Late Pride Month: AIDS

I hadn't thought of this being a full sub-section, but it happened:

Goodbye, I Love You by Carol Lynn Pearson 
Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an Activist by Cleve Jones with Jeff Dawson
Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)
United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (2012) 
The Quilt: Stories from the NAMES Project by Cindy Ruskin  

I had been planning on viewing Common Threads and United in Anger all along. They had come up during the last round of study.

Sometimes I get more attached to people, and I felt that way about Cleve Jones from reading his first book. That meant I had to read the second one. Some of it was familiar, but there was a lot more on the NAMES Project and the quilt. 

Those two movies and one book were part of the plan before I started, then Carol Lynn Pearson died.

I had been vaguely familiar with her, and kind of forgotten, but the obituary made Julie want to read the book. I requested it and we both read it. It was one of the last to be added but was read first. 

Finally, trying to find more work by photographer Matt Herron after seeing some of his photos at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, I found that he had taken many photos of the quilt and people working on it that were used in Cindy Ruskin's book.  

What happens putting them all together?

A big part of it was thinking about activism. 

I was already leaning that way, especially because of also reading of disability rights and just looking at things today.

It is easy to forget about all of the work that has gone into any progress that we have made toward equity and equality, and which in some cases what progress has been lost.

First there is understanding how much there was a need to fight. 

Currently I am reading many YA books for Hispanic Heritage Month, and I decided to focus on the ones that were had LGBTQIA themes as a bridge. 

Many of those books deal with the process of coming out. Beautifully -- especially in the contemporary ones -- there are usually multiple supportive people among friends and family. It is usually not everyone, so there is conflict, but a good percentage is supportive.

That would have been so revolutionary when I was in high school. "Gay" was a common insult, not really falling out of usage until around 2010, if I recall, and that was a good fifteen years after the makers of The Celluloid Closet film were feeling more optimistic and My So-Called Life introduced Ricky Vasquez.

Actually, when I was in high school the Oregon Citizens Alliance was working hard to convince Oregonians that not getting fired for being gay would be "special rights." 

There had been activism for years to try and get equality -- that was a big part of Harvey Milk's work -- but without the work in that direction being complete. Suddenly there was also a deadly threat that needed more work, and in many different ways.

ACT UP and Gran Fury worked hard to get attention to put political pressure and force the government to support research and get drugs released. That was needed, but it wasn't the only need.

There were still the people who were sick, not only needing care but having people who were scared to touch them. Not getting the research would result in more deaths, but not working out ways to get information out and testing and getting privacy respected and bringing meals and all of those other things would make those deaths more miserable.

Often the people working in different areas would focus on their area and forget other needs. 

No one could do everything, so everyone was needed. If some people were worse about remembering that than others, that's just the story of humanity.

And then, of course, there was a lot of anger and grief. Finding a way to memorialize that was also needed, which was where the quilt came in. It did raise awareness and create some pressure. It gave people not directly affected a chance to began to care about it. There was political value, but it also became a tool for healing.

One interesting thing is that people who were in ACT UP and people who worked on the NAMES project would often talk the same way about it, in terms of creating relationships and belonging and giving purpose. 

We need meaning and connection. Working with others for some cause can help with that. We can have that without needing our cause to beat out all the others.

There is so much work to do. 

With all of that work, AIDS killed a lot of people. I thought about COVID now, and grief now and then.

I said that Vito Russo came up in another movie. That was Common Threads. He is working on a quilt for his partner, Jeffrey Sevcik. Common Threads was released in 1989; Russo died in 1990, five years after his diagnosis. One of the other storytellers, Tracy Torrey, died in 1988 before the film was completed.

All of that death can get overwhelming, which makes doing something with the grief even more important, but I started thinking about some pictures from a few years back. 

One was a picture of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus taken in 1993, demonstrating how many people they had lost:

https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/san-francisco-gay-mens-chorus-aids-epidemic/

Then I remember Keith Haring's Unfinished Painting.

(And yes, I remember someone using AI to finish it, missing the point completely and not worthy of a link.)  

Then, more recently, there were these threads: 

https://x.com/wychstreet/status/2115852045903380760  

https://x.com/politicalmath/status/2118746105609429188 

One is about the loss of many artistic people, not just for creating art but also supporting it, from AIDS, and then one is about how easily we could never have had The Lord of the Rings except that trench fever meant that J.R.R. Tolkien was not with his unit when most of them were annihilated in WWI.

Some years ago I read a collection of poems, Anthem For Doomed Youth (ed. Lyn MacDonald, 2000). It honestly wasn't well done, which was a shame, but yes, when something kills a lot of people, whether it's disease or war, or maybe even an oppressive capitalism and exploitation that grinds people down, there is loss. There is loss of love and security, but there can also be loss of invention and art and uplift and inspiration.

It's just more of me saying that we need to value people.   

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/10/intersecting-months.html  

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/10/animal-rescue-infighting.html