It's not over.

So, there I was at the AIDS Walk this morning, waiting with Desert Voices (our local GLBTSQIA.... chorus) to sing at the end of the quilt opening ceremony so that I could get back to work and not miss too much. I was watching the pinwheel unfolding-and-lofting maneuver that’s become standard practice for opening quilt panels, and I thought to myself that using only one twelve by twelve panel just doesn’t get the same loft as when you have four of those panels tied together into a twenty-four foot square.

I recalled how I learned to handle quilt panels in preparation for going with the Pittsburgh contingent to a March on Washington DC where they opened the entire Names Project quilt on the National Mall. I thought about the fellow (whose name escapes me right now) from the national team that came and taught us the procedure, calling it his tribute to the June Taylor Dancers. Each panel was prepared in a lotus pattern fold and laid out on the field. Four people unfolded each corner in pairs, starting with opposite sides and taking turns, working out until the panel was opened. Then each person grabbed a corner and together they lofted the entire four panel square into the air, rotating it an eighth of a turn into its place as it caught the air and then settled back to earth.

I even caught myself thinking this morning about how these kids (many school kids from a local middle school) just didn’t have the style that we had, and that’s when it hit me: It was almost exactly twenty years ago (September-October of 1989) when we learned how and went to Washington. None of these kids were alive then. Most of the college kids around us weren’t alive then, either, or they were babes in arms.

Twenty years.

It’s been over twenty-five years since I first heard of GRID, or Gay Related Immuno-Deficiency. It’s been about that long since I first heard of HTLV-III, the virus that after further research was better isolation was renamed HIV.

Ronald Reagan, the great do-nothing and say-nothing president, has been out of office now for almost twenty-one years. Act Up and Queer Nation have been effectively over for almost as long. (I know, Act Up is still around and still fighting for HIV-AIDS awareness and treatment, but its last great civil disobedience action was during Bush I. Queer Nation died almost as fast as it was born, suffocating under the weight of nearly impossible to create and totally impossible to sustain consensus governing.)

It’s been almost exactly twenty years since Guy died, in the summer of 1989. He died just short of his twenty-ninth birthday. He said that the worst part of dying so young was that his mid-life crisis was adolescence. It’s in his memory that I won’t wear a red ribbon. He said “Don’t wear a ribbon, anyone can wear a ribbon. Get out there and do what needs to be done and let other people worry about silly things like ribbons.”

Guy was one of my first friends (and the first person that I could conceivably refer to as a boyfriend, even if it was of extremely short duration) who died. Unfortunately he wasn’t the last.

Since then, things have gotten incrementally better. I’m not burying friends the same way anymore, but still hardly a month goes by when I don’t hear about someone I’ve lost touch with who’s now gone. The new drug therapies are working and many are living longer, healthier lives, but acquaintances, friends, and loved ones are still getting infected at alarming rates. The nation has seemingly forgotten about it, but it’s still affecting me locally in a major way.

Twenty years. It’s still not over.

It’s time to stop worrying about the ribbons and get back to work.