Aids: Gay Life and the Aids Memorial Quilt

Birthed in June of 1987 by a group of strangers with the mission to document and make aware to others the devastation and loss caused by AIDS, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, once a small-scale project in San Francisco, is now a powerful visual construction representing the AIDS pandemic, inclusive of over 48,000 individual 3-by-6-foot memorial panels commemorating the lives lost to AIDS ("AIDS Memorial Quilt: The NAMES Project Foundation"). Conception of the Quilt's idea occurred in November of 1985 by San Francisco gay rights activist Cleve Jones after learning of the many who had died of AIDS planning the annual candlelit march in honor of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. Responding to this news, he asked other marchers to write the names of their lost loved ones on placards, which he and others then taped to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building. Resembling a patchwork quilt once completed, Jones was inspired by the image to further this activist project to create an even large memorial. The first panel was created a year later, in honor of Marvin Feldman, a close friend of Jones's. June of 1987 saw the formal organization of the NAMES Project Foundation. A powerful public response erupted, inciting people in U.S. cities such as Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to send panels to Jones's workshop and inciting donors to quickly supply sewing machines and other equipment and materials to the volunteers working on the project.
During the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, the Quilt was for the first time showcased on the National Mall on October 11, 1987 in Washington D.C. Its inaugural display in 1987 prompted a fur-month national tour for the Quilt spanning 20 cities in the spring of the year 1988, resulting in a $500,000 total donation towards a multitude of AIDS service organizations and by the end of the tour, an increase of over 6,000 panels to the Quilt's size.   By October of 1988, a...