Queer Time is Filled With Sewing and Dying

“Everyone I knew was dead, dying, or caring for someone who was dying. Our friends died, we made new friends, they died, we made new friends, and they died, and it just went on and on.” 

- AIDS Activist Cleve Jones

There's this idea that queer folx don't experience time the same way as straight, cis people. In her article "Queer Time: The Alternative to 'Adulting,'"queer novelist and scholar Sarah Jaffe suggested that "Queer lives follow their own temporal logic." As a queer person, I'd have to agree. We've never been given the opportunity to live time like the majority. 

How could we when we had to spend so much time sewing quilt squares because we weren't allowed to have funerals? We spent so much time stitching and stitching and stitching our friends' names, our lovers' names, our colleagues' names, and even our own names' into pieces of fabrics. 

In 1985, queer activist Cleve Jones came up with the idea for the NAMES Project AIDS quilt, also called the AIDS memorial quilt. At that time over a thousand people had died from AIDS, yet at that time no one was paying attention. No one outside the queer community was caring. 

“I remember saying to my friend, ‘You know, if this was a meadow with a thousand corpses rotting in the sun, then people would see it, they would understand it, and if they were human beings, they would be compelled to respond,’” said Jones. So during a candlelight march in remembrance of the assassinations of Harvey Milk and Mayor George Mascone, Jones had those marching write the names of those who had passed due to AIDS related causes on signs and then tape those signs to the old San Francisco Federal Building. The sight of those names on taped to the wall inspired Jones to begin the quilt.

The NAMES Project AIDS quilt features 3' by 6' panels that are created in recognition of a person who died from AIDS-related complications. Each panel tells the story of the person who passed through its design. Today there are more than 48,000 panels, with more than 94,000 names sewn into fabric. 

Queer poet Mark Doty talked about his lover's passing from AIDS in his memoir Firebird. In it, he said "All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes but never vanishes" (p. 4). For queer folx, our lives are always shrinking. Always being regulated from military bans to legislation that allows healthcare providers to chose not to treat us just because we are not cisgender or heterosexual. Time is different for us. We don't get to grow old, have kids, and so forth. 

In her article Jaffe quoted from Michelle Tea's novel Black Wave, “It [was] so hard for a queer person to become an adult… They didn’t get married. They didn’t have children. They didn’t buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment.”

Of course, a rent-controlled apartment was what you got if you lived through the AIDS crisis, the muggings and violence in darkened street corners, being harassed for your choice of bathroom, being kicked out by your parents and living on the streets, the workplace discrimination, the suicidal thoughts brought on by being told you're wrong, going to hell, and so forth. 

During the 2019 State of the Union Address, President Trump promised to defeat AIDS. Yet, according to the Health Global Access Project, his promise is a lie, as his proposed budget would "wipe out years of progress in the effort to end the AIDS pandemic," as it "includes $1.35 billion in cuts to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and $392 million in cuts to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria compared with enacted FY 2019 levels." Additionally it also guts domestic programs that support those living with and affected by HIV in the United States.

There are approximately 1.1 million people living with HIV today in the United States alone. In 2016, an estimated 38,700 people in the United States were newly infected with HIV with around at least 26,000 of those being queer folx. HIV isn't over just because the quilt isn't being displayed any more. 

With so many things stacked up against us, it's no wonder queer folx experience time a little differently. We never know if tomorrow is going to come after all. Maybe that's why we're still sewing panels, why the quilt is still growing.  

Yet sewing takes time. It requires stitches upon stitches upon stitches. Viewing the quilt takes even more time. Us queer folx, though, aren't the ones who need to view it. We know the names. We remember them every day. We know the loss. We feel it every day. 

So let us keep our time, the little bit of it we have. Let us stop sewing. Let us stop telling the same story over and over and over again by starting to listen, by starting to do something about it.