Bay Area Reporter - February 2, 2001
Terry Beswick

But that doesn't mean everyone is going to like it when they're shut out - particularly the long-term employees, volunteers, and contributors of nonprofit corporations - the ones that helped to create and sustain the organization.

Emotions are running high in San Francisco among a few volunteers who have heard - though not through official channels - that the Names Project Foundation will be moving its headquarters to Washington, D.C. in less than two months, while the nonprofit organization's AIDS Memorial Quilt, with its nearly 45,000 panels memorializing people who have died from AIDS, will be based in Atlanta.

"We have nothing to announce at this time," said Andy Ilves, executive director of the Names Project Foundation, on Tuesday, January 23, when asked to comment on the reports.

Pressed to explain a January 17 correspondence to the organization's 46 chapters in which he and Edward Gatta Jr., Rhode Island-based president of the foundation's board of directors, wrote, "In March, we will be moving the organization to Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, Georgia," Ilves, who has served at the helm of the nonprofit agency for three years, reluctantly acknowledged that the letter was accurate, explaining that he wanted to avoid publicity that could have an impact on lease negotiations that are not yet completed.

"The concern is they have made no effort to consult the public at all," said Rick McCormack, nine-year volunteer with the quilt and a co-founder of its San Francisco chapter in 1995. "This is something that this city and its community created."

For the last four months, the Names Project has been negotiating a lease buyout with its landlord at 310 Townsend Street. According to McCormack, at a recent meeting of the Names Project's approximately 20 staff members, Ilves had assigned him to help in the search for a new home - in San Francisco. But McCormack said that when he offered to follow-up on a lead he obtained from San Francisco Supervisor Mark Leno concerning a new museum being planned in the city that might be interested in housing the quilt, "Andy told me he didn't want to do that."

In December, when the Names Project's national board of directors held a meeting in San Francisco, McCormack alleged that he was asked to leave by Ilves. McCormack presumed that this action was taken to prevent him from hearing about the move.

Ilves did not confirm or deny many of McCormack's statements concerning the Names Project's secretly planned move, but stated that in March 2000 at the last national chapter conference, "It was very explicitly announced that there was a possibility of moving from San Francisco."

And yet even the 20 staff of the national headquarters in the South of Market neighborhood only found out about the move to Washington, D.C. within the last several days, and reportedly some staff are being invited to move with the project, while others were told that they will have to face a special evaluation if they wished to be transferred.

The personal is political

The quilt has long served as the best-known HIV/AIDS memorial to the HIV/AIDS dead, effectively communicating the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic through its immense size and the unique personal remembrances on each panel.

The story of the powerful memorial's genesis has become legend, told and retold in countless venues by its founder, Cleve Jones. It was in the fall of 1985, and Jones had joined thousands of San Franciscans in a candlelight march memorializing the late Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, who were murdered by embittered, homophobic former Supervisor Dan White in 1978. The marchers had joined together for the annual trek from the Castro to City Hall as they had in previous years, to honor and mourn Moscone and Milk.

But the burgeoning death toll from AIDS was also on the minds of many protesters at the march, taking place in the middle of the administration of President Ronald Reagan, widely recognized for his failure to provide leadership or resources to fight the rapidly emerging crisis. A group of marchers took their anger to the nearby Federal Building, which they plastered with placards emblazoned with the names of loved ones who had fallen to the disease.

Jones, an openly gay and HIV-positive community organizer, stood in the crowd and gazed at the memorial protest. It looked to him like a patchwork quilt.

It took a couple of years for Jones, a former Milk staffer, to realize his vision, which drew on the uniquely American tradition of quilt-making. But the charismatic leader rallied and inspired legions of volunteers and donors to help construct a vast, collective memorial quilt to those who had been lost to AIDS. By 1987, a large Castro storefront was secured and converted into a workshop for seamstresses and others to help assemble the fast-accumulating collection of individual 3 feet by 6 feet panels designed and created by survivors of people dead from AIDS. The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was under way with its first national display on the Mall during the highly successful 1987 National March on Washington for lesbian and gay rights.

Jones, who has retired and now resides in Palm Springs, California, was not available for comment at press time.

Putting aside the question of whether the Names Project should have allowed public discussion of their move away from San Francisco, McCormack and Felicia Elizondo, also a co-founder of the quilt's San Francisco chapter and an HIV educator, said they believe the quilt is moving to the East Coast because it will be cheaper to do displays in Washington.

"Saving money is quite nice," said Elizondo, a transgender woman who serves as a spokesmodel with the "HIV Stops With Me" advertising campaign. "But the majority of the panels were made here in San Francisco. How am I going to be able to go and view the panels I have made?"

But the Ilves-Gatta letter obtained by the B.A.R. said the move to Washington, D.C. "will allow us to collaborate more effectively with other national and international AIDS service organizations, and identify and secure strategic partners and funders for our programs." The quilt itself is to be housed in Atlanta, according to the letter.

Through its emotional impact, the quilt has always served an advocacy function, and with its many displays around the nation - including five complete displays in Washington, D.C. - also has served since its inception as an educational and advocacy tool, a goal the project's board of directors and top management say would be better served by relocating to the nation's capital.

"The community is going to be robbed," McCormack stated. "I've been told that there may be an attempt to kidnap the quilt and keep it here."

"We have begun to identify several options with regard to what permanent presence the quilt will have in its birthplace, San Francisco," Gatta and Ilves stated in their letter, anticipating this concern among the locals.

"People are going to be nuts about this," said Elizondo, who added that she had strong doubts that the newly elected president will be any more likely to visit the quilt with it based in Washington, D.C. "I could see it he was a Democrat."

But Gilbert Baker, who was also involved in the early days of the quilt, told the Bay Area Reporter that on a number of levels, moving the Names Project's offices to Washington, D.C. makes sense. He said that he's surprised that the quilt itself isn't going there too. "With George W. Bush in office, it makes visibility that much more important," Baker said. "There's nothing more eloquent that the quilt panels themselves."

McCormack, Elizondo, and others acknowledged that they have strong emotional ties to the quilt, and to loved ones they have memorialized in its panels, and for this reason, the quilt belongs in San Francisco.

"The quilt by its very nature is personal," Ilves said. "And it is personal to all of us, whether it's board members, volunteers, panel-makers, donors, staff, or the public."

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