To commemorate the 23rd International AIDS Conference, which this year took place virtually between 6–10 July, the National AIDS Memorial (NAM) made the entire NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt accessible online.
The Quilt was conceived in 1985 by gay rights activist Cleve Jones, who having heard that 1,000 San Franciscans had died from AIDS-related causes, asked fellow activists to write the names of their friends and family who had been lost to AIDS on placards. These were taped to the walls of the San Francisco Federal Building during the 1985 candlelight march (organised each year) for San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor George Moscone who were assassinated in 1978. The wall of placards looked like a patchwork quilt. Since the inaugural display of the Quilt in 1987 during the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, followed by years of touring the country and its last public display in 1996 (by which time it had grown large enough to cover the entire National Mall in Washington, DC, where an estimated 1.2 million people came to view it), the Quilt now spans around 1.2 million square feet and includes more than 48,000 panels memorialising more than 100,000 people since 1980.
NAM became the custodians of the Quilt in 2012, and its newly launched interactive map of the Quilt allows the public to see the details of each panel, as well as the entire patchwork which is also searchable by name, panel number and keywords. The Quilt has been published alongside a storytelling initiative which features stories from those on the frontlines of the initial crisis.
You can visit the quilt on the National AIDS Memorial website here.
