This is one of the hardest reviews I have ever written. I knew when I was offered the chance to review this book it would be difficult. I just did not realize that the tears would start on first page and last to the index. If you are looking for a completely objective review of this book in terms of the topic itself, this is not it. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1978 I saw Harvey Milk debate John Briggs over Proposition 6, which would have banned gays and lesbians from working in California’s public schools; and, I remember a time before AIDS. I can tell you in detail where I was when the news about Harvey Milk’s and George Moscones’ assassinations broke. I have names on the quilt and I have cried with joy at not finding the names of long lost friends in the quilt index. To ask me to review this book objectively: it is just not going to happen, as it details an important part of my life.
That being said, Remembering the AIDS Quilt presents the history of the AIDS quilt as a vital, controversial, and contested mode of memorial. The volume opens with an introduction by Cleve Jones and his description of how the quilt began. It was San Francisco, 1975, and the seventh anniversary of Milk’s assassination and the annual candlelight march. Handing out poster board and markers, Jones asked the crowd to write down the names of loved ones killed by AIDS. Many had only first names with the words “my lover” and “my brother.” When the crowd reached the old Federal Building, they plastered the facade in the posters. “It was a strange image. Just this uneven patchwork of white squares, each with handwritten names....I said to myself, It looks like a quilt. As I said the word quilt, I was flooded with memories of home and family and the warmth of a quilt when it was cold in a winter night” (xiv).
Arising in the aftermath of Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and one of the first memorials to be conceived and built by the people involved rather than a government entity, the quilt seemed like a daunting task, a memorial to a disease no one wanted to talk about. The prologue outlines the history of the quilt’s beginnings, the politics surrounding it, and the contested and controversial move from its origins in San Francisco to Atlanta.
In what serves as the introduction to the work, titled “The Mourning After,” Charles E. Morris III details the historically contentious space that the quilt occupies as a memorial to victims of this disease that no one wanted to talk about. This was “easy,” given AIDS’s early genesis within the homosexual community; for many it was “out of sight, out of mind” with the “gay cancer.” Those within the community and the circles of family and friends around it sought ways to commemorate while simultaneously bringing awareness to a disease that would not confine itself to one demographic.
The work in this book is split into three sections, Emergence, Movement, and Transformation, the section titles highlighting three important phases of the quilt, its genesis, and growth. In Emergence, the essays ground us in the history of the quilt within the historical, social, and cultural context of the times in which AIDS and the quilt arises.
Movement traverses the impact of the quilt from its beginnings to the present, through textual readings of the quilt panels and people’s response to them. “We are offered vivid proof of the claims that the Quilt is experiential, material, performative” (lvii). Unlike other memorials, which have a completion date with periodic maintenance, the quilt is in constant movement with no completion date in sight.
The final section, Transformation, connects the quilt of the past to the potential of its future. Begun before the blossoming of social media, the quilt served a particular purpose to publicly commemorate. Is the quilt still necessary in this time of social media and the option to virtually quilt and memorialize? As the AIDS epidemic has become international and its culture has evolved on other continents, such as Africa, where, in many communities, commemoration is a luxury, what will be the quilt’s utility? Historical object or living document?
While each chapter highlights a different aspect of the quilt’s story, each chapter also reiterates the history of the quilt. So there is a tendency towards repetition, which can take away from the power of the later chapters. It becomes evident that many of the chapters were originally written for other venues and required there a historical recap. However, for this volume, the introduction by Cleve Jones is enough, and the historical sections could have been edited out. It would make for a more cohesive work.
This book is useful as a supplementary text for a history of the late-twentieth century, a study of social issues related to epidemics, or a course section on modern day memorials.
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[Review length: 835 words • Review posted on May 22, 2014]