Part of America’s biggest memorials to victims of AIDS is on display in the Lone Star State.
34 colorful pieces of the NAMES Project’s National AIDS Memorial Quilt are currently on view at First Baptist Church of Austin to coincide with the city’s Pride celebrations. The complete quilt is too big to be viewed anywhere but the internet, but 34 blocks of the 1.3 million-square-foot quilt are on display in the church’s atrium through Aug. 24. Each block contains eight 3-by-6-foot blocks containing the name of a person who died of AIDS. Meant to resemble the shape of gravestones, every panel is different and celebrates the deceased’s life. Some have clothes and other personal effects sewn into the fabric.
The panels on display at FBC Austin contain the names of 270 people, including many names from Texas. One panel memorializes City of Houston employees who died of AIDS. Most, however, memorialize ordinary people, such as Ira Berliski, a Houston resident who died aged 33 in 1994, or Michael Woodall, a Dallas resident who died at the age of 25 in 1986. Thanks to the work of Houston LGBTQ+ activist and historian JD Doyle, many of the obituaries of those on the Texas panels can be found online.
Quilts memorializing the lives claimed by AIDS, many of them LGBTQ+, may seem a strange sight for a Baptist church in Texas. But FBC Austin Senior Pastor Griff Martin told Chron he sees the display, inspired by a church volunteer, as an opportunity to repent for the times the church shunned Texans who are queer and living with AIDS.”This is a chance for us to help people remember a horrible time in our history and, in particular, a horrible time for the church,” Martin said. “We were actively doing the wrong thing when it came to our queer neighbors and siblings and the HIV crisis, so it kind of became this moment for us to do some confessional work, some inclusion work, and some education work.”…