13: AIDS Quilt as a Literacy

Cleve Jones, a San Francisco community activist, picked up the San Francisco Chronicle on Thanksgiving, 1985, and read a horrifying headline on what was supposed to be a day of thanks. The headline announced that 1,000 San Franciscans were dead from AIDS (Hawkins, 1993; Stull, 2001). It was coincidental that, on that same day, Jones was coordinating the annual Harvey Milk Candlelight Memorial March, which commemorates the life and work of San Francisco’s first openly gay supervisor who was gunned down in 1978 along with then-San Francisco mayor George Moscone (NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, 2007). Cleve Jones had lost countless friends to AIDS, and realized that many people who would be participating in the march also would have lost loved ones to AIDS. Very little was being done to combat the spread of the disease because, at this time in U.S. history, the American government chose to blame gays for contracting AIDS because of their lifestyle choices instead of considering AIDS a public health issue (Stull, 2001). Jones wondered who would remember those fellow Americans that have been lost to AIDS after they were gone (Stull, 2001).