COVID-19 and AIDS

 Reflect on your experience visiting the Sewn in Memory exhibit at Spurlock, making connections to our curriculum. How did you feel looking at the quilt panels? What did the exhibit add to your understanding of the AIDS crisis and/or representation of local gay communities? What else would you like to know in connection to the exhibit (e.g., about the AIDS crisis, about local LGBTQ+ activism, etc.)? What comparisons do you see between the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s and early 90s and the COVID-19 pandemic of our current moment?

I think that this museum exhibit is extremely important and will do a great job bringing more attention to the topic, especially how it impacted our local community, and I think the quilts in general are a good way to contextualize the AIDS crisis, taking a massive issue and making it seem much more personal. That said the quilts do still kind of misrepresent the crisis as a whole and the local queer community. There were no quilts for women in the exhibit which is by no means the museums fault but it is important to talk about. I think that people may assume that no women in this area died from AIDS and while I have no proof to contradict that I do highly doubt it. A woman (living in Newark, New Jersey) with AIDS lived an average of 15.5 WEEKS after getting diagnosed while a white gay man lived an average of 20.8 MONTHS (Women, AIDS, and Activism). This is an extremely complicated statistic that I won’t be able to correctly and succinctly explain so I highly recommend reading more about it with the link I’ve included at the bottom. With the understanding that women had much shorter life expectancies than men I would be surprised if no women in the area died from AIDS or AIDS related complications which is why I think the quilts don’t do the best job representing the impact of AIDS on the local community. The quilts are a window into a dark room, they allow us to see a small piece of this history but there is still a lot missing. Who knows how many people in this area died from AIDS who didn’t get a quilt. There’s sadly just too much missing for this exhibit to be able to truly shine a light on the local queer community.

Something upsetting is that there was a big goal within the AIDS movement of wanting to be remerbered, wanting their fight to have an impact on the future, outside of their direct actions. A lot of people losts their lives fighting with the government to get them to fund and approve a treatment but these people aren’t remembered and they aren’t taught about in schools. We can look at how quickly COVID-19 vaccines were created and approved and compare that to how long it took to create a treatment for AIDS and it just makes it even more heartbreaking. Yes, AIDS is a complicated disease but if you can create a vaccine in a year they could have created an AIDS treatment in less than ~13 years if they had wanted to. The government was simply ignoring the AIDS crisis and when they finally acknowledged it they didn’t put much effort into creating a treatment because they didn’t care about the people it was effecting. COVID-19 spread to anyone and everyone very quickly and while it does impact some communities much more than others it still has a much wider spread than AIDS. Yes, anyone can get AIDS but it wasn’t very common for rich, white, straight, men to get it meaning the government was able brush it off as something irrelevant. In terms of the governenment AIDS and COVID-19 are very similar, both had Dr.Fauci as a central voice though Dr. Fauci was seen as more of a villian by AIDS activist compared to being the voice of reason during COVID-19 and both health crises were/are ignored and trivialized by conservatives. 

Women, AIDS, and Activism:  https://web-a-ebscohost-com.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=7&sid=710ec926-7ad2-4f82-9214-d7b67eb261f6%40sdc-v-sessmgr02 

(Highly reccomend reading this, fair wanring the graphic design of the website is horrible) Speech from AIDS activist Vito Russo: https://actupny.org/documents/whfight.html