The AIDS Memorial Quilt, an historic fabric monument to many who have died of AIDS, originated within the gay community of San Francisco in 1987. This paper explores the quilt's inception as a response to discourses that developed with the appearance of the AIDS epidemic, discourses that promoted the further stigmatization and marginalization of gay men. I demonstrate that the images evoked within the quilt can be seen to counter and resist the condemning images of gay men constructed specifically within biomedical discourse about AIDS. The quilt's implications for certain gay communities are also discussed, including it's tendency to draw gay men out of physical and social isolation into a collective experience where the positive reconstruction of gay identity becomes possible.The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt is an historic community-based art project that was begun in San Francisco when it seemed that no other form of expression could allow for movement beyond the devastation, paralysis, and isolation caused by the AIDS epidemic. The quilt was conceptualized by Cleve Jones, a gay activist and protege of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay supervisor of San Francisco whose term in office ended in assassination. Jones fashioned the first quilt panel in February of 1987 to memorialize his best friend, actor Marvin Feldman, who had died of AIDS four months earlier. By that time, more than a thousand San Franciscans had died of AIDS, many of whom had lived in the heavily gay-populated Castro area.
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