The AIDS Memorial Quilt’s return to San Francisco and its planned display at last Saturday’s 150th-anniversary celebration of Golden Gate Park was canceled.
Another victim of the coronavirus pandemic.
The art project, created more than three decades before our current pandemic, was inspired by local activist Cleve Jones, who wanted a potent symbol to represent the human toll of some 105,000 individuals who had died of AIDS-related complications
But the hand-sewn 3 x 6-foot quilt panels, the size of a typical casket, that had were laid end to end on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. back in 1987, won’t be displayed anytime soon in San Francisco, even as that grim quilt project total is eclipsed this week by today’s pandemic.
This Saturday, Johns Hopkins University reported that 106,469 people have died, victims of COVID-19.
While we are left to weather the current pandemic and reflect upon the continuing scourge of the last one, (32 million people have now died of HIV-AIDS related complications according to the World Health Organization), Golden Gate Park’s sesquicentennial celebration has moved online and the park has become a remote oasis of social-distancing solitude as the world waits for the day we can gather once again.
