The Best Ways to Quickly Learn About The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt
We describe the best videos to watch, today, on YouTube. These are deeply moving! Watch them with friends or associates if you can.
The Best Videos to Watch:
Here are three of the best videos to get a quick, moving, and well-rounded introduction to the AIDS Memorial Quilt:
#1. “POZ on Location: Stories from the Quilt”
This superb video is only four minutes long, but it speaks volumes. It captures what the AIDS Quilt was all about—the huge public displays, the spirit of the volunteers, and how the actual panels were lovingly stitched together.
To watch: Go to YouTube and search: POZ on Location: Stories from the Quilt
This video was filmed in 2012, when the Quilt was on display at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., laid out on the grassy lawn.
It opens with footage of people walking among the quilt “panels” to view them.
(POZ is the name of a magazine focused on people living with HIV.)
The video then shifts to a row of folding tables set up under a large canopy near the Quilt.
At each table, a volunteer is sewing a new quilt panel:
Most are stitching by hand—cutting out letters of the deceased’s name from cloth and sewing them onto a 3 ft. x 6 ft. piece of cotton.
They also add cloth numbers for the birth and death dates.
Many panels include personal items: a college sweatshirt, a school pennant, a photo, or a favorite quote.
The volunteers include children, teens, parents, grandparents, and people of all ages.
#2. A Pair of Videos:
“Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt Home Movie – Part 1 and Part 2”
These two 10-minute videos tell the origin story of the San Francisco nonprofit started by Cleve Jones and his friends—after they created a few dozen panels and realized the project had real power.
To watch: Go to YouTube and search: The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt Home Movie
These are digitized versions of original film footage from the late 1980s.
Cleve Jones, who was in his 30s, conceived and launched the Quilt project after being told for over a year that the idea was “foolish” and “would never go anywhere.”
He not only conceived the project, he built it—organizing and leading a growing movement.
In these two films:
You’ll see dozens of volunteers explain their roles in the San Francisco headquarters.
You’ll get a rare view of how a grassroots, grief-driven, volunteer movement got going—and grew fast—during a public health nightmare.
#3. Common Threads: Stories from The Quilt (Full Documentary)
This high-quality, award-winning documentary is essential if you want to understand the depth of the epidemic and the birth of the Quilt movement.
Runtime: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Produced by: HBO
Narrated by: Actor Dustin Hoffman
Released: 1989
(The disease was first reported in 1981. The Quilt project began in 1985 and was officially launched in 1987.)
The film includes:
Short, emotional interviews with people affected by AIDS—mostly young gay men, but also hemophiliacs, injection drug users, and people infected by blood transfusion
Interviews with families, friends, caregivers
A powerful chronology using local and national news clips, footage of top doctors and epidemiologists, and statements from politicians and public figures of the era
To See Great Photos of the AIDS Quilt:
Go to Google Images and search: Individual panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt
A Final Note:
As of 2018, approximately 700,000 Americans had died of HIV/AIDS since the epidemic began in 1981.
Nearly 13,000 people with AIDS still die each year.