AIDS Quilt Comforting U.S. Grief

Cleve Jones concedes that it was a “dingbat” idea--rectangles of fabric bearing the names of the dead joined together to form an enormous quilt.

” . . . I said to myself we need a memorial,” he remembers. “Then when the word quilt went into my brain, what I remembered was my grandmother tucking me in with this quilt that was made by my great-great-grandmother and has been repaired by various grandmothers and great-aunts over the years. I immediately had a very comforting, warm memory and that was the key. . . .”

To the National AIDS Quilt.

Since the idea bloomed in Jones’ mind on a cold, rainy night about two years ago, the quilt has evolved from odd concept to sprawling reality.

National Sewing Bee

At bars in Houston, houses in West Hollywood, in towns and cities across the country, people who have lost friends, lovers, children, parents, relatives and colleagues to the disease AIDS have joined together in a sort of national sewing bee. So far, they have created more than 4,000 3x6-foot “panels” for this cooperative piece of folk art that is both a movable monument to those who have died and therapy for the grief-stricken.

It is now roughly the size of three football fields and weighs six tons. By this fall it is expected to more than double in size--big enough, Jones estimates, to cover the grassy Washington Mall from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument. (Still, it will contain only about a third of AIDS victims in this country. According to the latest Centers for Disease Control figures, 31,420 people have died of the incurable disease in the United States.)

Some of the quilt’s panels are crude--childlike crayon sketches on sheets. Many others are flamboyant, complicated or intricate. Surgical scrub suits, the “colors” of a motorcycle club, wigs, jewelry and other personal items of the dead often are stitched into a design. Often, too, there are words of remembrance. A panel dedicated to a dairy farmer includes the names of his cows. The panel for controversial New York lawyer Roy Cohn--the subject of a new, widely publicized biography--offers a harsh assessment of his life, labeling him, “Bully, Coward, Victim.”

“They get as elaborate as the person’s character was--or as simple,” explained Tom Trimm, a West Hollywood actor who has worked on five quilt panels and helps run a workshop for others who want to contribute to the quilt.

Until now the quilt has been fully displayed only twice--at a massive AIDS rally in Washington last October and in San Francisco last December.

But that is about to change.

Beginning April 7 in Los Angeles at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, The Names Project--the organization that coalesced around Jones’ once improbable inspiration--is launching the quilt on a 20-city, 12,000-mile tour. The quilt will be displayed in Los Angeles for four days before moving on to San Diego and then to other cities, including New York, Cleveland, Minneapolis and Dallas.

And in May, Pocket Books will publish 75,000 copies of “The Quilt: Stories From the Names Project,” a photographic album and narrative of some of the disease’s victims.

All profits from the tour and the book will go to agencies providing direct services to AIDS victims. In Los Angeles, event organizers say they hope to raise $300,000 to $1 million for local services to AIDS patients. At UCLA the quilt’s unveiling will be marked by a 2 1/2-hour opening that will include song and ceremony, according to special events producer Mike Mitchell whose company was selected by the local chapter of The Names Project to orchestrate the event.

“Each community has a chance to experience the quilt that’s a reflection of that community,” said Mitchell, who also produced “Live Aid,” the rock music event that raised money for African famine relief. “The way we’re doing it is a reflection of L.A. It’s a reflection of our style, the way we live. . . . It may be done in a little more grandiose or high style, maybe, than what another city might do--like Minneapolis.”

An ‘Experience’

Mitchell declined to further discuss details of the show, beyond promising that its will “supplement the quilt experience.”

Like others involved in the quilt’s tour, Mitchell stressed that the emphasis in Los Angeles will be on “a community event because AIDS, in and of itself, is a community problem. . . . The way we’re producing it, the ceremony is very purposefully bringing all aspects of the community--the religious community, heterosexuals, gays, everybody--together and not producing it either as a gay event or an AIDS event.”

Some who have been closely associated with the quilt speak of it in mystical terms.

Matt Herron, principal photographer for the book that will be published in May, said the quilt has acquired an aura “almost of sacredness.” It has become a powerful, emotive symbol that may “leapfrog the gay culture,” he added.

Quilt-innovator Jones, a gay activist who said he has tested positive for exposure to the AIDS virus, has the same idea.

“Just the word quilt itself is very important,” he said. “It makes you think of being comforted, of being warmed. It’s something that we give to the ill or the weary. It is something that is usually handmade by friends and family working together. . . . It was a symbol that was very positive, that was very American, that was healing, that was collaborative. The symbolism isn’t buried; it’s not obscure: We join together, we take our individual experiences, we stitch them together, we come up with something that’s beautiful, that’s comforting, that is a symbol of love and compassion.”

How Idea Grew

Jones and a core group of about 30 project workers organizing the national tour operate from a combination storefront office and quilt-sewing shop here. Everything in the makeshift headquarters has been donated--sewing machines, computers, typewriters, desks and chairs.

On one recent afternoon, Jones, settled down in his office--an area carved from a second-floor balcony--and talked about how his idea grew from a timid thought to a national movement.

“For a year, everybody said I was a dingbat and that it (the quilt) wouldn’t work, or that it was morbid,” he recalled. “And I had all sorts of doubts about it, too, and then a full year later my friend Marvin died. That was when I stuck my neck out and said to people, ‘OK, I want to do this,’ and I said it publicly.”

With a friend who also was trying to cope with grief, Jones said he went into his back yard and spent an afternoon making a quilt panel.

“I was able to devote this entire afternoon to really thinking about Marvin without crying, without getting hysterical, without getting depressed, without getting maudlin. . . . The whole afternoon was just looking at us under a microscope. By the end of the day I felt enormously relieved. The pain is not gone, or the sorrow of it. But it’s very important to have a way to remember people. . . . The quilt allows us to hold on to our memories.”

Jones believes the quilt serves mourners as a catharsis and as a way of coming to philosophical terms with death.

Jones said he has worked hard to make a quilt a symbol that memorializes all victims. To protect that goal, he said he has fended off attempts to use the quilt for particular, political causes within the gay community or elsewhere.

“I think in many ways we are relentlessly political, by my definition of politics,” Jones said. “But I believe that I can be more powerful, have a greater impact, touch the lives of far more people if I can remove it (the quilt) from the trappings of politics. So I will not allow it to be corrupted or tainted by petty tangential issues. To me the big issue is that human life has value. That is a political statement in this world, to say that human life has value without qualification. Life is sacred and to be honored--that is the message of the quilt.”