A Very American Epidemic: Memory Politics and Identity Politics in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1985–1993

Abstract

During a gay protest march in San Francisco in November 1985, local activist Cleve Jones asked participants to carry placards bearing the names of people they knew who had died of AIDS. Protesters then posted the names on a wall of the San Francisco Federal Building, and in surveying them, Jones says he was reminded of a quilt. Soon thereafter, in grief over the death of a friend, Jones made the first panel of what was to become the AIDS Memorial Quilt, whose 44,000 panels now bear witness to the memories of some of the 448,000 people in the United States who have already died of AIDS.1 But in 1988, just three years after the AIDS Memorial Quilt was born at a political demonstration, Cleve Jones, then acting as the Executive Director of the Names Project Foundation, told reporters that “we’re completely non-political; we have no political message at all.” Jones’s attempt to distance the Names Project from politics reveals the complexities of political culture and political activism in the 1980s, and it encourages us to examine memory politics, cultural politics, and identity politics together with the issue-oriented, interest-group activism that is often assumed to encompass the full definition of politics. What kind of politics did the AIDS Quilt envision in its design, and what kind of politics did it embody in its practices?2