In November 1985, gay rights activists Cleve Jones and his friend Joseph Durant learned that 1,000 lives were already lost to AIDS, and while planning the annual march to mark the 1978 assassination of Harvey Milk and George Moscone, they asked fellow marchers to write the name of friends and lovers lost to this AIDS, which they were going to tape to the side of the Federal Building.
While looking at the cards, Jones realized `how it looks like a quilt.`
That was the start of the whole names project.
When it was displayed the very first time, in Washington D.C., on The Mall, there was already over 1,900 names and covered an area larger than a football field. All the names were read off, one name at a time.
Today with over 700,000 dedicated names on the quilt, it will now cover an area of 1.2 Million square feet and weight 54 tons, way too large and heavy to be shown all together in one place at one time.
To commemorate the 35th anniversary of the quilt, and as the founding home, San Francisco`s Golden Gate Park is having an open air display of the quilt at Robin Williams Meadow on 11-12 June 2022, and like the first display, there will be people taking turns reading off the names of the people on the quilt.
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