Mark Olmsted

Professor Justine Van Meter

Thanatourism - HUM 289

MSMC - Summer 2012

The AIDS Quilt: A Destination Like No Other

In 1985, a gay activist named Cleve Jones was numb.

“When somebody you know dies every day, what do you do? You

try to stop feeling and stop remembering. But I don’t want

to stop remembering Marvin Feldman and all the other friends

of mine that have gone. They shaped my life and I love them

and I don’t want to forget them. I had to find a way for me

to hold on to those memories and everything I cherish about

those people.” (Ruskin 18) During a candlelight march in San

Francisco commemorating the murders of Harvey Milk and

George Moscone, Jones passed placards honoring individuals

recently killed by AIDS along a government building. It was

blustery, and the signs blew off with the wind. The idea of

creating something more permanent was born in Jones’ mind,

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and by 1987, sewing bees were organized to fashion the first

panels of what would become the AIDS Quilt. (9) In less than

a decade, the Quilt became so large that 1996 was the last

time it could be displayed in its entirety. At present,

there are 48,000 panels and counting, and only sections of

the Quilt are displayed in different cities annually. With

none of the intention that usually attaches to the creation

of memorials, this “community art project” has become a

major site for dark tourism, drawing an estimated 14 million

visitors since its inception. 1

Sharpley and Stone assess dark tourist sites along a

scale of pale to black (20-21), whereas Seaton suggests 5

categories of travel activities, using the degree of

interest of the tourist in the death aspect of the site as a

criteria. (15) I found it most interesting to assess dark

sites along a continuum of impersonal to personal, measuring

the degree with which a site resonates with the tourist on a

psychological and emotional level.

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“Impersonal” does not mean sterile or uninteresting, it

merely connotes that the site depicts historically distant

events (Pompeii, the Inquisition) or disasters which, while

dramatic, impacted relatively few people. By this measure,

the Titanic is less personal than, say, a World War I

battlefield. Conversely the Antietam battlefield would seem

less personal than the Somme battlefield, but one conflict

having occurred on American soil certainly outweighs the

closer chronological proximity of the second conflict.

Visitors to concentration camps or other sites of

genocide (Cambodia) may have relatives who perished or

survived, but far more likely the “personal” nature of the

experience for most visitors lies in their visceral reaction

to the extraordinary intensity and scale of the cruelty to

which the site testifies. Visitors who make the trek come

pre-educated to the horrors; seeing for themselves the

actual venues in which the atrocities were committed speaks

to a need to authenticate the unimaginable. It is even

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arguable that we seek to reassure ourselves in visiting such

places that we are personally incapable of such acts,

ignoring the near-certainty that any future concentration

camp guards interviewed in 1933 would have no doubt sworn

exactly the same thing. (In “Playing for Time,” an inmate

refers to the cruelty of the SS guards. “They’re monsters!

They're not human!" Fania Fenelon--played by Vanessa

Redgrave--answers: "But they are human. Just like you. Just

like me. That's the problem. Here we have learned something

about human nature, and it's not very good news.") 2

The memorials to modern wars are understandably more

personal in relation to how recently the war was fought, but

this is leavened by the degree of national engagement

reflected by the conflict. World War II and Vietnam rate

relatively high on this scale, Korea and the first Iraq war

much less so. Unquestionably, 9/11 also looms large in the

mind of every adult American, who can to a person tell you

where they were that morning. As a national trauma, AIDS

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might be best compared to the recent conflicts in Iraq and

Afghanistan, draining the national treasure but acutely

affecting relatively narrow swathes of the population in

terms of sacrifice and death.

A quilt is a handicraft that is traditionally sewn by

wives and mothers for use on a bed -- the place where sleep

and sexual intimacy both occur. As such it embodies notions

of domesticity and tranquility--an intrinsic counterpoint to

the classic tropes around AIDS invoking the mythic

promiscuity of the urban gay male. These stereotypical

assumptions are also mitigated somewhat by the great

multitude of panels, which by definition represent every

conceivable kind of individual with AIDS--gay, straight,

male, female, black, white etc..

Another aspect particular to the AIDS Quilt--in

opposition to other dark tourist sites--is the degree of

interactivity demanded of the visitor. The information

available to each viewer is as personalized as each life it

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represents, evoking not only how each individual lived, but

how each was loved. This exceeds both qualitatively and

quantitatively the degree of content one might find on a

grave marker, or even in a short biological sketch of a

death camp victim handed out at the end of a Holocaust

Museum tour, but it remains evocative, not conclusive. One’s

own imagination is required to fill in the blanks, to add

muscle to the skeleton. The AIDS Quilt is like a series of

giant obituaries made of cloth, with the significant

difference being that “reading” the panels occurs as a group

experience, not separately via thousands of distinct

individual newspaper readers.

This sense of being immersed in the lives of the

commemorated is further reinforced by the physical structure

of the quilt. Eight panels are stitched together in a

section, visitors view them from the grass walkways created

between the equidistant sections. Lost in a sea of quilts,

the visitors can focus on each life individually or peer out

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at the enormity of lives lost to AIDS. (A roughly

equivalent strategy can be seen in the stacks of personal

items displayed in Holocaust museums, somewhat less so in

the mounds of skulls at Cambodian genocide memorials. A pair

of shoes or eyeglasses reminds one of a life; it is rather

difficult to think of anything else but a death when seeing

a skull.)

It is strange to describe dark tourist sites according

to their entertainment value, and yet the concept is

clearly applicable in some cases. While it would be obscene

to be “entertained” by a tour of Bergen-Belsen, no one would

think it strange to find it fun to watch a reenactment of

the Battle of Shiloh. The AIDS Quilt most certainly lies on

the somber side of the equation, but not entirely. Each

panel celebrates a life every bit as much as it mourns a

death. Many quilts are humorous, just like the individuals

they represent. We are not “entertained” in the classic

sense, but we are creatively engaged, as we would be reading

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a book that was sad but full of interesting characters. The

Quilt is the dark tourist site that most doubles as a work

of literature. As Elsley puts it , “textile as text.”

(Nelson 187)

This is not to say one can’t find enough fodder to

create a wide array of novel plots using information off

gravestones from any run-of-the-mill cemetery. But the lack

of one consistent cause of death makes the typical

taphophilic tour quite different from visiting the AIDS

Quilt. In a cemetery one can deduce that widows and widowers

remarry, stillborn babies are survived by long-lived

siblings, and most parents are buried by their children, not

the other way around. Cemeteries can be oddly comforting. We

bury our dead as the part of the natural order of things,

and life goes on.

The Quilt is far more like a battlefield cemetery. On

one side, the cause of death is AIDS, on the other, war.

In both places, the overwhelming majority have died young.

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In both places, it is impossible not only to think of cut-

short lives, but of the futures unlived. In both places,

“what a waste” is likely to be heard uttered by many a

visitor.

That said, the decision to go to war itself is hardly

random. Countries intentionally send soldiers into battle to

achieve political ends (however ill-advised), and casualties

are expected. Nor is the sacrifice meaningless if a cause or

purpose is advanced. War may be senseless, but we can still

make sense of it.

It is very hard to find any meaning in a death from

AIDS, and a great deal that is particularly cruel. It’s

almost as if the devil got bored, and decided to find a way

of creating havoc among human beings by creating a virus

that was not just highly lethal, but led to maximum shame

and stigma because of its modes of transmission.

For even though AIDS has come to be a pandemic spread

mostly via heterosexual contact, a large portion of the

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Quilt reflects a time when the overwhelming percentage of

victims were gay men. This makes it the sole dark tourist

destination thematically informed by sexual orientation. As

one half of a middle-aged couple expressed it to a NAMES

project volunteer: “The is the first homosexual event we

have ever been at. Our son has a panel here. Now we

understand homosexual people in a new way.” (Ruskin 142)

Because the societal taboos surrounding homosexuality

attached themselves to AIDS, many of the first victims of

the disease were shunned by families and friends suffering

from homophobia as well as garden-variety fear. Thousands

died virtually alone, and among many reasons the NAMES

project was summoned into being was to give these early dead

a retroactive solace, to bring them out of the second closet

in which the disease had thrust them. The creation of the

Quilt represented a giant pushback of thousands of

individuals who rejected the notion that those who died in

the search for sexual intimacy had something to be ashamed

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of. And the mutuality involved in making each panel with

friends or family members, meeting other mourners making

other panels, and then collectively sewing them together in

a panel-block, provided an incalculable therapeutic release

for most. As Cleve Jones put it: “You get this group of

people in a room, and one is telephone operator, another a

word processor, a ballerina and a waiter, and you tell them

that they’ve got to figure out a way to display ten tons of

fabric. You leave them alone for an hour and when you come

back they’re laughing hysterically, but they have a workable

plan. It’s constantly marvelous.” (Ruskin 19)

Next to the Quilt, most dark tourist sites are

comparatively static. They may add to or change exhibits,

but the emotional experience attached to the site lies with

the viewer. The making of each panel of the Quilt, however,

is imbued with the process of each sewer’s creativity,

birthing art out of death. The Quilt itself becomes a

living creature, ever-growing, adding memories, eulogizing.

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Battle reenactments, particularly of the American Civil

War, offer the only other dark tourist experience comparable

in kinetic charge. The uniforms, so lovingly tended, can be

seen similarly to the quilt panels, and the emotional

attachment of the reenactors to the process of recreating

the past is legendary.3 Participants speak of a bonding

process that far transcends a typical hobby, a sense of

family that occurs among the reenactors. Just as the Quilt

is taken from warehouses and laid out on football fields;

the uniforms are taken from closets and marched out on

fields of faux-battle.

Still, for all the parallels between these tableaux

vivant, the differences are crucial.

A few die-hard southerners may still mourn the

confederacy, but there is no personal grief for any of its

long-dead soldiers. It is a rare visitor to the Quilt who is

not grieving at least one death, often more. From that

vantage point, it ranks with the most visceral of dark

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tourist sites. A description in “The Quilt” is worth

repeating in full: “Young parents with strollers, clutching

their children, wander up and down the network of walkways.

A little boy in a yellow slicker gets on his hands and knees

to pat the panel made out of quilted pinwheels. A man

arrives with his lover’s ashes in a plastic bag and places

them on a panel. Entire families search for names. Many

bring bouquets of flowers and mementos to lay on the quilt

panels. A mother points out a panel to her toddler son.

‘See, his name is Michael, too,’ she says to him. ‘He died

of AIDS, remember, we talked about that.’ Two deaf men are

signing to each other. Both are crying. ‘Walking through the

panels is so much like being in a cemetery,’ says Woody

Mosely, a 40-year old psychiatrist. ‘But it’s very

different. It also feels alive. I am as moved by the people

who came to see the quilt as I am by my own feelings and the

panel.’ People are crying unabashedly, comforting one

another and strangers.” (Ruskin 142)

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Cemeteries are public settings in which private spheres

of grief are carved out, protected by invisible bubbles

marked by discretion and respect. (Military cemeteries might

be somewhat of an exception when grief is appropriated by

strangers as an extension of the notion that the fallen have

“died for their country,” i.e., for all of their co-

nationals.) The AIDS Quilt seems to provoke a new class of

grief, one that is intensely public and private at the same

time. Most everyone there has experienced the isolation of

the disease; the automatic lies told to neighbors and

relatives about reasons for hospital stays and weight loss.

Here finally, is a safe place--ironically completely in the

open, unhemmed by any physical walls--in which finally no

one will cringe at the cause of death. The heart of everyone

there has been broken in the same way--by the cruelty of

such horrific illness in those so young and by the weight of

social stigma. When one visitor tells another: “I know what

you’re going through” it’s not a platitude; it’s a reality.

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From a specific tragedy comes a specific solidarity, a

particular kind of healing. As Jeffrey Bennett puts it:“The

Quilt was certainly not the only outlet that people embraced

in their effort to understand the devastation of AIDS, but

it offered communal spaces for working through the

syndrome’s perplexities. The Quilt propagated an emotive

quality that allowed publics to be constituted around

reflection, loss, despair, anger and hope. For some, the

Quilt was public acknowledgment of queer lives lost, for

others a space where loved ones who did not ‘belong’ to the

classification schemes of official discourse could be

recognized” (Morris, 138)

This may be where the AIDS Quilt is most singular as a

dark tourist site; the degree to which it elicits an

emotional response that is shared-- in both meanings of the

word. It is shared in the sense that multiple individuals

experience the same emotion concurrently; and it is shared

in the sense that it is communicated to others. One need

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only have gone on a few guided tours to have noticed how

rare this is; a conversation with a stranger may occur as

the result of physical proximity, but usually psychological

territoriality is the rule. One communicates with other

members of the party one has come with, usually a family

member, sometimes a friend; the desire is for a distinct

experience amidst the common one; not a common experience

that renders it distinct.

My familiarity with the AIDS Quilt was not the result of

this paper, rather the other way around.  My experience is

no doubt fairly representative of why the Quilt is a dark

tourist destination unlike any other.

I came of age as a gay man in Manhattan in the late 70s,

working my way through NYU as a waiter in a gay bar. One

night, Eric Bean, a tall blonde 26-year old who bore a

striking resemblance to the actor Jeff Daniels, came in

after work to play pool.  Our rapport was instant, and

within a few weeks he’d introduced me to his college friends

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from Ohio who’d all moved to New York after graduation to

make it in the Big Apple. For my part I introduced him to

Alan Rabinovich, someone I knew through a mutual childhood

friend. Eric and Alan were a couple from there on out, but

it was my friendship with Eric that formed the core nucleus

of a large social circle that spent uncountable hours

together over the next fifteen years.

Alan was one of the very first wave to get AIDS, but

when he initially got better, we came to believe it was a

misdiagnosis.  There was no HIV test yet, no understanding

of the dormancy period. By the end of the decade we had been

educated. One by one friends started to sicken and die,

including my brother, who I came to the the West Coast to

take care of in 1990.  Back in New York, Alan went on

disability and then died; two years later Eric followed

suit. Eric’s friends came together to make a panel for the

AIDS quilt, stitching together 12 sections illuminating

various facets of his life and history:

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The top left panel duplicates a giant Breakfast at

Tiffany’s poster we gave him for his 35th birthday. He

absolutely adored Audrey Hepburn and that movie in

particular. To its right is a shirt and tie, reflecting the

high-powered exec he’d become and the suits he loved to

wear. To its right is Lucy, the sweet Basenji who was his

pride and joy. At the end of the row is a card, the King of

Hearts, representing both what Eric meant to us and his

passion for Bridge. (Eric loved games and was very

competitive - the aerial view of a ping pong table lies

within the card.)

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The second row starts with a visual of The Pines, the

Fire Island colony where Eric and Alan spent many a

vacation. To the right of his name is his world-famous drag

impersonation of Janis Joplin, performed at a Halloween

party, and the visual to its right expresses another of his

passions, watching women’s tennis.

The bottom row starts with the logo for him alma mater,

Wittenberg University--a place I’ve never been but got to

know intimately through scores of stories. Next to that is a

Stickley armchair where Alan (his face on the cushion) spent

many a hour snoozing. Their commitment rings are to the

right, and at the bottom corner is a rendition of their

beautiful 23rd street apartment. In front of it, Eric and

Alan are pictured taking a final road trip -- probably the

most heartbreaking and comforting image of all.

When I stood before the panel at the AIDS Quilt, the

genius of this creative form to honor the dead became clear

to me. In remembering Eric’s life in its profusion of well-

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chosen details, I could instantly absorb how every single

one of those thousands of names embroidered on panels in

every direction represented an equally complex and

profoundly treasured individual.

Paradoxically, one might well describe it as a deeply

intimate experience on the grandest of scales.

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END NOTES

1. http://www.aidsquilt.org/about/the-aids-memorial-quilt

2. Playing for Time directed by Daniel Mann and Joseph

Sargent, written by Fania Fenelon and Arthur Miller,

CBS Television, 1980, TV Film

3. Chasing the Elephant http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=OeJ9g2mhitY

WORKS CITED

Elsley, Judy, The Rhetoric of the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt:

Reading the Textile AIDS The Literary Response, ed.

Emmanuel Nelson New York, Twayne, 1992. Print.

Lennon, John and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction

of Death and Disaster, Cengage, 2010

Morris, Charles ed. Remembering the AIDS Quilt, Michigan

State University Press, 2011, Print.

Ruskin, Cindy, The Quilt: Stories from The NAMES Project,

New York, Pocket Books, 1988. Print

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Seaton. A, “ Guided by the dark: From Thanatopsis to

Thanatourism,” International Journal of Heritage Studies

2 (4) , 234-44

Sharpley, Richard and Philip R Stone, eds. The Darker Side

of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism

Bristol, Channel View, 2009. Print.