels they sewed. So much loss, and so much emotion sewed into a memory.
posted by xingcat at 8:49 AM on October 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

I went down to the Mall in Washington D.C. in Fall 1996 when the full quilt was displayed. That summer I had done a benefit bike ride for HIV/AIDS services in D.C. and Philly, and for the first time had gotten to know several HIV-positive people. But I'd yet to know personally anyone who had died from the disease.

I remember stopping to look closely at the first panel I approached, and then looking at this sea of panels *literally* covering the Mall, subconsciously multiplying that one deeply felt loss by tens of thousands, and starting to cry instantly and uncontrollably. I'm tearing up right now, 20 years later.

All of this is to say that, of the dozens of marches and rallies and protests I covered as a reporter, the Quilt is by far the most powerful statement I've ever experienced. It's beautiful and terrifying and certainly changed how America saw and understood people with the disease.
posted by martin q blank at 9:02 AM on October 11, 2016 [5 favorites]

I will be teaching medical students about HIV treatment this week. One slide I included this year to let them know the situation in the 80s:

We had an infectious disease:

Spreading exponentially.
Undetermined pathogen.
No way to screen blood supply.
Causing horrific deaths.
Seemingly 100% lethal.
No treatment.

And a government that didn't seem to care.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:09 AM on October 11, 2016 [7 favorites]

One of my earliest memories is my mom taking me to see the quilt on display at Rutgers University and pointing out Howard Ashman's square. I would have been about four. I'm not going to say there's a direct line between that day and the fact that I'm a nurse with a strong interest in harm reduction now, but the images have definitely stayed with me for all these many years.

Millions of .s
posted by ActionPopulated at 9:33 AM on October 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

I have only seen it in photos, but it always moves me. It's the individuality in the mass tragedy that makes it so touching.

It directly inspired a smaller (as well as happier) project I was involved with last year - quilts with individual panels to honour historic activists, which were displayed at Toronto's Dyke March. Making these tangible memorials to specific people - featuring their names, illustrations, etc - brought home the history and rich diversity even more.
posted by jb at 10:08 AM on October 11, 2016

I was at the March on Washington in 1993 when it was laid out on the mall. At the time I didn't know anyone who had died - I was 18 and freshly out of the closet. That would change in the year after as Brian, Chris, Jay and others fell away. I looked around on the mall and saw other people sobbing, and I started to sob too. The AIDS crisis was attempted genocide, pure and simple.

But we're still here, and we're still queer.
posted by AFABulous at 11:19 AM on October 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

I saw in in Boston in 1988. My strongest memory of that day is of someone gently asking if I was okay. I was a teenager, and that a stranger would care about how I felt was revelatory.
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:33 PM on October 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

I hadn't heard of it before it was first displayed at the March in 1987 - I was wandering around the Mall, occasionally running into people I knew, and wandered across the street from the main March end-area and suddenly there were all these things on the ground. And I walked through them and very quickly realized what the quilt panels were about. And it hit me like a pile of bricks.
posted by rmd1023 at 4:14 PM on October 11, 2016

Back in the '90s, I helped make one of those panels for a friend/coworker: it's one of the anonymous ones, because AIDS was so socially isolating that very few people would even admit they had it.
posted by easily confused at 6:36 PM on October 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Reading about the Quilt one day, I came across a song and monologue cycle that was inspired by it: Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens. It's beautiful and sad, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Particularly this song: My Brother Lived in San Francisco (YouTube link). I learned this song to sing my child to sleep, he doesn't understand why it it so sad.
posted by maxcelcat at 6:57 PM on October 11, 2016 [2 favorites]