AIDS Memorial Quilt founder visits MC

By Kyle Christensen
Courier Staff

“AIDS is the most serious pandemic that the human species has ever known.” Those very words were uttered with discontent by Cleve Jones, founder of the famed AIDS Memorial Quilt, during his stirring and emotionally compelling address on March 29 in the Dahl Chapel & Auditorium.

The Quilt, intended to honor those whose lives have been lost to the HIV/AIDS virus, began as an individual tribute to a pair of influential figures in Jones’ life.

A young student and political science major at San Francisco State University during the mid-70s, Jones also served as an intern in the regional city hall, under the direction of dear friend Harvey Milk (the first gay elected official in the state of California). Sadly, this companionship was tragically cut short on November 27, 1978, when Milk and Mayor George Moscone were shot and killed by an openly homophobic assailant.

Following the brutal crimes, members of the local community enacted their own tradition, participating in annual demonstration marches through the neighborhood streets to the doorsteps of city hall, on the same observed day of the slayings.

Four years later, in early spring of 1982, preliminary reports of the HIV/AIDS virus began to surface. When Jones himself was diagnosed with HIV (in 1985, after scientific confirmation of the disease’s prevalence), the issue hit closer to home than he could ever have anticipated.

Frightened and insecure, Jones remarked, “I felt that everything I loved- being gay, being in San Francisco, being part of this movement- was just taken from me.”

While HIV/AIDS began to spread rapidly within the gay populace and many resulting deaths were quickly covered up by ashamed relatives of the deceased, Jones questioned how the unfortunate casualties would be remembered. “One by one, people began to disappear. You had no idea that you were standing in the middle of this incredible, invisible disaster,” Jones recalled.

In response to this uncertainty, during the march of 1985, Jones compelled its participants to write the names of HIV/AIDS victims on cardboard placards, which they later tapped to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. The image of attached square patterns instantly reminded Jones of a quilt his grandmother had made for him when he was a child, which he regarded as “the symbol of the family.”

Jones took this initial concept to the next level, when he created the first stitched quilt (from fabric and spray paint) to memorialize Marvin Feldman, a close acquaintance who had died of AIDS. Though his project appeared admittedly crude, the idea of a commemorative quilt appealed to Jones immensely.

Jones began running workshops in San Francisco, where he and a team of volunteers toiled endlessly to create these elaborate quilts, hoping each contribution would further venerate another late AIDS victim.

“What a tiny planet it is and how, irrevocably, all of our lives are linked,” Jones suggested as the possible abridged message of the entire Quilt. “It’s the largest piece of art in the world.”

The first completed form of the Quilt was placed on display on October 11, 1987, at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It would eventually return to the D.C. area multiple times in 1988, 1989, 1992 and most recently in 1996, where it was presented in its entirety, with nearly 20,000 patches fully covering the wall of the National Monument.

This achievement would later receive a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 1989 and inspired the Oscar-winning documentary “Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.”

The outgrowth of AIDS is a political matter for Jones, who expressed concerns in his lecture over the distribution of medical resources across the globe, commenting specifically upon the countless fatalities of Africa’s broad AIDS-infected and impoverished nation. Moreover, the neglectful practices of the US government have additionally prompted a huge adverse impact.

According to Jones, who stated, “Had we acted swiftly, and intelligently and compassionately, none of this would have happened.”