Bull in the Heather

The AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington DC (USA) in 1996. Photo source: AIDS Memorial Quilt social media.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt was started in 1987 in the USA to show all the lives that were lost to AIDS representing them humanely and not just as a statistic. It was nominated to the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. The idea spread to other countries, and it was also done here in Catalonia starting in 1993.

An event with the local AIDS Memorial Quilt in Barcelona (Catalonia) in the 1990s.

Other parts of the quilt. Photos from Catalonia History Museum.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt is present in over 40 countries, where about 100,000 tapestries have been made to commemorate loved ones who died due to this illness. It is the largest piece of community folk art in the world.

The Quilt has the objective of keeping alive the memory of the people who died of AIDS, but it also has an educational purpose, showing the diversity of people who were affected by it. AIDS was an extremely stigmatised illness because of its association to gay men, drug users, and prostitutes (even though it affected -and still affects- other people, too), that led to some religious leaders and conservative politicians to state that it was divine punishment and that nothing should be done to help the ill people. People with AIDS, their friends and family, and the queer community as a whole had to fight just to be treated like other ill people would.

Nowadays, it is known that the most important tool to not get or spread HIV is to be protected during sex and not share needles. If a person catches HIV, it can be treated with medication that slows down the virus from developing into AIDS so much that it extends the life expectancy to a standard level, so a person can have a normal life while being HIV-positive. For this, it's important to be tested to find it early. For this reason, the people most affected by AIDS in the present are people from countries with little medical resources, with the highest death rates in Africa.