Subject: Adios:  A Giant Quilt Commemorates AIDS Victims
Date: Published: 10/13/87 84 lines
Source:  WALL STREET JOURNAL. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    LEISURE & ARTS:  
    Adios:  A Giant Quilt Commemorates AIDS Victims
    ---
    By Marilyn Chase

    San Francisco -- Giving grief a name and a face, that is
 the task of the Names Project, a monumental patchwork quilt
 unfurled Sunday on the National Mall in Washington, D. C. The
 giant quilt lists Reggie, Michael and Baby Jessica.  Stitched
 into it are dates, words of celebration or farewell and even
 personal effects.
    The quilt was displayed not far from the granite
 serpentine wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with which
 it inevitably will be compared.  The stone took many years and
 a national effort to complete.  The quilt is basically the
 brainchild of two San Francisco men, Cleve Jones, a longtime
 homosexual activist, and Mike Smith, a Stanford University
 MBA and management consultant.  Mr. Jones had the idea and
 made others believe in it.  Mr. Smith managed the project and
 found its funds.  Together, Messrs. Smith and Jones solicited
 three-by-six-foot panels from 300 organizations, including
 parents' groups, gay bookstores and social services groups.
 They cadged 10 sewing machines to stitch together 1,920
 panels representing 2,100 AIDS victims.  An additional 1,000
 panels remain warehoused in San Francisco, finished too late
 for the Washington unfurling, but ready to be pieced into the
 quilt by spring, when the quilt begins a national tour to
 raise funds for AIDS hospices.
    Although it is devoted to death, the huge quilt is more
 joyful than morbid.  The size of a city block, it's been
 patched together with sidewalk-sized strips of canvas so that
 viewers can walk over its vast breadth and see the individual
 patches up close, take in the colors and read the messages
 from the survivors to the country's dead.
    One patch simply says "Adios."  Another reads:  "Stephen F. 
 Gaskill -- Over the Rainbow -- 10/12/52-6/17/85."  Still
 another says:  "He could tan better than anyone I ever knew."
    Some of the fallen were famous.  A Los Angeles costumer
 submitted a gold lame panel studded with rhinestones on
 behalf of Liberace.  Broadway's Michael Bennett, creator of "A
 Chorus Line," is there in a black-and-white cartoon.
    There also are patches from groups not usually identified
 with gay causes, who have nonetheless honored members lost to
 AIDS. Among them:  a San Francisco chapter of the Lions Club,
 and Flying Tiger, the macho air-freight line famous for its
 government contract work in wartime.
    Then there are the Everyman patches, stitched by family
 members, friends and lovers of the dead.  My favorite
 proclaims:  "Reggie Hightower Forever," against a patchwork of
 shirts, and shows a black hand signing the deaf symbol for "I
 love you."  It was made by Art Peterson Jr.  of Atlanta on
 behalf of his companion of 3 1/2 years, who was black and
 deaf.
    Sydney and Jim Soons, homosexual brothers from Princeton,
 N. J., were commemorated in an early American red floral
 border quilt by their mother, Julia C. Soons, who wrote:  "I
 have two more gay sons.  I live in fear."
    A baseball jersey, a baby blanket, a transvestite's frock
 -- all are among the personal effects sewn into the patches.
 Mixed in with them are fantastic fabric landscapes with
 applique lilies, palm trees and several maps of Texas.  Star
 maps and seascapes deck the squares, as do pianos and peace
 symbols.  Calico, flannel and denim are the artists' media,
 along with satin, velvet, lame and leather.
    Recently, as celebrities, politicians and patients
 prepared to read a roll call of names here, about 130
 volunteers were folding up the quilt like a mammoth textile
 lotus for shipment to Washington.  Mr. Smith, red-faced and
 exhausted, rehearsed his troops for a dawn-to-dusk showing
 that he hoped would be "moving and beautiful, not a rock
 concert."
    ---
    Ms. Chase is a reporter in the Journal's San Francisco
 bureau.

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the 
personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the 
hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering 
from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]