Word: quilt
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Peak development of quilt design by the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Amish...
...comes down to the AIDS quilt, that collection of nearly 50,000 squares of fabric devoted to the dead. Gays have always been divided on this display. While some find the quilt a touching memorial and a useful political tool, others consider it a cemetery designed by the Ladies' Home Journal. I joined the landmark gay march on Washington in 1993, as a snob who had tended to avoid such gung-ho events, wary of all that coerced hugging. But that year everyone went. Too many people had died, and solidarity was no longer merely a buzzword. The quilt...
...quilt was displayed again this year in Washington, to considerable crowds. Organizers announced that this might be the last time a space could be found large enough to contain the majority of the panels. I didn't go, out of laziness and some vile sense of been-there-seen-that. I can't imagine a world without AIDS. Gay people have been marked, although I disagree with neo-con gay activists who claim that AIDS has taught gay people responsibility, as if, prior to the plague, homos were all shiftless and madcap. What AIDS has done is to make...
...favorite band of Beavis and Butt-head. A generation has been all but erased. AIDS has paradoxically proved that gay lives matter, that the days when President Reagan refused even to say "AIDS" in public are past. Perhaps the post-plague years will soon begin and all those quilt panels and ribbons and T shirts will become relics or even flea-market collectibles. There was a debate recently over destroying some last sample of smallpox, contained in a laboratory. I wish I could visit the final AIDS molecule, cornered and shivering in some barren government crypt. No mercy...
...McFadden saying that those who have died of AIDS are not worthy of being commemorated? The AIDS epidemic is a pandemic; quoting the Commemorative Program from the AIDS Memorial Quilt, "18.5 million adults are living with HIV." We cannot marginalize those affected by AIDS any longer...