AIDS Quilt on the White House Lawn, December 2024. Wikimedia Commons.

The concept of the AIDS Quilt was conceived by Cleve Jones (an Indiana native) in 1985. The project officially started in 1987 with Jones and several volunteers organizing the creation and display of panels. This first display was on the National Mall in October at the second National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Washington, D.C. At a time when many funeral homes and cemeteries wouldn't handle the remains of individuals who died from AIDS, the quilt was a means to memorialize, remember, and celebrate the lives of those who passed. The quilt continues to grow today, with an estimation of over 50,000 panels with over 110,000 people commemorated by 2022. In 2020, it was recognized as the largest piece of community folk art in the world.

To learn more about the AIDS Quilt, check out the Wikipedia article.

In his own words

Cleve Jones shares how the AIDS Memorial Quilt came to be in this short interview from March 28, 2020.

ACT-UP button with the phrase "Silence = Death" beneath the symbol of the pink triangle (made popular in the 1970s from reviving and reclaiming a marker used to identify homosexuals in Nazi Germany), 1987. Wikimedia Commons.

ACT-UP protest at National Institute of Health Office advocating for HIV-AIDS awareness, May 1990.Wikimedia Commons.

In 1969, advocacy for gay rights was elevated to a national level by the Stonewall Riots, a multi-day demonstration by gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals after a violent police raid of the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. Much progress was made for the LGBTQ+ community in the 1970s, including the first Pride parades in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago in 1970 and several cities and states passing protective legislation.

AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) mysteriously appeared in 1981, and there was little known for months about its spread and contagiousness. While the predominant group affected by the disease was gay men, AIDS infections outside of this group were known within the disease's first year. Early media coverage and later conservative groups referred to the disease as "gay cancer" or the "gay plague," perpetuating stereotypes of the disease.

Department of Health and Human Services poster for the America Responds to AIDS Campaign,1990s. Wikimedia Commons.

Even as scientists learned more information about the spread of AIDS and began educating the public, public fear persisted and the stigmatization of the LGBTQ+ community again increased. The federal government would not allocate significant funds toward research to find a cure even as thousands of gay men and other individuals were dying every year. Some politicians joked about the pandemic and others ignored it; as an example, President Ronald Reagan did not mention the word AIDS until 1985 (covering his first term in office and his reelection campaign) and tended to emphasize other groups affected by the disease over gay and lesbian individuals.

Grassroots efforts to advocate for government research and support were elevated in the mid-1980s. The political advocacy group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was established in 1987 and organized many demonstrations and protests. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan created a presidential commission through executive order to increase resources towards research and the investigation of new resources, followed by increased funding and resource investments by later presidents. These grassroots efforts, through their experiences of seeing partners and friends die and not being able to be by their side in the hospital, led to new LGBTQ+ advocacy movements, such as the equal right to marry.

These grassroots efforts combined with federal investments into AIDS research led to new knowledge, public education, and eventually treatments and preventative medications. Global deaths from the disease peaked in the late 1990s; however, many hundreds of thousands of individuals still die around the world, and research is still working toward a cure.