A Very American Epidemic: Memory Politics and Identity Politics in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1985-1993

During a gay protest march in San Francisco in November 1985, local activist Cleve Jones asked participants to carry placards bearing the names of people they knew who had died of AIDS. Protesters then posted the names on a wall of the San Francisco Federal Building, and in surveying them, Jones says he was reminded of a quilt. Soon thereafter, in grief over the death of a friend, Jones made the first panel of what was to become the AIDS Memorial Quilt, whose 44,000 panels now bear witness to the memories of some of the 448,000 people in the United States who have already died of AIDS. ¹

But in 1988, just three years after the AIDS Memorial Quilt was born at a political demonstration, Cleve Jones, then acting as the Executive Director of the Names Project Foundation, told reporters that "we're completely non-political; we have no political message at all." Jones's attempt to distance the Names Project from politics reveals the complexities of political culture and political activism in the 1980s, and it encourages us to examine memory politics, cultural politics, and identity politics together with the issue-oriented, interest-group activism that is often assumed to encompass the full definition of politics. What kind of politics did the AIDS Quilt envision in its design, and what kind of politics did it embody in its practices? ²

In its first decade, the AIDS epidemic disproportionately affected particular social groups that often found existing cultural forms for mourning unable--or unwilling--to represent the emerging crisis. In turn, communities responded to AIDS by developing new cultural products that could accommodate the urge to memorialize and mourn those who had died. These were particularly visible among urban gay men, then just emerging from the hotly contested battles of "personal politics" in the late 1960s and 1970s. Mourning that might have been private and cultural took place in the midst of an activism that had made personal issues into the stuff of politics. These categories worked as opposites at the same time that the boundaries between them were consistently blurred. Creations of cultural meaning, like the AIDS Memorial Quilt, intended as acts of personal memory and collective mourning, were drafted into political battles and affirmed as instances of militancy. Long before Cleve Jones stood in front of the San Francisco Federal Building, culture and memory were already bound up with the political in the public response to the AIDS epidemic. ³

From its outset, the constituency of the AIDS Memorial Quilt was always an issue of controversy. The Names Project made extensive use of what its founders called "traditional American" symbolism in an effort to reach out to "mainstream" America's hearts and pocketbooks. Names Project founders sought to demonstrate that the disease was, indeed, as Jones claimed, "a very American epidemic," or to prove, as another Names Project document put it, that "America has AIDS." ⁴ The attempt to nationalize a global epidemic that had disproportionately struck segments of a national population embodied some obvious tensions, but it can best be understood within the overlapping contexts of nationalism and identity politics in the 1980s.

The Names Project voiced its claim to national inclusion at a moment in American political culture when the power to define Americanism rested primarily with conservatives who were hostile to all people with AIDS and gay men in particular. The Names Project was one of many efforts to challenge that cultural power in the language of Americanism itself, insisting that active and caring national responses to AIDS and people who had the disease were not fundamental departures from American traditions in the political and memorial realms. ⁵

This reworking of American national identity had a radical edge at a particular moment in history, but its limits quickly became apparent. Although Jones repeatedly acknowledged the Quilt's origin as...