David Woodhead reflects on the memories, legacies, and queer histories provoked by viewing- gazing upon- the AIDS memorial quilt in 1994 and in June this year.
I first saw the AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1994. I was 24 then, a young gay man, HIV-negative, standing before a vast fabric of grief. I remember the panels that honoured the famous, like the singer Freddie Mercury, artist Keith Haring, and writer Bruce Chatwin. Their names gave structure to the devastation. Their panels were elaborate, carefully made, touched with glamour and design. They helped me make sense of the loss. They made the unbearable feel contained.
When I returned to the quilt in June 2025, now 55 and living with HIV, my gaze had changed. I no longer focused on the carefully designed panels. I found myself drawn to the ones that felt raw, improvised, even chaotic. These panels came from hands that shook with grief. They came from people who had no fame to lean on, only love and loss and the need to act. These panels did not just remember. They kept people alive. Each uneven thread refused silence. Each scrap of fabric pushed back against forgetting.
In those panels, I saw myself. Not only the man I am now, but the young man I was then. At 24, I feared I would die of AIDS. And that fear shaped me. After all, there were voices around me – including politicians, churchmen and journalists – that said I was disposable, that my death would not matter, that some would feel relief. I absorbed that message. Despite years of therapy and reflection, I still carry traces of that shame. The quilt does not only remember the dead. It reveals the wounds of those who remain.
The trauma of the AIDS crisis did not end with the virus. It settled in the mind, in the nervous system, in the quiet hours. Grief piled up. Stigma wore us down. Many of us braced ourselves for loss. We lived with a constant mourning, sometimes in anticipation of diagnoses yet to be made. The quilt shows this too. It holds the weight of what we carried and still carry.
The epidemic didn’t just steal lives. It revealed the brutal fault lines of power, visibility, and care. Queer theorists (Halberstam, 2005; Muñoz, 209) have long argued that identity is not fixed but performed, politicised, and often shaped in resistance. In that light, the protest group Act Up – AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power – adopted the mantra that Silence = Death, which became more than just a slogan of protest. It was a revelation of queer existence refusing erasure. Indeed, as one panel tells us unequivocally: these men didn’t simply die of AIDS; they were killed by it and the associated indifference of a deeply homophobic society. The quilt reclaims that narrative, each panel a counter-history, insisting: we are here, we have always been here, and we will fight to be remembered.
And yet throughout those turbulent times, and beyond, there was love, the radical act of sex, and the friends and family who stayed, the ones who still remember, and those who know what it was like to be there. Our bonds were not casual; they were forged in a furnace, and they have endured. We held each other through funerals, through broken relationships, through diagnoses. We were ready to catch each other as we fell. And the intimacy endures. We still see each other as we were- clear skinned and vital – as well as how we are now – with greying temples and furrowed brows, creaking joints, and failing eyes.
This is queerness too. Not only in who we love, but in how we move through time and space, in how we remember. Queer space and time do not follow a straight line. They loop. They fold. They hold past and present together. I am there and here. Then and now. I am the young man at the quilt in 1994. And I am the middle-aged man standing alongside it in 2025. I mourn. I remember. And I live. The quilt does not only preserve memory. It bends space and time. It reflects who I was and who I have become.
And What of the Survivors?
Going to see the quilt brings me back to a question I have been grappling with for a while. What happened to the men who survived the UK AIDS crisis? What became of us?
Some became activists. Some became carers. Some became keepers of memory. Others disappeared. Some found love again. Some grew old. All of us carry survival, not as unalloyed victory, but as complex legacy.
This is the ground my current research, undertaken as part of my Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of Medical Humanities, explores. I want to understand what it means to look again at those days. To return to the same events, places, and objects more than thirty years later, with a changed self. I want to ask how memory lives in the body. How does trauma alter the gaze? How does survival reshape the story? How has survival reshaped us? And I want to elaborate a queer theory of remembering.
The quilt offers us a way to think. It is, somehow, a kind of methodology. It shows that memory is not fixed. It is stitched together. The quilt remains the same, but I now see it differently. I am different and how I look at the world is different. And yet, at the same time, I can still remember, in part, how I saw it more than thirty years ago. The quilt also shows us that grief can teach us as much about ourselves as it does about others. It reminds us that mental health and history are bound together. It also illustrates how queer time and space can hold many truths at once. And it underscores a simple but powerful conclusion; our survival deserves attention, care, and honour.
If you are interested in receiving more information about David’s research: david.woodhead@durham.ac.uk
About the author
David Woodhead is Honorary Fellow and Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Medical Humanities, Durham University, and Associate Director of Research, Centre for Mental Health, London. He is committed to amplifying the voices of people from marginalised communities and foregrounds his research in his queer lived experiences of trauma, addiction, and being HIV positive.
References
Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 2019 [2009]. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. 10th anniversary edition. New York: New York University Press.
