For the first time in a decade, a panel from the National AIDS Memorial Quilt is back on display at the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod in Provincetown.
Senior case manager Bill Furdon joined the group in 1989. By 1992, Furdon had lost enough clients to complications from HIV and AIDS to start a community quilt in their memory.
The 12-foot-by-12-foot quilt panel is just a small piece of the much larger National AIDS Memorial Quilt. That quilt is stitched with the names of nearly 110,000 people who died from complications related to HIV and AIDS.
The Provincetown panel has about 120 names on it, Furdon said, which is just a small fraction of the patients the AIDS Support Group has seen since the organization was founded in the early 1980s.
“I know almost all of these people,” Furdon said as he looked up at the quilt, which hangs from the high ceiling of the AIDS Support Group’s “Great Room” on Bradford Street in Provincetown.
In the center of the quilt are illustrations of Provincetown’s skyline, beaches, dunes, and forests, along with a quote from "Romeo and Juliet," selected by Alice Foley, the original founder of the AIDS Support Group: "And when they shall die, take them and turn them into little stars, and they shall make the face of heaven so fine that all in the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun."
Two rows of names encircle the quilt’s center. The inner row came first, and the outer row was added later.
“Some of the people that are on the interior are now on the exterior,” Furdon said. “In other words, they had worked on their friends and then they had other people work on theirs when they died.”
The last round of names that was added is in the center of the quilt, to the right of the Romeo and Juliet quote. Each name is stitched onto its own star-shaped patch.
All the stars are five-point stars, save for one.
“This was Liz, she was Jewish,” Furdon said, gesturing toward the only six-point star on the quilt. “She said to me, ‘Do not put me on a regular star. I want to be a Jewish star.’”
Liz was not Furdon’s only client who gave input on how they wanted to be remembered.
Furdon recalled how he came up with the design for Don D, whose star-shaped patch has a three-inch beaded figure of a drum major sewn onto it.
“When he was dying, he said, ‘Bill, I've just been an old houseboy my whole life. I didn't do anything good for anybody,’” Furdon said. “And I said, ‘Don, I cannot believe that.’”
Furdon asked Don to think of a time in his life when he felt good about himself, and Don said he used to lead marching bands as a baton twirler.
“I said, ‘You march down the street, you take us all out of our environment and out of our space, and make us smile and make us sing,’” Furdon said. “That's such an important part of the world.”
Not just Don, but every person who is memorialized on the quilt has something special on their patches.
Patrick B has an earring sewn into his.
Buddy C's has a piece of his leather jacket.
Paul Christo, one of Provincetown’s first gay selectmen, has a picture of a gavel on his patch.
Pierre Brabant’s patch has a Christmas tree, commemorating his love for the holiday. Furdon recalled Brabant’s memorial service in the dead of summer, when he and other attendees sang Christmas carols in Brabant’s honor.
Richard Coggins’s original glasses frames are sewn onto his patch. Furdon said a friend of Coggins chose to include the frames because Coggins was known for his glasses always falling off his face.
Right next to Coggins’s patch is one for Richard Brown. The two men lived together as a couple. Both of them had been abandoned by their families.
“They were definitely such a big part of our community,” Furdon said. “Richard Coggins died 30 days after Richard Brown. They're in the Provincetown Cemetery right next to each other.”
Some of Furdon’s former clients contracted HIV in Provincetown, but many of them moved here from Boston after being shunned by their communities.
“If you lost your housing, or if you were disenfranchised in some way, there weren't many safe spaces for people who were gay, let alone people who were gay and visibly sick,” said Dan Gates, the CEO of AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod. “So they came here where they could live freely and receive services and care that were without stigma and discrimination.”
Essentially, Gates said, people came to Provincetown to die in relative peace, though some would return to Boston to undergo experimental treatments. Part of the AIDS Support Group’s role at the time was helping people get to the city for clinical trials. Sometimes those trials would end up hastening patients’ deaths.
“The people at the front line were willing to do anything,” Gates said.
As Gates and Furdon see it, those patients sacrificed their lives for HIV and AIDS treatment research that paved the way for the much more effective treatments that exist today.
“A lot of the medical advancements we have today are because of the queer community in the 80s responding to HIV and AIDS through groups like Act Up,” Gates said.
These groups advocated for governmental policy changes that sped up access to newly developed drug treatments. The approval process for new medications required years of testing, and at the time, many people with HIV and AIDS didn’t have years to wait.
“And so when something like Covid-19 happens in America, the swiftness with which we obtained a vaccine wouldn't have happened if it weren't for the thousands of people who died of HIV and AIDS in the ’80s and ’90s,” Gates said.
After years of the AIDS Support Group helping people deal with the impacts of HIV and AIDS, along came another public health crisis: the opioid epidemic. And when it came, the AIDS Support Group was ready.
In 1995, the AIDS Support Group started the first two syringe exchange programs in Massachusetts. Throughout the 2000s, helping those impacted by the opioid crisis became a bigger part of the organization’s work.
To Gates and Furdon, the opioid crisis looks a lot like the AIDS crisis. Both are widespread public health issues worsened by stigma—gay men faced mounting discrimination during the AIDS epidemic, as do drug users currently. And the government was slow to address both of these crises, Gates said.
“When I listen to our team that works with people dealing with overdoses, and how much they're dealing with this on a regular basis—of people dying—that to me is coming back really full circle,” Furdon said. “I think, ‘Oh my God, they're doing this again. This is just happening again.’”
The AIDS Support Group quilt panel was displayed almost every year from the mid-1990s into the early 2000s. The last time it was displayed in town was in 2014.
All 50,000 or so of the National AIDS Quilt panels are overseen by a nonprofit called the National AIDS Memorial. Organizations like the AIDS Support Group that want to display quilt panels must pay a fee, and in recent years the group has not had enough funding, Gates said.
“A lot of people look at us, see our size, see the impact we make in communities, and assume we must get a ton of funding,” Gates said. “We are grossly underfunded and have to make painful decisions every day, and the decisions we make are always informed by how to help the most people as possible.”
But this year, there was enough money to bring the quilt back. It has been hanging at the AIDS Support Group headquarters since the beginning of the summer, where it will remain through World AIDS Day on December 1. At that time, the AIDS Support Group will bring out three more quilt panels to display.
At 54 tons, the National AIDS Quilt has grown far too large to be displayed in its entirety. A searchable, digitized version of the quilt can be viewed on the National AIDS Memorial website.
