World AIDS Day, 2020

I generally post this picture on Facebook on December 1st, World AIDS Day. It's the quilt panel made for my first partner, Bert, who died of AIDS related illnesses on March 20, 1995, just a month shy of his 35th birthday. That date was the end of his life and it also marked a significant turning point in my own. 

We owned a house on five acres up in Prince William County, with three horses, two dogs, and a cat. It had always been his dream to have horses and although I'm the one who shoveled most of the shit, I was glad that we made it happen. He asked me one day, in full awareness of his own mortality, what I was going to do with my life and with the house when he was gone. I told him that perhaps I'd turn it into a group home for AIDS patients with nowhere to go and no one to take care of them as they died. In those days that's what happened when you had HIV, you developed AIDS and you died. And far too many gay men died estranged from their families with no one to take care of them.

Bert died just as the "cocktail" was being developed, that magical mixture of meds that kept the virus at bay and reversed the death sentence that so many were living under. In those days, Dr. Fauci was pretty much unknown to the general public, but he was very well known to the gay community as the nation's leading expert on infectious disease. Unlike much of the general public today, which refuses his common sense prescription to wear a mask, the gay community largely responded to the call to adopt safer sex practices and to "mask it" with a condom, which contained and brought down the AIDS epidemic.

In the year or so after Bert died, I sort of muddled along, doing much as I had done before. Gradually, I guess, my heart healed somewhat and I realized I had much of my life yet ahead of me. Towards the end of 1996, I met Clay, who was then serving as co-chair for the event put on by the Names Project to display the Quilt on the mall in October of 1996. I turned in Bert's quilt panel at that event and it's now part of the largest folk art project in the world. It was cobbled together by friends and family from some of his favorite old t-shirts, the most fitting memorial that I could imagine.

Although people continue to die from AIDS, that has declined drastically, thanks to science, Dr. Fauci, and people smart enough to take simple steps to save themselves and others. I didn't open our home to AIDS patients, knowing that I didn't have it in me to go through that kind of loss over and over. However, when we moved here in 2000, we did begin to open our home to dogs who needed a safe place to land and a chance at a better life. That's how I've come to know most readers of this blog; there's only a precious few who know the prologue to my life in dog rescue. I guess now there's a few more. 

Each individual panel is 3' x 6', modeled after the size of a grave.

The individual panels were stitched together into 24' x 24' sections. 

The quilt was on display for three days. It was folded and put away each night.

This is a picture of a group of volunteers, in white, unfolding a quilt section in the morning.

This is a photograph showing the layout of the quilt from the Capitol to the Washington Monument.

This is me with Bert's mother and sister, after turning in his quilt panel.

Maybe COVID needs a quilt?