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INTERLUDE

~ilts

he NAMES Project AIDS Me1no'Hal Quilt has been ana- lyzed as art, theater, politics, spirituality and even (in a panel at the 1993 Modern Lan~ua~e Association con- vention) as "rhetoric." It has appeared on a daytime television soap opera and has inspired a musical equiv-

alent, a video, a book, and countless articles in both the popular press and academic journals. But, curiously enou~h, it is seldom described as bein~ what it most basically is: a communal folk craft known as quiltin~.

A quilt, or "comforter," as it is called in some rural communities, is a warm double-layered blanket, usually with stuffin~ inside (to make it even warmer) and decorated in some sort of pattern with small ~eometric shapes of colored cloth "pieced" in various elaborate desi~ns onto one or both surfaces.

As a child ~rowin~ up in a small town in southern Indiana, I have many memories of quilts and quiltin~. The quilt on my bed was pur- ple, blue, and white, with the pieces of cloth stitched into a kind of repeatin~ octa~onal desi~n that I used to contemplate in the moon- li~ht while tryin~ to fall asleep or observe in the early mornin~ sun- li~ht on awakenin~. The quilt itself wasn't very thick or heavy, but it provided a perfect cover under which to snu~~le on winter ni~hts in the cold attic room of our farmhouse.

My ~randmother, who raised me, did not quilt, but her sister (whom I called Aunt Addie) did. I remember how the quilts-in- pro~ress would be on frames in her livin~ room when we would visit and I would stuff myself with her homemade rolls (my ~randmother made terrific cornbread, but she could never match her sister's rolls). Aunt Addie held periodic quiltin~ bees with other farm women from the nei~hborhood. I was never invited, but I enjoyed ima~inin~ what that communal craft must have been like, pep-

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MUSIC & DANCE 125

pered as I'm sure it was with lau~hter, ~ossip, and easy country- lady -like camaraderie.

My ~randmother's best friend Carrie had a step-dau~hter named Ella who was lar~e and plain and used to cut and sort pieces of cloth for quiltin~ on Carrie's front porch. I used to ~o over and help her after school, and we each took a childlike pride in our cuttin~ and sortin~ of these buildin~ blocks.

After Ella went away (to "a home," my ~randmother told me, for the "simple-minded"), I moved on to visits with Aunt Lola Barfus, who lived on the town square and who quilted with pieces of material like those that Ella and I used to sort. Aunt Lola (we pronounced it "Lo-lee" and she wasn't really anybody's aunt, as far as I can recall, but the whole town called her that) loved quiltin~, requirin~ only the assistance of a ~ood listener. As she quilted, Aunt Lola also con- structed stories, drawin~ from her own personal history and that of the town. I sat spellbound, and stories now seem inseparable from the desi~ns for the quilts she was piecin~.

After I went away to colle~e and Aunt Lola died, I didn't think too much about quilts for a number of years, dependin~ on what my ~randmother would call "store-bou~ht" blankets instead.

Then on the Sunday of Thanks~ivin~ weekend in 1987, I made a quick trip down to Washin~ton, D.C. to see the Geor~ia O'Keeffe and Lucian Freud exhibits, after ten non-stop months of caretakin~ Peter throu~h five bouts of PCP. "Get away for a few days," his doctor had ur~ed. "You need some rest." I be~rud~in~ly allowed myself one afternoon. After first walkin~ numbly throu~h Freud's harrowin~ neorealistic portraits in the Hirschheim Gallery, then dreamily sur- veyin~ O'Keeffe's pink clouds and flowers and seashells at the National Gallery, I had some extra time and took in the Shaker quilts at the same location. In a flash, my memories of quilts came back to me, ~ently comfortin~ the stress and fear I'd been livin~ with, day in day out, for the past ten months. Leavin~ the quilt exhibit, I called home. Peter was worse. I took a cab to the airport and arrived at our apartment just three hours before he died, at home, the way he wanted it.

The followin~ May, I saw a portion of the NAMES project quilt for the first time, at a book convention in Anaheim, California. The power of the statements-so simple, so eloquent, so individual, yet so powerful-overwhelmed me. The followin~ month, the whole quilt was on display in New York. I be~an to reco~nize the scope and size of the whole, the way feelin~s and memories were bein~ stitched

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126 THE ART OF AIDS

together out of an endless array of materials, like those Ella and I had sorted through on Carrie's porch. Some of the pieces were simi- lar, almost matched, having been cut perhaps from the same cloth, but each was startlingly unique. And what a patchwork they made, stretched out together on the ground.

It took almost a year for Peter's twin sister Patti and I to begin working on our own quilt panel for Peter. We included one of his favorite shirts (bright yellow, with little green stripes), a green Tibetan prayer flag that our friend Kate had brought back from Ladakh, some felt flowers and a felt panda, his name (in a bold pur- ple that almost matched the triangles from the quilt on my bed back in Indiana), and a little pouch thal' h!Cluded a poem (from me), a dollar (from Patti), a St. Jude medal, and a few other memories.

We didn't "quilt" our panel with the proper stitching and backing and formally arranged pieces of cloth. If I'd ever learned how, from watching Aunt Lola Barfus, I'd forgotten. Our collaboration was more free-form, personal. But it was a quilt nonetheless. A com- forter. It still is, each time I see it as a part of the whole.

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12

The :fi0'/M£S Project e//IVS Memorial %ilt

They brought me some of his clothes. The hospital gown, those too-tight dungarees, his blue choir robe with the gold sash. How that boy could sing! His favorite color in a necktie. A Sunday shirt. What I'm gonna do with all this stuff? I can remember Junie without this business. My niece Francine say they quilting all over the country. So many good boys like her boy, gone.

-Melvin Dixon, "Aunt Ida Pieces a Quilt" 1

o response to AIDS has touched so many people in quite the same way as the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. It's hard to analyze something so personal, so heartfelt as the Quilt, but the responses have raised ques-

- tions central to any discussion of the art of AIDS, so this chapter finds itself, not coincidentally, near the center of this book.

The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt is a traveling exhibition of memorial panels, each 3 feet by 6 feet (the size of a cemetery plot) honoring the memory of a person who has died of AIDS. Most are made by friends, lovers, and families of the person who has died; some are made by total strangers. There are no rules, no requirements other than the dimensions. Those making the panels can use any material they choose, and they can decorate their panels as simply or as elaborately as they wish.

The panels are sent to a regional office, where they are stitched

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together to form 12-foot-by-12-foot blocks of 8 panels each. A number of permutations exist for combining the 8 panels in the block, and those who assemble them vary the combinations, so that the effect is that of a large crazy quilt, not uniform in either color or design.

When the Quilt is displayed, usually in some large outdoor space (such as the Ellipse next to the Washington Monument in the nation's capital), the 12 x 12s are combined further into groups of four, with white walkways in between them. An even larger grid, of square blocks 24 feet by 24 feet, now containing 32 panels each, is achieved.

Viewed from a slight distance, the Quilt presents a true patchwork of lives remembered: wild colors an~ S(ift pastels, somber blacks and browns, rainbows and clouds, and most of all names: formal names, familiar names, nicknames and drag names, first names only and "anony- mous," for those afraid or unable to speak out, for whatever reason. One panel has a large hole where a family ripped out a man's last name that his lover had sewn on: the first name remains, proud and defiant, beside the gaping hole.

There are sometimes groupings of panels in the 12 x 12s: Lovers or brothers, remembered with matching panels; similarly constructed panels celebrating a whole group of friends or co-workers, like that remember- ing a group from San Francisco's Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

Walking closer, viewers can see how individual the panels are: what fabrics are used (everything from silk to gunny sack, from chintz to leather), what accessories (ribbons, buttons, flags, college pennants, nap- kins, jewelry, even a 4-H blue ribbon), what representations of persons remembered (photos, drawings, cut-outs, empty garments), what words (not only names and dates, but poems, phrases, favorite quotes, some- times whole volumes on a single panel). The words and memories are sewn, glued, magic-markered or even penciled to the panels: some sturdi- ly, intent on weathering the passage of time, some so fragilely that they're already beginning to fade and fall off.

The panels celebrate occupations, identities, relationships: the departed as brother, son, lover, father, mother, daughter, sister, teacher, poet, actor, singer, dancer, bird-watcher, opera lover, disco bunny, drag queen, leatherman. Charles Ludlam as Camille. Roy Cohn: "Bully. Coward. Victim." An Edward Gorey cartoon. A staff of music containing no notes, only a single rest. A name over 12 candles (12 friends), 9 of which are extinguished.

As the viewers walk down the white paths between the grouped pan-

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els, names are read aloud over a sound system, minute after minute, hour after hour. All these names, as if the list will never end.

Cleve Jones says he got the idea for the Quilt during a memorial parade in November 1985, honoring the late Harvey Milk, the San Francisco supervisor assassinated in 1978. As part of the march, those in the parade had been asked to bring cardboard placards with the names of people who had died of AIDS and place them on the wall of the old Federal Building. In The Quilt: Stories from the NAMES Project, Cindy Ruskin quotes Jones as recalling: "It was such a startling image. The wind and the rain tore some of the cardboard names loose, but people stood there for hours reading names. I knew then that we needed a monument, a memorial."2

It took Jones over a year to formulate and organize his project, work- ing initially with a friend, Mike Smith. By the annual San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Freedom Day Parade, June 28, 1987, there were 40 pan- els, including the first, made by Jones for Marvin Feldman, a close friend who had died the previous October. The panels were hung from the mayor's balcony at City Hall.

Word spread quickly about the project. The NAMES Project opened an office on Castro Street, starting with seven volunteers, and quickly grew into an operation with ten sewing machines and scores of helpers. Pushing for a display in Washington in October, where there was to be a National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights, the Project had 400 panels by August. As Ruskin reports, "Ultimately, 1,920 quilt panels made it to the Capitol Mall in Washington, where they covered the size of two football fields. But nearly 3,000 panels had reached the San Francisco workshop by the time of the March and they haven't stopped coming."3

The Quilt had grown to such proportions by October 1992 that orga- nizers of the project predicted that this showing would be the last time that all the panels could be shown together (there are many regional showings around the country, where panels specific to that geographic location are featured). At that time, according to one report,4 the Quilt consisted of 22,000 panels, weighed 26 tons, filled 48 tractor trailers and, when unfolded, covered an area that was the equivalent of 12 football fields. (As of April 1, 1994, the NAMES Project reports it now has 26, 613 panels)

Like any phenomenon that has received so much attention, the Quilt has drawn its share of critical (and often contradictory) responses: that it is

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too personal (or too impersonal), that it is too political (or not political enough), that it favors elegy or emotionalism over action and resistance, that it is aesthetically flawed, that its real attention is on those who mourn or grieve (those who make the panels and come to see them) rather than on those persons with AIDS being remembered, that it is a work by the living presuming to speak for the dead.

Peter S. Hawkins, a professor of religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, has noted the basic human impulse for naming that the Quilt satisfies: "Human beings are alone in imagining their own deaths; they are also unique in their need to remember the dead and to keep on imagining them. Central to this aCt of memory is the name of the deceased, that familiar formula of identity by which a person seems to live on after life is over. To forget a name is in effect to allow death to have the last word." 5

Hawkins compares the Quilt to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which unlike the towering edifices surrounding it in Washington, is instead "a minimalist sculpture, an earthwork in which the spectator moves down rather than up, to view names engraved not in the capital's customary white stone but in highly polished black granite."6 As he con- tinues to describe the Vietnam memorial, conceived by architectural stu- dent Maya Lin, the parallels with the Quilt experience are startling:

In effect, the walls of the memorial were turned into mirrors in which the living would see themselves superimposed upon the names of the dead. Lin also decided against arranging the soldiers alpha- betically, choosing instead to place them in the order of the day they died. The wall, she said, would read like a Greek epic. To locate specific names, with the aid of a directory, would be like entering a tour of duty, like finding bodies on a battlefield.?

There are distinct differences, of course: The Quilt has no permanent installation but travels around the country; it is made of cloth, not stone; its list of names continues to grow, while the Vietnam list is complete. But "the Quilt in any of its forms is most profoundly about the naming of names: the sight of them on the myriad panels, the sound of them read aloud. As with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the names themselves are the memorial. In both cases they are the destination of pilgrimage, the occasion for candlelight vigils and song."8

Hawkins goes on to relate the Quilt to the history of quilting, which he points out was traditionally a way that women memorialized their

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ART 133

dead, in a softer, more intuitive way, while men chiseled names in stone. He is intrigued that the originators of the Quilt, being gay men, chose this method, which often recorded more than just birth dates and death dates about a particular name:

Some of the panels are indeed "volumes of hieroglyphics," recon- structions of human narrative that rely as much on private associa- tions as on any public discourse-life stories that need to be decod- ed. Moreover, intimacies are everywhere confided to strangers. The panels betray a delight in the telling of tales, revealing in those who have died a taste for leather or for chintz, for motorbikes or drag shows. Secrets are shared with everybody. It is as if the survivors had decided that the greatest gift they could offer the dead would be telling everything, breaking the silence that has surrounded gay life long before the advent of AIDS.9

Still, it is the name itself that holds the real intimacies, the real secrets, and its repetition, like a litany, is the real empowerment. One panel in particular caught Hawkins attention-as it did many others (including John Corigliano, who chose it as one of three panels on the album cover of his Symphony No. 1). The panel was made by David Kemmeries for his lover Jac Wall: a simple white outlined figure stands against a patterned background of light blue. If you walk close enough, you can read the black printing which outlines this reverse shadow, this body turning to light:

Jac Wall is my lover. Jac Wall had AIDS. Jac Wall died. I love Jac Wall. Jac Wall is a good guy. Jac Wall made me a better per- son. Jac Wall could beat me in wrestling. Jac Wall loves me. Jac Wall is thoughtful. Jac Wall is great in bed. Jac Wall is intelli- gent. I love Jac Wall. Jac Wall is with me. Jac Wall turns me on. I miss Jac Wall. Jac Wall is faithful. Jac Wall is a natural Indian. Jac Wall is young at heart. Jac Wall looks good naked. I love Jac Wall. Jac Wall improved my life. Jac Wall is my lover. Jac Wall loves me. I miss Jac Wall. I will be with you soon. 10

Another writer, Robert Dawidoff, has given an achingly clear repre- sentation of what it is like to be "lost" in the Quilt, moving from panel to panel, hearing the names read over a loudspeaker, drifting from life to life, name to name, memory to memory: "The experience of the Quilt is overwhelming. It is not like visiting a place or viewing something, it is being in the Quilt, as if enfolded by it. You go to look and suddenly the

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Quilt makes you present in your own life because of the surrounding atmosphere of lives, lives, lives." 11 He also points out, importantly, that the experience is not a solitary one: "The other thing in The NAMES Project is the other people there seeing it with you." 12 The audience of the Quilt, like its makers and those memorialized, is a kind of Rainbow Coalition:

AIDS has taken every kind of life, male, female, young, old, child, adult; every kind of person has died of AIDS. The NAMES Project reminds us of that. A child's bed strewn with her stuffed animals remembers a little girl. But, as everyone knows, gay men have been especially hard hit by AIDS. The N'AMES Project is, among other things, a remarkable, living record of the recent history of gay Americans. The panels unfold a story of love, friendship, creativity, and human worth that chokes the viewer with pride and sadness .... AIDS is not only happening to gays, let alone to gay men, but it is happening to them and The NAMES Project is an extraordinary tribute to and by and for a community under desperate, unlooked for, unmerited siege. 13

Like a few others, gay theorist Richard Mohr has criticized the Quilt for omitting certain details (specifically the more sexual details) of the lives of those remembered-that those memorializing friends and family they have lost, in other words, paint their own distorted pictures of the deceased instead of letting the deceased represent themselves: "The prop- er focus of moral concern in mourning is he who is mourned, not he who does the mourning." 14 But surely mourning-and certainly the mourning associated with the Quilt-almost has to be at least partly about the sur- vivors and caregivers, who make the panels, who view the panels, who live the other half of the stories being told and cannot be arbitrarily denied their part in those stories, or in the grieving that must be a kind of final chapter in those stories. "The NAMES Project Quilt is not only a memorial," Susan Grant Rosen of Union Theological Seminary has written. "If this were its sole aim, the job could have been commissioned, and a work of consistent artistic quality produced. But the Quilt exists to honor the survivors along with the dead." 15 Or, as Judy Elsley has writ- ten: "In part the panels provide a way for survivors to make a differ- ence. Because caretakers feel particularly helpless in terms of healing those afflicted with the disease, the quilt is something concrete and last- ing over which they do have control."l6

Each panel is, in a sense, a bond between the maker and the person

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memorialized, and can in turn serve as a bridge to the viewer as well. It is in this respect that Elinor Fuchs's initially surprising analysis of the Quilt as a "performance" in American Theatre makes most sense: "the Quilt is more relaxed, more inclusive, more sensual, more human, more theatrical than anything previously imagined in the protocols of mourning." 17 Its spunky sense of humor helps alleviate the sadness and sobriety of the rit- ual performance:

With all the suffering it represents, the Quilt playfully sends up the solemnity, the rigidity, of mourning, including "permanence." Imagine a cemetery putting all its attendants in white jeans and sneakers. Then imagine rows and rows of marble headstones etched with teddy bears, Hawaiian shirts and Mickey Mouse. Imagine jum- bling Jews, Catholics, Muslims and New Age Buddhists in the same subdivision of the "everlasting abode." Imagine finding a sublime design of mountains, bordered with "Comfort, oh comfort my peo- ple" in Hebrew and English right next to a splash of sequins cele- brating "Boogie," and directly below a grinning depiction of Bugs Bunny. The Quilt is cemetery as All Fools' Days, a carnival of the sacred, the homely, the joyous and the downright tacky, resisting, even in extremis, the solemnity of mourning.l 8

However, at the same time that the Quilt is performance or a kind of camp celebration, more like a wake than a visit to the funeral home, it also has a very serious, solemn, and perhaps sacred purpose: to honor in death persons who, more often than not were not accorded proper honor and respect in life, especially during their final disease. As Susan Grant Rosen notes, "The Quilt emerges from the profound need human beings feel to mark the passage from life to death in a way that is 'right and fit- ting.' In our culture, with its religious heritage, 'right and fitting' death ceremonial means honoring the sacred quality in human life." 19 It is that very sacred quality that is often denied to people who die of AIDS, Rosen states: "Many AIDS patients die without the support of family or faith community. Even when they are remembered in conventional funer- al rites, one can question the degree to which the ceremony honors the dead or permits a full expression of grief, since the cause of death is often obscured to protect the family and the community from stigma."20

Rosen quotes a woman from Nebraska who made a panel for a col- league of her son, whom she had never met, because she was afraid his own family would not recognize him: "I felt bad about that. I feel bad about all the people who die of AIDS that nobody knows." 21 A similar

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touching anecdote is included by Ruskin in The Quilt: a woman who had never met a man who died of AIDS decided to make a panel for him after seeing an "In Memoriam" notice by his lover in the local paper. She sent it to the NAMES Project with this note:

Dear David's Lover:

Please know my intent, when making this panel, was not to invade your memories or life with David. I have no memories to share of him but I do share one thing with you. On October 23, 1986 [when I read the death notice in the paper], a pain went through my heart that was unbearable. A loneliness for the loss of a complete stranger-a potential friend. To this day I cry when I think of how you must miss each other. . . .

Love, Cindy22

The letters, like the panels themselves, are strikingly democratic: They open the Quilt up to anyone who wants to participate. There are no aliens, no outsiders, no foreigners or outcasts. They include the writer or maker in a dialogue with the person remembered and are intended, as Timothy F. Murphy, has written, "to preserve the memory of a life that has touched them, that deserves something better than silence." 23 Like Aunt Ida in Melvin Dixon's poem, each quilter chips away at that silence. Aunt Ida is shocked at first when she hears her nephew Junie's quilt is going to be displayed: "A quilt ain't no showpiece," she insists. "It's to keep you warm. Francine say it can do both." 24 And perhaps even more:

Francine say she gonna send this quilt to Washington like folks doing from all 'cross the country, so many good people gone. Babies, mothers, fathers and boys like our Junie. Francine say they gonna piece this quilt to another one, another name and another patch all in a larger quilt getting larger and larger.

Maybe we all like that, patches waiting to be pieced .... Now where did I put that needle? 25