Introduction: The Mourning After

Anniversaries, by convention, invite and invent time passages: rhetorical embodiments of retrospective experiences; mappings of routes from those pasts through contemporaneous frames into prospective futures; interpellations of us as chronological or epochal or historically contingent and contiguous beings. By way of introducing this very special issue marking the 20th anniversary of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, I begin with three time passages that for me exemplify the spirit of commemoration and critique that animates these engaging essays on this epidemic text.¹

In his posthumously published volume of essays on AIDS, Queer and Loathing (1994), author and activist David B. Feinberg opened his tribute to "David P." by lamenting how the epidemic had left him bereft not only of the lost, but of the rhetorical resources to convey their fulsome histories: "In these horrible times we have been forced to abbreviate the mourning process. How many people can you grieve for properly when everyone is dying? I wrote a novel for Jim Bronson, whom I barely knew. I wrote stories about my friends Saul Meissler, Glenn Peter Pumilia, and Glenn Person. Now I am reduced to brief essays in memoriam. Eventually all will be reduced to nothing but a litany of names chanted at the Quilt, panels of cloth the size of a coffin."²

The impetus for this issue came in a start on a Sunday morning in February 2006 while drinking coffee and rereading Christopher Capozzola's essay on the AIDS Quilt for my course on public memory. That I was seized by an awareness of the imminent anniversary is ironic given that Capozzola insightfully places the AIDS Quilt in history, within the very specific context of gay liberation and AIDS activism in the Reagan era.³ But I think it was, in fact, such historical precision that precipitated my recognition of the momentous present, what that present might mean, and the ways in which the past might envelop you at the expense of the here and now. When a week later I wrote to ask Cleve Jones for permission to reprint material from his memoir Stitching a Revolution, he responded, "I must admit that I was taken aback by the realization that next year marks the 20th anniversary of the first display." What did Jones mean by this? I imagine that, in no small part, and perhaps with lamentation, he had in a start measured the distance between then and now.

On the 2004 DVD edition of Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein's documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), we twice find the late, beloved activist Vito Russo waxing prophetic about a time after AIDS, about legacies and the archive. In the peroration of his 1988 speech "Why We Fight," which he memorably delivered at two ACT UP actions that year, Russo observed, "Don't ever forget . . . remember, that some day, the AIDS crisis is going to be over. And when that day comes, when that day has come and gone, there are going to be people alive on this earth, gay people and straight people, and black people and white people, men and women, who are going to hear the story, that once, a long time ago there was a terrible disease and that a brave group of people stood up and fought and in some cases died so that others might live and be free." Russo's visionary eloquence also provides in voiceover the peroration of the documentary itself, as we glance one last time at the Quilt displayed at sunset in the sightline of, in juxtaposition against, the White House: "I think what we want to see eventually is an end, a day when we can stop adding panels to this quilt and put it away, as a symbol of a terrible thing that happened and that's now over. You know we forget that some day this is going to be over. Some day there's going to be no such thing as AIDS, and people will just look back and remember that there was a terrible tragedy and we survived."⁴

Yesterday

In the untimely loss of...