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Cleve Jones
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 Stitching
a Revolution - The Making of an Activist by
Cleve Jones, Jeff Dawson (Contributor)
There
can be few American stories more inspiring than that of the
tremendous 43,000-panel AIDS quilt, a national memorial as
powerfully symbolic as the Vietnam War Memorial--but made from a
material as fragile and ephemeral as human life. The quilt is
predicated on a simple concept: putting names to those who have
died of AIDS humanizes the statistics and forces those who visit
the quilt to look beyond the stigmatized categories of gayness and
contagious disease that cling to the popular image of AIDS. Cleve
Jones stitched the first panel in his backyard in February 1987 as
a memorial to his best friend, Marvin. He has been speaking in
public about the quilt for many years now, and his narrative in Stitching
a Revolution is smooth and engaging. Perhaps his best quality
as a storyteller is his generous recognition of others, shown in
his memory of Rosa Parks in her Sunday hat: "When she handed
me the quilts she'd made for her neighbors," Jones recalls,
"she wanted to relish only their lives, not the
divisions--just memorialize her friends and what they'd meant to
her. You're doing a wonderful thing, young man, she'd said. There
were no tears in her eyes, just a message for me to continue. Did
my fatigue show? Did she see that the death threats and potshots
had taken their toll? Dismiss them, she seemed to say, and grow
old. A challenge. I brighten and feel combative." --Regina
Marler
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By Cleve Jones
Excerpt:
A few weeks ago most of the media and much of
the nation got a bit of a chuckle when George W. Bush, unaware
that his microphone was on, referred audibly to a New York Times
reporter as a "major league asshole" and running mate
Dick Cheney gamely agreed, "Oh, yeah, big time." Most of
my friends thought the incident was amusing, but when I saw the
exchange repeated on the evening news, I felt a cold sense of
dread and the chill of an ugly memory...
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The AIDS Memorial Quilt (Cleve Jones, founder)
is a poignant memorial, a powerful tool for prevention education
and the largest ongoing community arts project in the world. Each
of the more than 44,000 colorful panels in the Quilt memorializes
the life of a person lost to AIDS.
As the epidemic claims more lives, the Quilt
continues to grow and to reach more communities with its messages
of remembrance, awareness and hope.
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Excerpt:
In June of 1987, a small group of
strangers gathered in a San Francisco storefront to document the
lives they feared history would neglect. Their goal was to create
a memorial for those who had died of AIDS, and to thereby help
people understand the devastating impact of the disease. This
meeting of devoted friends and lovers served as the foundation of
the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.
Today, nearly 13 years later, the
Quilt is a powerful visual reminder of the AIDS pandemic. Over
42,960 individual 3-by-6-foot memorial panels -- each one
commemorating the life of someone who has died of AIDS -- have
been sewn together by friends, lovers and family members. The
NAMES Project Foundation coordinates displays of portions of The
Quilt worldwide.
The Quilt was conceived in November
of 1985 by longtime San Francisco gay rights activist Cleve Jones.
Since the 1978 assassinations of gay San Francisco Supervisor
Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Jones had helped to organize
the annual candlelight march honoring these men. As he was
planning for the 1985 march, he learned that the number of San
Franciscans lost to AIDS had passed the 1,000 mark. He was moved
to ask each of his fellow marchers to write on placards the names
of friends and loved ones who had died of AIDS. At the end of the
march, Jones and others stood on ladders, above the sea of
candlelight, taping these placards to the walls of the San
Francisco Federal Building. The wall of names looked to Jones like
a patchwork quilt...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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