Quilt Stitches Together Shared Sorrow of AIDS

Some compare its power to that of the Vietnam War Memorial. Others see it as perhaps the largest work of folk art in history, a patchwork quilt that weighs seven tons, could cover three football fields and is only beginning to grow.

They call it the National AIDS Quilt. Sewn together with millions of stitches by thousands of relatives, friends and lovers of more than 4,000 people who have died of AIDS, the quilt begins a 20-city tour in Los Angeles tonight.

Volunteers began unfolding the patchwork panels of color Wednesday morning at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, where the quilt will be the centerpiece of a fund-raising ceremony tonight involving dozens of celebrities, public officials and families of people who have died of AIDS.

“I’ve never felt anything like this,” said John Fournier, event manager at UCLA. “We’re used to sports events, political events here. We just had the NCAA (basketball) playoffs. But when they began unfolding it all this morning, I saw it, I felt the emotional content of it. I almost could feel all the spirits of these people flying out into the pavilion.”

Only about a third of the quilt will fit into Pauley Pavilion, where parts of it will be hung from the ceiling and others will be laid out with runways on the floor for spectators to walk through. Eight hundred volunteers have helped prepare the display here.

“It’s tough working on it because I figure I’m probably going to be a panel myself one day,” said Stephen Kolzak, 35, who was diagnosed last year as having AIDS-related complex. “But this is the Vietnam Wall of AIDS. It’s the only thing that has found its way into the mainstream because it transcends politics. It transcends gay. It touches people’s hearts. Each one of these panels was created by someone who sewed their love into it.”

People who have already seen the quilt displayed say that walking among the panels is like moving through a battlefield where thousands have fallen. They speak not of looking at it, but of visiting it, even of listening to it. They say that they can see on it human tears that have dried.

Each panel is 3 by 6 feet, about the size of a human grave.

There are panels made of worn denim, panels of T-shirts. Panels with rainbows and flowers and sequins. Panels of names in blocked letters traced with uncertain hands from stencils. Panels drawn by artists.

Each suggests a story without telling it. On one panel there is a small dog and a stained-glass window of an iris. On another are Mardi Gras beads and a French surname from New Orleans. “In memory of Bob, a biker,” proclaims one. “Taught gifted kids,” reads another.

The quilt is the inspiration of Cleve Jones, a founder of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. He is now executive director of The Names Project, which is proliferating into chapters around the country that are sponsoring the quilt’s tour.

Almost all the 1,800 panels on display are of people who lived here or had family here. According to the county Department of Health Services, 2,844 have died of AIDS in Los Angeles County since 1981. Nationally, 31,420 have died.

The quilt was taken out of its truck late Tuesday, each panel sewn together with seven others to make large segments of eight.

One volunteer, Debra Resnik, 35, of San Francisco, who sews for a living, has personally sewn much of the more than 3 million feet of seams in the quilt.

While sewing the panels together, she found herself securing to them the mementos of people’s lives: teddy bears, medals and ribbons from sports events, photographs. Also the insignia of their careers: airline wings, doctors’ scrubs, nurses’ caps, chefs’ hats, haircutting scissors.

“You go through so many emotions,” she said. “Every panel was a life. But then they kept coming and kept coming and kept coming.”

She made one herself for a friend. “I used to cry every time I heard his name mentioned,” she said. “Since I finished the panel, I don’t cry anymore.”

Joe Braden of Cypress volunteered to help lay out the quilts because his oldest son, Jim, 29, died of AIDS last year. “I wanted to see the panel his friends made,” he said with tears in his eyes Wednesday as he tried to find his son’s among the thousands encircling him. “It’s strange that something that can cause so much sorrow can be so beautiful.”

Over the last several weeks, workshops have been held around Los Angeles to help friends and relatives of those who died design and sew their quilts.

‘The Last Step’

Leena Deneroff, workshop coordinator, said people often arrive confused, unable to begin. “We try to encourage them, gently, because this is the last step in acknowledging the loss of someone they love,” she said.

Some sewed baby rattles into their panels, she said. One family drew a railroad track because their 5-year-old son liked trains.

Jennie Reyes, a legal secretary with the district attorney’s office, went in to make one for her son, Eddie, who died in November at 31.

“When I first found out he had AIDS, I had to ask the doctor if I could hold my son in my arms without getting it,” she said at a last workshop Wednesday night. “That’s how little I understood. That’s one reason I made this, to help others understand they’re all just people like us, those who died. . . . I also did it for me. It is helping me heal.”

One young computer operator was cutting out his 41st panel dedicated not to one person, but many: “To those who died alone,” it said.

‘Way of Saying Goodby’

“For me, this is a physical way of saying goodby when you didn’t have a chance to say it yourself,” he said, asking that his name not be used.

He said he made one for a man whose last words before he died were, “Where’s my mother?” And another for a friend he had sent a Christmas card to, only to learn by return mail that he had died. And another for someone he met only once who was his same size, age and coloring. “He could just as easily have been me,” he said. “I will be making these for as long as people I know are dying.”

The quilt was first displayed Oct. 11 as part of the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. It will be on display at Pauley Pavilion from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Admission is free.

Profits from the fund-raiser will be given to nonprofit AIDS organizations that are helping people with AIDS in Los Angeles and five other surrounding counties.