San Francisco Examiner - September 16, 2000
Susan Lieu

The NAMES Project came to light when Jones asked gay rights activists at Harvey Milk's candlelight memorial in 1985 to write down the names of loved ones who died from AIDS and post them on the side of the federal building. As Jones looked at all the names, he imagined a quilt spread out before the National Mall.

He began work on the project by creating one of the first panels to commemorate his best friend. Slowly, word got out about the project, and two years later, Jones and volunteers started to receive packages from several states for the inaugural presentation of the quilt at the gay and lesbian march on Washington.

Today, people are still sending quilts to the 49 NAMES chapters throughout the United States.

Jones left San Francisco in 1997 and moved to Palm Springs, where space is abundant and housing is affordable. He works from home and travels to The City about once a month to check on the NAMES Project, which has relocated to Townsend Street. Diagnosed with HIV in 1994, Jones said he's in good health and thriving on anger and work.

The project includes about 43,000, 3-feet-by-6-feet panels, stretching 50 miles long. The state chapters send all the quilts to the San Francisco office, where staff and volunteers sew them into panels of eight. The undisplayed quilts are stored in the warehouse. Each quilt has its own characteristics. Some are decked with a loved one's favorite shirt or a picture of their most prized possessions, like a car or violin. And there are those that read like a tombstone, "In Loving Memory of .s.s. April 3, 1957 - November 1, 1993."

The NAMES Project staff members are active in communities around the country, setting up quilt displays and education programs in high schools and at historically black universities. The staff and volunteers are working to arrange display sites in different cities, setting up sights in churches, synagogues, schools and especially in African American communities.

With 40 independent quilt projects around the world, the fastest growing of these quilts is the South African AIDS Memorial quilt. Jones was surprised by the significance the quilt had on South Africans' lives.

"When I first went to South Africa last year, I thought the quilt was sort of this luxury that only we in the West could afford," Jones said. "But I saw that the quilt has a very important role to play in combating the stigma and denial in Africa."

NAMES is expected to bring a section of the South African AIDS Memorial quilt on Wednesday to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation conference in Washington. It also will be presented at the U.S. Conference on AIDS in Atlanta on Oct. 1.

Jones said he also plans to use the South African AIDS Memorial quilt, first displayed last December on World AIDS Day in Capetown, "within African American communities to mobilize young people and help them see the epidemic in its true global context rather than through this white gay male lens."

He wants to bring attention to the rise in HIV infection, not just in San Francisco, but in around the world.

Although Jones has worked for years to raise AIDS awareness in San Francisco, in recent years, he has seen the rate of HIV infection creep up after a mid-1990s lull.

As new drugs helped AIDS patients survive longer, and media coverage of the epidemic lost its urgency, people forget AIDS is fatal.

An estimated 573 gay men in San Francisco have been infected with HIV this year, compared to 283 in 1997. Faced with this reality, Jones called for a constant renewal of aggressive HIV-prevention campaigns.

"We used to be much more creative on how we encouraged safer-sex behavior," he said. "We have a whole new generation who did not experience the horrific days of hundreds of people dying every week. They're not being exposed to these creative community-based safer-sex campaigns. But this death rate is not going to stay down even with all the new drugs."

Jones said the statistics are not surprising. Although it is often stereotyped as a gay man's disease, AIDS is killing heterosexual adults and children globally.

"We in America, our policy makers, even people running our AIDS organizations view it as a white gay male disease."

He hopes the South African AIDS quilt will have as powerful an effect on Americans as it did on South Africans.

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