Despite what us Gen X-ers might have you believe, the 1980s weren't all fun and games and brightly-colored sweaters. Frankie didn't just say "Relax," he also contracted HIV.

 

It's difficult to explain the full impact of the AIDS Quilt today. For one thing, handicrafts like quilting and knitting have become mainstream and have even been used to make artistic statements. It doesn't seem entirely unusual, at any rate, that a craft like quilting would be used to bring public attention to a deadly disease.

 

But what you have to understand is that in the 1980s, quilters were largely assumed to be frumpy old women. And AIDS patients were largely assumed to be freaks and disgusting perverts, society's leavings, the great American underclass: the invisible. Just announcing that you had AIDS would have been tantamount to explaining on national television that you were a pedophile heroin freak who was out to corrupt our nation's youth.

 

The gay rights movement was really fighting an uphill battle. Gay people were widely assumed to be monsters, and if they caught a "gay plague," in a lot of people's minds, that was just fine.

 

It was ugly, folks. It's important to remember that, because it wasn't so long ago. A lot of good people died. 

 

There was so much misinformation floating around. People thought you could get AIDS from a swimming pool, or from being in the vicinity of a sick person, or from a toilet seat. We didn't really know where it came from or how it was transmitted. A lot of people thought that "those sickos" could make "real people" sick with their germs. 

 

All this misinformation only fostered the spread of the disease. This, by the way, is where that "SILENCE = DEATH" phrase originates from, because it was true. When no one talked about AIDS, everyone spread it.

 

And then there was this quilt, this beautiful outpouring of love and grief, in the form of one of America's most traditional folk arts. And not only was it beautiful, but it was staggeringly huge when the entire thing was assembled. So huge that you couldn't NOT see the scope of the problem that AIDS represented. 

 

After the official assembling in Washington DC, individual squares of the quilt went traveling around the country. Each square representing a real flesh and blood human being. Not a monster: someone with friends and family who cared about them and who mourned their passing.

 

The AIDS quilt is both one of the saddest works of art, and one of the most uplifting and influential.