I don't think I'm the only one with a little bit of PTSD these days.
For a lot of us that lived through those really dark days, suddenly,
here we are again with a virus you can't see randomly affecting people,
life being put on hold, all sorts of things changing.
Around the time of the lockdown here in San Francisco, it suddenly occurred to me
that this is going to be the second pandemic of my life.
And really, no one should have to live through more than one.
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All those years ago in San Francisco, in the early 80s, and mid 80s,
it was a really dark time.
I had just finished Stanford Business School and had taken care of a friend and
a classmate who died during school.
And moved up to San Francisco without really thinking much about a career and
a job, a little heartbroken, a little bit lost, and
kind of stumbled into the middle an epidemic.
The Castro back then was horrible.
You'd walk down the street and you'd pass dozens of people who you knew you were
probably never going to see again.
The country didn't seem to be responding or didn't seem to be caring.
When some friends and I started the AIDS Memorial Quilt,
it was really a cry for help.
It was really a way to be heard at a time when
we all thought we were going to die alone and forgotten.
A friend of a friend, Cleve Jones, came to me in 1987 and
said he had this crazy idea for a quilt and some way to reach Middle America with
something that's not threatening and feels warm and comforting.
And you think of your grandmother when someone says quilt, and
that wasn't the world we were living in with AIDS right then.
It was a much different world where people were either there's you and there's us,
and we don't have it and you do, and that's all there is to it.
Almost immediately, I thought this is an idea that's really going to resonate.
We said we were going to do that first display at the March on Washington for
Gay and Lesbian Rights in October of 87,
four months after we decided to start building this thing, which was crazy.
And I think I thought we would do this for a little while, and we'd make our point,
and that would be the end.
And I don't think we were prepared for the beauty of the quilts.
We had been making something that were basically bed sheets to make a protest
statement.
And suddenly we had mothers all over the country, sending us panels for
their dead son, expecting us to preserve them and care for them in perpetuity.
I never thought it would become my life's work, but it has become my life's work.
In the middle of all of this COVID, when it first happened,
I wasn't the only one that was kind of looking for
a way to be helpful, a way to do something which has always been kind of my mode.
Gert McMullin, who'd been very involved in sewing together
many of the panels in the quilt for years, was feeling the same way.
She used to be able to go into hospital rooms in the 80s and
be with dying friends.
She just couldn't stand that she couldn't touch people and
she couldn't be up close with people.
Finally she said, I'm going to go into the workshop, it's empty,
there's nobody else there.
And I'm going to start making some face masks and we can give them away to people.
I made a phone call to an old friend, and
it turned out she was working at an agency that was desperate for masks.
This project has really opened my eyes to see how many vulnerable and
at risk populations there are in an epidemic like this, in a homeless shelter,
in a youth rehab program.
People are right there up close with each other and
you can't get that kind of distance.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt has gone from a protest banner and
something we were going to take to Washington to make a difference for
one day to a national treasure.
I mean, it's the largest community arts project in the world.
More people have worked on the quilt than built the pyramids.
And a lot of what we did at the time was not just the fabric.
We inspired people to do something, anything,
to express what they were going through, to tell their stories.
And I think now about where we are with this mask project and it's the same thing.
We may make 2 or 3,000 masks and that may save some lives.
I'd much rather have this be a catalyst for
other people to feel like I can find something to do.
I can get out of my house and go help stuff food at the food bank.
If we can do something simple like make masks,
you can do something simple, like find a way to be helpful.
And that's what I'd much rather be remembered for, being that catalyst,
than for just doing some sewing.
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