It’s been nine years since Cleve Jones, now 42, decided to make quilts to memorialize friends who had died from complications of AIDS. He worked to capture aspects of his friends’ personalities on each panel. Jones’ idea caught on and became the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Last weekend, more than 41,000 3-by-6-foot quilts were displayed on Washington’s Mall. Family members, lovers and friends grieved and remembered those who had died; and strangers experienced the sorrow of the men, women and children claimed by history’s most recent plague.
Q: What were you feeling before you made the first quilt?
A: I was very angry that so many of my friends had already died and so many were dying and the world was trying to ignore it. I tried to find some evidence that would be compelling enough to break through the apathy.
Q: Why did you choose to make quilts?
A: I was at a demonstration where we taped the names of people who had died onto the San Francisco federal building and as I looked at this patchwork of names, I said it looked like a quilt.
I was flooded with memories of my grandmother and great-grandmother. Their quilts were passed down through the family. It was such a potent symbol of traditional American family values. . . . It was very difficult the first six months. All my friends said it was a stupid idea. They couldn’t see it the way I could see it. I knew what it would look like.
Q: How did you get started?
A: A friend of mine and I made a list of 40 people we knew who had died and we made quilts for them.
I made the first quilt for my friend Marvin Feldman from Providence, R.I. I spray-painted pink and blue triangles and overlapped them to resemble Stars of David. Marvin was a Jew and the pink triangles were the symbols forced on homosexuals in Nazi death camps.
My friend painted a stormy sunset sky, and then he took off his shoes and socks and dipped his bare feet into gold paint and danced across the fabric, leaving gold footprints. That one was for Ed Mock, a San Francisco choreographer and dancer. I hung the first 40 (quilts) from the mayor’s balcony in San Francisco’s City Hall in June 1987, during Gay Pride Week. There were about 300,000 people who saw the quilts there.
Q: I recall that people still didn’t seem to respond.
A: At first it just seemed that nobody liked the idea. What I didn’t know was that all over the country people were sewing. One day I went to the post office and they asked me if I had a truck. They’ve never stopped coming. They were from Texas, Virginia, Illinois, New York, California, Florida. Now we receive them from all over the world.
It was exciting to receive quilts from new places. They’re very beautiful, but of course they represent a terrible loss. By Oct. 11, 1987, we had 1,920 quilts for the first display in Washington.
Q: You told a story when you were in Illinois earlier this year about a woman from Kentucky who brought a quilt for the display.
A: She came to San Francisco by herself on a Greyhound bus. She was in her 70s. She said she had taken care of her son until he died. She had never told another human being (of his illness) and she’d never felt a connection with anyone else who was a care-giver. She said she had read about us in the back of a People magazine while waiting for a dentist’s appointment. She gave me a quilt and said, “Here is my son.”
Q: What was it like being present at the display last weekend?
A: It was the most amazing sight of my life. The power of the quilt–as vast as it gets and the last display covered 40 acres of land–is that it remains intensely personal.
I had the opportunity to spend 30 minutes on Friday showing the president and the first lady the quilt. It felt like the culmination of a decade of work, to talk about the cure and the vaccines that are going to be coming soon and to finally have a president of the United States attend the quilt display.
Q: You spoke of a cure and vaccines. Do you think they will be the outgrowth of recently released drugs that have shown progress in keeping people with HIV/AIDS healthy?
A: I believe we’ll have a cure and a vaccine by the year 2000. It’s based primarily on our advances in understanding the virus itself. Our basic scientific understanding of the virus has been doubling every six months.
A vaccine is terribly important for the developing world because none of these incredibly expensive new drugs are available in the developing world. While it’s very exciting we’re going to have effective treatment, we must press forward for the developing world.
Q: What changes are you seeing now that there are drugs available that seem to be working? To have HIV/AIDS today is much different than it was 10 years ago, isn’t it?
A: Everything is different now. People like me who never thought we would live this long are looking at the possibility of a normal lifespan.
It’s an emotional roller coaster. For some of us, accepting the possibility of hope is almost as difficult as it was to accept a death sentence. I’m now watching friends of mine who were sick in bed, getting out of bed and going back to work.
Q: What kinds of changes do you foresee in a policy sense, now that HIV/AIDS is becoming more treatable?
A: What we’re going to see now is a lot more focus on providing money for research and raising money for these drugs. The new drugs can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year for one person, depending on the drugs that person is using. ADAP (the AIDS Drug Assistance Programs) picks up the cost for people who are underinsured or uninsured. But as of last week, only 14 states are paying for any of these drugs.
Right now in America people are being denied potentially life-saving medications because they can’t afford them. That’s what I lobbied the president for when we were walking at the quilt. We think we need another $195 million for ADAP to make these incredible drugs affordable.
It’s one thing to have medical breakthroughs but it’s another thing to get these drugs in people’s bodies. Our priority has been to care for the sick and comfort the dying. Now we need to refocus our efforts on speeding a cure. We can actually end this pandemic.
Q: Does the quilt project raise funds for AIDS research?
A: In every city where we do a display, we encourage donations and all of those donations stay in that city to care for people with AIDS.
Q: Can you describe the ingenuity that people have placed in making panels?
A: I think it’s a great challenge for anyone who makes a quilt to try to create a visual representation. It’s very difficult. Therein lies the power of the quilt. As vast, as enormous, as huge as it is, it’s made up of these intensely personal components. The items that are being used in it are not as fascinating as the stories they tell.
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An edited transcript.
