Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1996. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - 12 October 1996
"This makes me think of the crosses in a war graveyard," said Dixie Ann Gabriel, of Palm Beach, Fla, as she surveyed the 40,000 panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt stretching on the Great Mall from the U.S. Capitol to the Washington Monument.
Gabriel traveled from Florida with a friend, May Ann McKenna, 58, whose son died of the disease in her arms in 1992. "Somebody loved every one of these people that are represented on these quilts," she said, as a voice read off the names of some of those victims in the distance.
The quilt, shown in its entirety for the first time in four years, was first displayed in 1987 in Washington as a tribute to victims of AIDS. Since then it has grown 20-fold to honor the memories of 70,000 AIDS fatalities, said Scott Williams, a spokesman for The Names Project.
The quilt is made of individual panels about six feet by three feet sewn into groups of eight, and divided between pathways so that visitors could see individual tributes fashioned from canvas, cloth, paper and other materials. Many panels are named for more than one victim.
Some panels just gave a name of a victim, perhaps with a portrait. Others included highly personal items: a passport, a motorcycle jacket, a pair of jeans with a gold chain belt at the waist and condoms hanging from the back pocket, a teddy pair, a poem.
The date of birth and death given on most quilts was a testimony to the lives shortened by the disease, many who perished in their 30s and 40s.
For some who visited the Mall, it was a chance to learn the fate of long-lost friends. Craig Bossi, 39, of New York, leafed through a 208-page booklet listing the dead and learned for the first time that several of his friends had died.
"I didn't expect to track down old friends this way," he said somberly.
For many, the vast scale of the quilt personalized the toll AIDS has had in recent years.
"It's a lot harder when you look at names and faces instead of just the numbers," said Marty Raef, 33, of Baltimore, who embraced a friend as he toured the quilts.
"We might not know any people here, but it still touches; you don't need to know them," said the friend, Chris Hacker, 33, of Washington D.C.
Although most of the victims remembered in the panels were Americans, the dead of 39 other countries are also in the quilt, said Williams. These include Germans, Cubans, Italians, Japanese, Russians, Thais, Venezuelans and Zambians.
"The extent is very, very impressive," said Ken Snyder, 83, a retired Foreign Service officer whose daughter is a nurse in a Texas AIDS hospice. It helps us "develop an understanding of death, which we Americans don't bother with. We tend to avoid it."
The entire quilt has been shown just five times since its initial unveiling in 1987, and the current display, which continues through Sunday, may be its last because it has become so large. On Friday and Saturday alone, families and friends of more recent victims brought about 2,000 new panels to expand the quilt.
"We're running out of spaces in urban America that can accommodate the quilt," Williams said.
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