1987 looms as a year of fear, fortitude, and firsts for the AIDS Quilt, Nancy Pelosi, and me

1987. Oh, that indescribable, unforgettable year. It was my first year on Capitol Hill. It was also Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s. And it was the year, in October, when the AIDS Memorial Quilt was laid out on the National Mall for the first time and laid bare innumerable emotions.

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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. 1987 was a year of tremendous pain, confusion, and above all, fear.

Only those who lived through that unbearable time in the gay community can understand the depth of that fear. I was 23. Closeted. My first job out of college was with my hometown congressman, and then I was moved abruptly to the Hill and promoted to press secretary, a position I was grossly underqualified for.

I feared being fired. I feared being outed. I feared other gay men. I feared the incurable plague. I feared I wouldn't live long. I feared everything.

I told the speaker about the first time I saw the quilt.

I didn’t go into the center of the Mall. That was too close for comfort. Instead, I stayed on the periphery, jogging along the edge, afraid that being seen too close to the quilt might somehow give me away. That’s how irrational and buried my fear was.

But even from the outskirts, the size of the quilt stunned me. A sea of color, of names, of lives. Every panel different. Every panel the same in its finality. I couldn’t see the beauty then. For me, all I saw was the brutal toll.

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 saw not a memorial but a mirror. I imagined my name stitched on a square. That terror overtook me.

I stopped running, collapsed under a tree, and wept. It was the first time I fully surrendered to so many truths. Namely, that AIDS would be the biggest, most consuming fear of my life. I assumed it would get me eventually. And if it did, everything would end, my job, my dignity, my future, and worse, my life.

So I turned away. I ran in the opposite direction, away from the quilt, away from all those souls.

Speaker Pelosi recalled seeing the quilt before it ever came to D.C. “The first time I saw the AIDS Memorial Quilt, it was still in San Francisco. It was small then,” she said. “But when it was finally displayed on the Mall in 1987, that was a moment of incredible success. It was glorious. So many people came. People had the courage to speak out, to name names, to show up in droves. The quilt was a threshold moment for the country. It was art, and art is one of the most powerful communicators we have.”

She was there when the idea for the quilt was born. Cleve Jones, the famous gay rights activist, had approached her about a press conference promoting a quilt that would memorialize the dead. “And I said, ‘A quilt? That’s a terrible idea!’” she remembered, laughing. “I had five kids, went to Catholic school, I used to knit, crochet, sew, you name it. But not anymore. And if I wasn’t sewing, with all that training, I figured no one else would be either.”

But Jones was undeterred. “He had such vision, such determination,” she said. “I didn’t get it at first, but we all got behind him. His idea grew, and it grew because of the love and loss it represented.”

Love and loss. That was the truth. But in 1987, love, at least for me, felt like an impossibility. I wouldn't let myself find it. Despite finally being on my own in a big city, I couldn’t even allow myself to hook up. Every desire came tethered to terror.

I didn’t look at men and think, He’s hot. I looked at every man and thought, Does he have it? The “it,” of course, being AIDS. And you had to assume the answer was yes.

Once, I tempted fate. I met someone. Before anything could happen, he quietly told me the truth: he had it. I panicked. I ran. Just like I ran from the quilt.

Pelosi told me that when the quilt's creators asked the National Park Service for permission to display it on the Mall, they were turned down multiple times. “They said the weight of it would kill the grass,” she said. “So we promised we’d lift it every 20 minutes. We didn’t even know if we had the capacity to do that or not, but it got them to say OK. And then the helicopters showed it from above for the whole world to see."

Pelosi added that what the world saw was an enormous expression of love, of individual testimonials to people who had died. It was undeniable,” she recalled.

After that guy, the one I ran from, disclosed his diagnosis, I nearly lost my mind. It was a Thursday. The next day after work, I got in my car and just drove. No destination. I ended up in Wilmington, Delaware, alone in a hotel room, sobbing through the night.

The next evening, I numbed myself with a six-pack, then wandered into what must have been the city’s only gay bar. I felt unburdened by anonymity. I met someone. We talked about our shared fear. He came back with me to my room. We held each other. In the morning, we said goodbye. And I drove back to D.C., carrying with me, for the first time, a flicker of solace.

That first crush of mine, the man I ran from, eventually died. I knew he was sick, but I stayed away. I’ll never forgive myself.

Eventually, I did find my first boyfriend. We dated with all the secrecy of shame. Meeting on street corners. Leaving movie theaters separately. We were careful, restrained. We even used condoms for mutual masturbation.

That’s because trust was impossible. Less among each other and more so about the insidiousness and untrustworthiness of the disease. Knowledge about it was scarce. No one really knew how AIDS spread. Not even the doctors. But we all knew the term. I was a congressional aide — but I couldn’t call myself that. I couldn’t say the acronym out loud.

Pelosi told me, “In those early days, I had friends who said, ‘I’m not giving money to that. They brought it on themselves.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, then don’t talk to me anymore.’ But once someone in their family was affected, everything changed. They became the biggest champions. They stepped up. They cared for loved ones. They advocated. And that transformation, well, it was beautiful to witness.”

My friends back then were all straight. To them, AIDS was a punch line. And I had to laugh along, while dying inside. I had no one to confide in. No one to whom I could say, "I’m terrified." No one to tell about the quilt or the boy in Delaware or the tree I wept under.

The stigma was a stench. It clung to you. It made people recoil.

“Some people are still stuck in their prejudice, and that’s their problem,” Pelosi said. “But many others have grown, because they’ve come to know someone personally. When it hits close to home, everything changes. That’s when discrimination begins to fall away.”

Eventually, my fear began to fall away too. I came out, little by little, to my friends, my family, and my coworkers. By then, antiretrovirals had arrived. The “cocktail” had started saving lives. You could say, “Yes, I’m gay,” without it automatically meaning to the uninformed that you were dying. Sure, people still asked, “Do you have it?” But you could say no and reply, “Even if I did, it doesn’t kill you anymore.”

Pelosi remembered how things shifted. “In the late ’80s and early ’90s, people with AIDS would come to my office regularly. They’d say, ‘Can you help me write a will?’ or, ‘I need a prescription that’s only available in Spain, so can you help me get it?’ We did everything we could, no matter what it took.”

Then she smiled. “But as the science progressed, those same people started coming in and saying, ‘Actually, I don’t need help with a will anymore. I need a job.’ And that shift? That was glory, hallelujah. From preparing for death to preparing for life.”

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