The article reflects on the author’s experience revisiting the AIDS Memorial Quilt during this year's WorldPride alongside Nancy Pelosi. It reminisces the haunting memories of 1987, a year marked by overwhelming fear and loss due to AIDS. The author shares personal anecdotes of being a young, closeted employee on Capitol Hill, detailing the anxieties surrounding the disease and the stigma faced by the gay community at the time. The quilt, a representation of lives lost, evokes deep emotional responses and memories of fear and grief.
During this year's WorldPride, I returned to the quilt, decades later, walking through the exhibit in Washington, D.C., with Pelosi. Together, we remembered that moment and that era, when the specter of AIDS loomed so brutally over our lives.
Only those who lived through that unbearable time in the gay community can understand the depth of that fear. I was 23. Closeted.
When I spotted a panel with someone born in 1964, my birth year, I froze. My heart ruptured. My mind spun. How could someone my age already be dead?
I imagined my name stitched on a square. That terror overtook me. I stopped running, collapsed under a tree, and wept.
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