ACT UP and the Quilt: Mourning or Militancy?

The AIDS Memorial Quilt brought grief into public space, transforming fabric into a powerful testament. When it spread across Central Park in June 1988, many saw it as a moving and necessary act of remembrance. Yet within New York’s activist community, especially among members of ACT UP, the Quilt raised difficult questions. Could mourning alone bring political change? Or did the beauty and quiet dignity of the panels risk softening the urgency of a crisis that demanded anger and confrontation?

ACT UP's political flyer, distributed during the Quilt’s display in Central Park, 1988—Boo-Hooray, "ACT UP Ephemera and Archives," accessed April 23, 2025, https://www.boo-hooray.com/advSearchResults.php?action=browse&category_id=222&orderBy=author&recordsLength=24&p=18.

ACT UP’s relationship to the Quilt was never one of outright rejection. Activists carried Quilt panels through the streets of Albany in 1988, folding grief into political protest. They also stood in candlelight vigils beside the Quilt on Christopher Street, finding strength in the blend of mourning and collective resolve. For some, this combination was transformative. Longtime member David Robinson later recalled being “bowled over” by the Quilt’s raw emotional power, describing it as a site where memory could move people to act.¹

At the same time, other activists warned against the dangers of symbolic mourning. In his 1988 “Why We Fight” speech, delivered at an ACT UP rally in Albany, Vito Russo insisted that “this is a war that has not united us, but divided us.”² His words underscored a deep tension: memorials could inspire solidarity, but they could also risk fragmenting a movement that demanded urgency and militancy.

Quilt panel created by ACT UP members calls for political engagement, harnessing grief into anger. 1988. National AIDS Memorial. Block # 1051 (02). “AIDS Memorial Quilt.” Accessed April 23, 2025. https://www.aidsmemorial.org/quilt.

This debate was echoed years later by filmmaker Jim Hubbard, who documented ACT UP from its earliest demonstrations. In a 2024 interview, Hubbard recalled that while the Quilt was “beautiful,” it also became “the acceptable sign of AIDS. The sort of thing George Bush could go down and talk in front of people … But it was pretty to look at.”³ For him, ACT UP’s more radical memorial practices—die-ins, political funerals, the scattering of ashes—refused that comfort. “From the tombstones … the cardboard tombstones and the die-ins which are symbolic, to … the desperation gets so great by 1992 or 1993 … that becomes more real. … First … just marching in [a dead friend’s] memory, but then they actually have the body.”⁴

As cultural critic Douglas Crimp later observed, ACT UP’s political funerals “refused to let the epidemic remain invisible.”⁵ Together, the Quilt and ACT UP embodied contrasting forms of AIDS memory: one consoling, the other confrontational. Their coexistence reveals how communities negotiated the politics of mourning in a city transformed by loss.

Notes

1. David Robinson, interview by Sarah Schulman, July 16, 2007, ACT UP Oral History Project, accessed February 24, 2025, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6075fe20d281ea3f320a7be9/t/60e7abb580504e0a7766c96b/1625795509476/082+-+David+Robinson.pdf.

2. Vito Russo, “Why We Fight,” ACT UP Historical Archive, March 1988, accessed April 23, 2025, https://actupny.org/documents/whfight.html.

3. Jim Hubbard, interviewed by Joseph Golden, December 2, 2024.

4. Ibid.

5. Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS, Queer Politics, and the Ethics of Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 259–60.

From Symbol to Body: ACT UP and Political Funerals

In the late 1980s, mourning in New York’s AIDS crisis often took symbolic form. Activists staged die-ins on cathedral floors, lay down in streets with cardboard tombstones, and stitched names into the AIDS Memorial Quilt. These actions carried grief into public view, but they stood in for the dead — symbolic gestures that represented lives cut short.

By the early 1990s, symbolism was no longer enough. As filmmaker Jim Hubbard later observed, desperation drove a shift: “From the tombstones, the cardboard tombstones and the die-ins which are symbolic, to … the desperation gets so great by 1992 or 1993 … that becomes more real. First just marching in [a dead friend’s] memory, but then they actually have the body.”¹ ACT UP began to stage funerals not as quiet memorials, but as confrontations, using the bodies and ashes of loved ones to force the city, and the nation, to witness what government neglect had wrought.

Flyer for David Wojnarowicz Funeral March, on July 29th, 1992.

"I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death, of their lovers, friends and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than simple rituals of life such as screaming in the streets..."

David Wojnarowicz: A Funeral as Confrontation

On September 14, 1992, what would have been David Wojnarowicz’s 38th birthday, hundreds of mourners gathered in the East Village to honor the artist, writer, and activist who had made AIDS visible through his art and words. Wojnarowicz had imagined funerals not hidden in private but staged before the nation as acts of defiance. In Close to the Knives, he wrote:

“I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend, or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers, or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to Washington, D.C., and blast through the gates of the White House and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps.”¹

For a group of ACT UP activists known as the Marys, this vision felt not only possible but necessary. That summer, during the 1992 Pride Parade, they had circulated flyers asking for volunteers who would pledge to “leave your body to politics.” No one yet agreed, but the idea was planted: Wojnarowicz’s vision could be turned into a collective act.²

Memorial March for David Wojnarowicz, July 29, 1992. Photo by Brian Palmer. https://wojfound.org/scholarship/timeline/1992-political-funeral/

The Marys put this vision into practice at Wojnarowicz’s memorial. The march began outside his loft on Second Avenue and moved east to Avenue A. At its front, activists carried a banner that stretched across the street: “David Wojnarowicz, 1954–1992, Died of AIDS Due to Government Neglect.” Two women beat snare drums, others clapped sticks of wood, but the crowd walked in silence. Some held sunflowers, others carried reproductions of David’s artwork.³ As they moved south to Houston Street and north on the Bowery, people stepped off sidewalks to join. By the time they reached a parking lot across from Cooper Union, hundreds had gathered. There, activists projected Wojnarowicz’s name and the White House image with his words about delivering the dead to its gates. His essay was read aloud, closing with imagery of the White House steps. The message was unmistakable: grief itself could be a political weapon.⁴

The night ended in fire. Joy Episalla and Barbara Hughes dragged the banner into the street and set it ablaze. Friends hurled placards and sunflowers into the flames. As smoke rose over the East Village, mourners stood in silence, watching the banner’s words burn. Wojnarowicz’s funeral marked a turning point. Earlier that year’s Pride Parade had revealed activists’ hunger to transform mourning into militant action. By the fall, that impulse crystallized in Wojnarowicz’s own memorial: no longer symbolic tombstones or die-ins, but the public display of a body, a banner, and the defiance of flames. In death, as in life, David Wojnarowicz forced the world to see what it wished to ignore.

Notes

1. David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage, 1991), 122.

2. Cynthia Carr, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 576.

3. Carr, Fire in the Belly, 576–77.

4. Carr, Fire in the Belly, 577.

ACT UP Memorial Flyer for Mark Lowe Fisher's Political Funeral, November 2, 1992.

Mark Lowe Fisher: “Bury Me Furiously”

On the night of November 2, 1992, the eve of Election Day, New York City witnessed one of the most defiant acts of mourning in its history. Mark Lowe Fisher, an ACT UP activist, architect, and member of the Marys affinity group, had died of AIDS just days before. Rather than accept a quiet service, Fisher left behind explicit instructions: his funeral should be a political act. In his statement Bury Me Furiously, he wrote:

“I want to show the reality of my death, to display my body in public. I want the public to bear witness. We are not just spiraling statistics; we are people who have lives, who have purpose, who have lovers, friends and families. And we are dying of a disease maintained by a degree of criminal neglect so enormous that it amounts to genocide. I want my own funeral to be fierce and defiant — to make the public statement that my death from AIDS is a form of political assassination. We are taking this action out of love and rage.”¹

About 200 mourners carried out the wishes of Mark Lowe Fisher, 38, an architect and AIDS activist who died of AIDS, by taking his coffin to the Bush-Quayle campaign on West 41st St. In Manhattan. Photo by Bob Strong.

Fisher’s friends and comrades in ACT UP honored that wish. After a service at Judson Memorial Church on West 4th Street, his body was placed in an open casket and lifted onto the shoulders of mourners. The procession moved north up Sixth Avenue, stopping traffic as hundreds of activists walked nearly forty blocks to the Republican National Committee headquarters on West 43rd Street. There, on the eve of the election, they laid responsibility for his death at the feet of President George H. W. Bush, whose years of indifference had left nearly 200,000 Americans dead from AIDS.²

At the front of the march, demonstrators carried a stark banner: “MARK LOWE FISHER / 1953–1992 / DIED OF AIDS / MURDERED BY GEORGE BUSH.”³

This was not mourning in private. It was grief transformed into confrontation, a funeral as indictment. For Fisher, and for ACT UP, the act of carrying his body through the streets was a way of insisting that the dead not be hidden, that AIDS deaths were not natural or inevitable, but the direct result of government neglect. As historian Jennifer Brier has argued, political funerals like Fisher’s reframed the epidemic as a crisis of power, exposing the policies and prejudices that allowed the disease to spread unchecked.⁴

In that moment, the line between memorial and protest collapsed. The body itself became the message, making visible what the state preferred to ignore. Fisher’s funeral was both a final act of love by his community and a furious demand that his death, and the deaths of thousands of others, be reckoned with in public.

Notes

1. Mark Lowe Fisher, Bury Me Furiously, ACT UP Memorial Flyer, 1992, ClampArt Gallery, https://clampart.com/2011/01/act-up-memorial-flyer-judson-memorial-church.

2. Cynthia Carr, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 577.

3. ACT UP NY, “Mark Lowe Fisher Political Funeral,” DIVA TV, https://actupny.org/diva/polfunsyn.html.

4. Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

On July 16, 1993, ACT UP carried Jon Greenberg’s body through the Lower East Side to Tompkins Square Park, transforming his funeral into a protest. Photograph by Thomas McGovern/Getty Images. https://theconversation.com/the-village-voices-photographers-captured-change-turmoil-unfolding-on-new-york-citys-streets-103820

Jon Greenberg: A Funeral of Wit and Fury

Jon Greenberg’s funeral was equal parts raw grief and dark, wry defiance. Friends carried his body in procession through the Lower East Side to Tompkins Square Park, turning a private loss into a public act of remembrance and community power. The march gathered neighbors and strangers as it moved, folding private sorrow into a visible claim on public space and insisting that the lives lost to AIDS be seen and named in the streets.¹

Greenberg was unmistakably irreverent about ritual and convention. He famously joked to friends, “I do not want an angry political funeral. I just want you to burn me in the street and eat my flesh,” a line he repeated with mordant humor at parties and even in crowded elevators. That macabre quip captured something essential about the funerals organized by ACT UP and allied affinity groups at the time: they mixed anger and theater, love and provocation, to shock the public into attention while honoring the dead on activists’ own terms.²

Jon Greenberg participated in the Day of Desperation Action at the PBS NewsHour Zap. He spoke at Mark Lowe Fisher's Political Funeral, and Barbara Hughes later read his speech at his own funeral:

"I am a person with AIDS.

I think about what's happened to my life since I was diagnosed over two years ago. I think about all the passion and precious time I've spent fighting this government's indifference toward me and all people with AIDS. And I realize that a lot of people out there -- gay, lesbian, and straight -- still do not believe that the AIDS crisis is a political crisis.

My friends and I have decided we don't want discreet memorial services. We understand our friends and families need to mourn. But we also understand that we are dying because of a government and a health care system that couldn't care less.

...I suspect -- I know -- my funeral will shock people when it happens. We Americans are terrified of death. Death takes place behind closed doors and is removed from reality, from the living. I want to show the reality of my death, to display my body in public; I want the public to bear witness. We are not just spiraling statistics; we are people who have lives, who have purpose, who have lovers, fiends, and families. And we are dying of a disease maintained by a degree of criminal neglect so enormous that it amounts to genocide.

I want my death to be as strong a statement as my life continues to be. I want my own funeral to be fierce and defiant, to make the public statement that my death from AIDS is a form of political assassination."²

Photographs and video from the day show a procession staged with careful theatricality. Activists and mourners carried banners and held the kinds of bold, photogenic visuals that ACT UP understood would travel through the press and into the public record. Photographer Tom McGovern later reflected that these demonstrations were staged to be seen and to change the story about AIDS, and his images of funerals like Greenberg’s document how activists choreographed grief into political testimony.³

Notes

¹ Funeral procession to Tompkins Square Park, July 16, 1993; see ACT UP NY, “Political Funerals,” DIVA TV / ACT UP archive.
² See ACT UP NY, “Political Funerals,” DIVA TV / ACT UP archive.
³ Tom McGovern interview and recollections on photographing ACT UP protests and funerals; see Tom McGovern, interview, The Conversation.

Political Funeral of Tim Bailey, Washington, DC, July 1, 1993. Footage shot by James Wentzy. (NYPL Tape # 01227-B) https://www.actuporalhistory.org/actions/political-funerals

Tim Bailey: A Funeral Blocked in Washington

Tim Bailey was a designer with Patricia Field and one of ACT UP’s most daring activists. He found his home in the Marys, an ACT UP affinity group infamous for bold actions—disrupting live broadcasts at CBS and PBS, crashing political events, and pushing protest into theatrical territory. Bailey brought that same flair to his own death.

At first, he wanted his body burned on a pyre in front of the White House as a final indictment of President Bill Clinton’s failed promises. Later, he revised his wishes: “Do something formal and aesthetic in front of the White House. I won’t be there anyway. It’ll be for you.”¹ On July 1, 1993, just months after Mark Fisher’s open-casket march through Manhattan, the Marys loaded Bailey’s body into a van and drove from New York to Washington, D.C. His family joined them, ready to honor his request for a public procession down Pennsylvania Avenue.

The plan was simple and devastating: carry Bailey’s coffin from the Capitol to the gates of the White House. But the state intervened. Capitol and Park Police surrounded the van and refused to allow the casket to be removed. What followed was a tense three-hour standoff. Activists argued that they were carrying out Bailey’s will. Police responded with force, roughing up mourners and arresting Bailey’s brother after a scuffle. Eventually, officers escorted the van out of the city, denying Bailey the final protest he had envisioned.²

The confrontation revealed the limits of public mourning when grief threatened political authority. Bailey’s funeral never reached the White House, but the sight of police blocking a coffin became its own indictment. For the Marys, it confirmed what they had long argued: AIDS was not only a medical crisis but a political one, sustained by government neglect and enforced by state power.

Bailey’s funeral demonstrated how far ACT UP had progressed from its early symbolic die-ins. The protesters who once used cardboard tombstones now carried real bodies. Even in defeat, the Marys transformed Bailey’s death into a public reckoning.

Notes

1. Tim Murphy, “How to Have Sex in an Epidemic,” New York Magazine, April 6, 2012, https://nymag.com/news/features/act-up-2012-4/#:~:text=after%20a%20three%2Dhour%20standoff.

2. “Political Funerals,” ACT UP Oral History Project, ACT UP New York, accessed September 23, 2025, https://www.actuporalhistory.org/actions/political-funerals.

Funeral procession for Aldyn McKean, across
14th Street to Union Square Park. March 4, 1994. https://actupny.org/diva/polfunsyn.html

Aldyn McKean’s Political Funeral

On March 4, 1994, ACT UP staged a political funeral for activist Aldyn McKean, who had died days earlier from AIDS-related complications. McKean was a sharp-tongued advocate, known for speaking truth to power at international AIDS conferences and demanding that scientists and policymakers listen to people living with HIV.¹

His funeral began at the Friends Meeting House on Rutherford Place, a historic Quaker gathering space in Manhattan. From there, hundreds of mourners carried his ashes west along 14th Street to Union Square, a site long associated with protest and dissent.² At the head of the procession, activists unfurled a banner with McKean’s image and the words: “A Great Hero in the Fight to End AIDS / Honor His Life—Take Action.”³

The march disrupted traffic as ACT UP members formed human chains across intersections, insisting that New Yorkers confront the epidemic’s toll. Union Square became the final stage of the funeral, linking McKean’s life and death to a tradition of labor struggles, antiwar rallies, and civil rights protests.

Later that year, ACT UP activists carried McKean’s ashes to the 10th International AIDS Conference in Yokohama, Japan, scattering them over the harbor.⁴ In death, as in life, McKean’s presence pressed activists and world leaders alike to act with urgency, turning mourning into a demand for justice.

Notes

1. “Aldyn McKean,” Wikipedia, last modified August 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldyn_McKean.

2. “Political Funerals,” ACT UP New York Historical Archive, accessed September 23, 2025, https://actupny.org/actions/political-funerals.

3. ACT UP New York, memorial flyer for Aldyn McKean, March 4, 1994, reproduced in ACT UP Historical Archive.

4. “Political Funerals,” ACT UP New York Historical Archive.

The Ashes Action: Mourning as Confrontation

By 1992, the escalating death toll—combined with continued government indifference—prompted a transformation in the language of protest. On October 11, ACT UP staged the Ashes Action at the gates of the White House, marking a radical redefinition of public mourning. Timed to coincide with the full display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt on the National Mall, the action offered a stark contrast. While the Quilt visualized absence, ACT UP brought presence. And while the Quilt was symbolic, this was literal. Protesters carried the cremated remains of their loved ones—partners, friends, fellow activists—and scattered them on the White House lawn.

You
have lost
someone to
AIDS.
For more than a decade,
your government has mocked your
loss. You have spoken out in anger, joined
political protests, carried fake coffins and mock
tombstones, and splattered red paint to represent
someone's HIV-positive blood, perhaps
your own. George Bush believes that
the White House gates shield him,
from you, your loss, and his responsibility
for the AIDS crisis. Now it is time to
bring AIDS home to George Bush.
On October 11th, we will carry
the actual ashes of people
we love in funeral
procession to
the White House.
In an act of grief and
rage and love, we
will deposit their
ashes on the
White House
lawn.

As ACT UP member Tim Robinson explained, “We weren’t going to do anything symbolic. The point was, these are the actual ashes. This is the literal physical result of the Bush administration’s AIDS policies.”¹ Fellow activist Avram Finkelstein recalled it as “the Quilt come to life—walking, shouting, and storming the White House... action is the real Quilt.”² The act collapsed the line between metaphor and reality: ashes were no longer standing in for the dead; they were the dead.

For David Robinson, who carried the ashes of his partner Warren, the action revealed the limits of symbolic mourning:

“George Bush would only be too happy for us simply to make beautiful panels—and I’m not belying (sic) the Quilt—it’s very useful, it’s very important, but it’s very beautiful and it does make a lot of people feel better... And I would wonder, is this making you feel like this is okay in some way? Because it’s not... From this point on, we are not going to hide this anymore, because hiding it is what they want.”³

David Robinson marching from the AIDS Quilt to the White House with cremated remains. October 11, 1992. Photo by Meg Handler, https://meghandlerphotography.com/gay-rights-act-up-aids-activism-nyc-1992-1994/

The Ashes Action was visceral, furious, and intimate. Chants and drumbeats accompanied the procession from the Quilt to the White House, where the lawn was transformed into a temporary cemetery (figure 67). Anthropologist Katherine Verdery has argued that dead bodies hold extraordinary symbolic power, provoking “awe, uncertainty, and fear associated with ‘cosmic’ concerns, such as the meaning of life and death.”⁴ In her words, “dead bodies animate the study of politics.”⁵ ACT UP’s deployment of corporeal remains was not only radical defiance but also a deliberate strategy of political inscription, using the dead themselves to write their presence into the national narrative.

Steve Michael’s Political Funeral, June 4, 1998: "If I die, take my body to the White House. Show the world that Bill Clinton has lied to and betrayed people with AIDS," - Steve Michael. Photo by Bill Bytsura The AIDS Activist Project, Facebook page, accessed April 27, 2025, https://www.facebook.com/theaidsactivistproject/.

This form of militant mourning continued. On June 4, 1998, the political funeral of Steve Michael, founder of ACT UP/DC, carried his casket along Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House gates. “If I die, take my body to the White House,” Michael had instructed. “Show the world that Bill Clinton has lied to and betrayed people with AIDS.” His coffin was not scattered but displayed, demanding justice in death (figure 68). The evolution from ashes to the display of the body underscored the ways grief had become inseparable from confrontation.

As scholar Sarah Schulman later reflected, “The radical potential of queer mourning was not only to remember but to demand.”⁶ Building on José Esteban Muñoz’s insight that queer mourning works by disidentifying with dominant rituals of loss, ACT UP queered mourning itself. Their interventions transformed funerals, ashes, and coffins into political acts, refusing to let grief serve as quiet consolation. The Ashes Action was not a rejection of the Quilt but its transformation. The Quilt said, Look what we’ve lost. ACT UP asked, Who is responsible?

ACT UP and the Power of Memory

By the early 1990s, public mourning for AIDS had expanded into multiple and sometimes competing forms. Political funerals and the Ashes Action brought death itself into confrontation with political power.¹ In contrast, the New York Quilt Workshop and its Central Park display offered a quieter, hand-sewn form of remembrance that was no less radical; mourning transformed into care, intimacy, and visibility.² Vigils, too, carried grief into public space. Still, ACT UP retooled them: die-ins and moments of silence were deployed not as passive lament but as acts of theatrical disruption, where bodies on the street turned grief into accusation.³

Placed together, these practices reveal that AIDS memorialization in New York was never singular. The Quilt’s fabric, the vigil’s candles, Pride’s parades, and ACT UP’s banners all worked through different registers, but shared the same conviction: the dead must be remembered, and remembrance must be public. Pride became a stage where celebration and mourning intertwined, its moments of silence and banners of names amplified by ACT UP’s confrontational presence.⁴ Die-ins, chants, and even provocative floats reasserted the militant roots of Gay Liberation, making Pride not just a parade but a living memorial.⁵

In this light, the Central Park Quilt was not a soft alternative to ACT UP, nor were vigils a retreat from activism. Instead, each form—Quilt, vigil, parade, and protest—interlocked to create a patchwork of memory that balanced love and rage, consolation and confrontation. ACT UP sharpened the political edge of mourning, while the Quilt insisted on its intimacy; Pride held both in the streets, weaving grief into celebration.

Taken together, these practices show that AIDS memorialization was not about choosing between love and defiance, silence and spectacle. It was about holding them all at once. Sewing rooms, church steps, parade routes, and city streets became overlapping memorial landscapes, where mourning was never private but always political, and where survival itself became an act of resistance.

Footnotes

1. Tim Robinson, quoted in Jason Silverstein, “Why the Ashes of People With AIDS on the White House Lawn Matter,” VICE, August 29, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-the-ashes-of-aids-victims-on-the-white-house-lawn-matter; Avram Finkelstein, quoted in Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Kindle edition.

2. Cleve Jones, When We Rise: My Life in the Movement (New York: Hachette, 2016), Kindle edition, 219.

3. Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 171–72.

4. David W. Dunlap, “Thousands March in New York to Back Homosexual Rights,” New York Times, June 25, 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/25/nyregion/thousands-hold-march-to-back-homosexuals.html; Tim Murphy, “A Timeline of HIV/AIDS Representation at New York City’s Pride March, From the Early 1980s to Modern Times,” The Body, July 1, 2024, https://www.thebody.com/article/timeline-hiv-representation-nyc-pride-march.

5. Avram Finkelstein, quoted in Gilbert Baker and Cindy Black, Rainbow Warrior: My Life in Color (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019), 207.

Gran Fury, AIDS: 1 in 61, 1989
Formed out of ACT UP, the artist collective Gran Fury used striking visual messages to turn activism into public education. Their 1 in 61 poster revealed that one in sixty-one babies born in New York City carried HIV antibodies, widening the story of AIDS to include women, children, and communities of color. When defaced with the words “scared fags crap,” the poster became more than an artwork—it became an artifact of its time, exposing the hostility activists faced while fighting for visibility. Today, it stands as a record of how art and advocacy merged in the struggle for life and remembrance.

Source: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/8af4d010-8181-0137-6d53-3995b828f3fc?canvasIndex=0

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