We Are Everywhere: Lesbians in the Archive

AIDS: A Crisis of Memory

“For All the Women Who Have Died from AIDS”  Quilt Block 5736 (Courtesy of National AIDS Memorial)

In 1987, the AIDS quilt, made of 1,920 fabric squares that each memorialized a person lost to AIDS, was displayed for the first time on the National Mall in Washington D.C. Thirty years later, the still-growing quilt has over 50,000 squares, and is visible in its entirety at aidsmemorial.org. Public expressions of intimate grief, each hand-made quilt square reminds us both of the hugeness of the AIDS crisis—an unimaginable number of people were lost—and of the specificity of grief—each person lost was loved.  Many quilt squares memorialize the 1.1 million women lost to AIDS. Many others, like the square below, specifically honor incarcerated women, who, as of 2017, were still nine times more likely to be HIV positive than non-incarcerated women.

“For Women Prisoners” Quilt Block 3035 (Courtesy of National AIDS Memorial)

Sarah Schulman, 1989

Let the Record Show (2020)

AIDS presented lesbians with a crisis of memory. The erasure of lesbians from the AIDS crisis meant that the present was slipping away and being forgotten before their eyes. Lesbian activists like Sarah Schulman, pictured here, saw record-keeping as central to their activism. In Let the Record Show (2020), Schulman chronicles the complicated history of ACT UP. To be a lesbian is to be a historian. We are everywhere. We record our own lives. We remember ourselves; we remember each other.