Remembering the AIDS Quilt (original) (raw)

2013, Quarterly Journal of Speech

The AIDS Memorial Quilt is sui generis. A casual observer might sense this, but a reader of the fine anthology Remembering the AIDS Quilt, edited by Charles E. Morris III, will be overwhelmed by the unparalleled qualities and conundrums of the Quilt. One of the most potent conundrums is remembering a traveling, crowd-sourced, parse-able memorial (that was never ''just'' a memorial and grows still). Morris rightly puts the irony front and center with the volume's title. I write as someone who has not experienced the Quilt but through overhead images. After reading 12 wide-ranging, often affecting, essays, I am struck by how much the Quilt is unlike other memorials. I am struck by the many personal, political, conceptual, and methodological issues staked by the short, freighted history of the Quilt. Like any anthology there are ups and downs, but this one is well worth reading, whether you are interested in the history of HIV/AIDS, gay activism, public memory, or critical methods. The idea for the Quilt came to activist Cleve Jones in 1985 at a San Francisco ceremony marking the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone. A prologue excerpted from Jones's memoir recalls this inspirational moment and the extraordinary labor to create and display the Quilt on the National Mall in 1987. Since its creation, the Quilt has been displayed as a totality five times, the last in 1996, but thousands of times in smaller portions. The Quilt is now stored and archived in Atlanta. Following the prologue, in ''The Mourning After,'' Morris gently turns the irony of a memorial remembered another half-twist by introducing the essays as self-conscious ruminations on the Quilt's ''Emergence,'' ''Movement,'' and ''Transformation.'' The essays say more than their places in these three sections suggest, but the overall structure reminds one that these are critical recollections. As to the Quilt's emergence, in Part I, Carole Blair and Neil Michel place it ''in the history of U.S public commemoration'' (3) by comparison with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) in their essay, ''The AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Contemporary Culture of Public Commemoration.'' They demonstrate that the Quilt, like the VVM, signaled a democratizing shift in memorial culture, but also a crucial material break with commemorative forms. Blair and Michel note that post-Quilt, commemorative forms have variegated and building memorials has sped up dramatically, which argues both for an appreciation of the Quilt's particularity as well as its role in galvanizing creative invention in memorializing rhetorics. In ''The Politics of Loss and Its Remains in Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt,'' Gust A. Yep analyzes the 1990 Academy Award winning documentary about the lives of five men with panels on the Quilt and the early history of HIV/AIDS. Yep argues that although the film presented dying, asexual bodies located in ''gay meccas and US inner cities'' (53) it also appealed to neoliberal sensibilities by portraying AIDS casualties as individuals whose lives and families demanded attention. In his estimation, Common Threads visually constituted, through the specificity of lives taken, the remains of a loss that was publicly unreal. These two essays see the Quilt rising against a culture of invisibility and from a culture of memorialization. Although the authors are not in dialogue with one another, the doubleorigin story implicated in their works is worth considering in terms of how forms of