The UK Aids Memorial Quilt of the 1980s is still so impactful to see – and a timely reminder that the best way to challenge stigma is to show, not tell
Last week, the Tate rolled out the UK Aids Memorial Quilt across the floor of the vast Turbine Hall. Created in the 1980s, it is made up of 42 panels, and each of those panels is made up of a collection of smaller panels, 6ft by 3ft, a size used because it represented the average size of a grave plot. And each of those panels is dedicated to someone who died of Aids in the UK. There’s one that says “Mum”, one that says “Malcolm I wish that I had known you longer”, one that says, beside a picture of a cot and bottle, “Baby Jamie”. It’s an uncommonly beautiful thing, not just a memorial or monument but a time machine, too. The handmade-ness helps transport you dizzily into the lives, angers and griefs of strangers, whose losses are sewn together here and forever.
There are two big panels for London Lighthouse, too, which, when it opened in 1986, was the world’s largest centre for people living with HIV, helping to pioneer a new approach in care, with a residential unit and drop-in centre designed to help people to live and die well.
These panels transported me back to a particular weekend in 1990. My mum is an artist, and back then was invited to collaborate with the Lighthouse on a project, building a pair of huge majestic sculptural doors. She made them out of plaster, by casting the faces and cherished objects of Lighthouse residents. Some chose to cast their smiles, one man did his leather jacket, another his teddy bear. My memory, as I skipped around, aged nine, helping mix the alginate rubber and eating sandwiches, is one of complete delight.
It wasn’t long after that monolith advert had aired on British TV, with its tombstone carved with the word Aids, and an accompanying leaflet, “Aids: Don’t Die Of Ignorance”, sent to every household. HIV and Aids was a punchline at school – the ignorance was real. All we knew was that this disease was something terrifying and unknowable and somehow rude. So when my mum merrily bundled my sister and me into the car to start work at the Lighthouse, I spent the journey in silence. I was expecting to enter another world altogether, I think, one full of fear and shame.
The quilt transports you dizzily into the lives, angers and griefs of strangers, whose losses are sewn together here and forever
Instead, what I found was a place that felt more like a chic community centre than a hospital, where a lightwell threw sunshine into the building, and nurses didn’t wear uniforms, and the residents being treated for HIV and Aids turned out, to my quiet surprise, to be… completely normal. Completely normal people who buzzed around and made jokes and let my little sister hold their teddy.
It’s only really now, in adulthood and looking properly at the quilt, that I’m thinking about the impact a single silly weekend can have, especially on a child who is porous and anxious and learning, desperately. I don’t remember any serious conversations that week – nobody used the word “stigma”, nobody sat me down to explain the problems with seeing people with HIV as either victims or villains, or disseminate the way the media was reporting the Aids crisis, no – they gave me a tuna sandwich and introduced me to a nice man called Nigel. I returned to school the next Monday fractionally, crucially changed – it didn’t take much.
Yes, there’s something to be said for the sitting down, for the lessons and the language when teaching children about humanity, empathy, death and how to live. But far more effective, in my experience, is showing them; by naming and normalising people and experiences that would otherwise remain hidden, and inviting curiosity.
The AIDS quilt inspires these sorts of conversations, at a time when awareness and protest is still horribly vital. We’ve come a long way from the days of the quilt: London Lighthouse closed in 2013, partly due to new treatments for HIV, which is now a manageable condition, and homophobia is now largely socially unacceptable, although transphobia creeps through in its place. Yet there’s more to do. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of heterosexual men and women newly diagnosed in England with HIV increased by more than 30%, and worldwide 1.3 million people acquired HIV in 2023. In the US last month, Bill Gates accused Elon Musk of “killing the world’s poorest children” for his part in Trump-administration cuts to HIV-prevention projects around the world. “I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money,” he said. Just as we mustn’t forget the people who have died, we must stay focused on the fight for those living.
Siobhán Lanigan (who used to work at London Lighthouse) is a founding member of the UK Aids Memorial Quilt Partnership. She told Frieze magazine they’re not planning for the quilt to enter Tate’s collection, but hope it will remain a living memorial that moves around the country, being hosted not just in London galleries but in community centres and schools. One way to help is to find (and fund) a permanent home for the quilt. “It only needs Elton John to decide he wants to look after it,” Lanigan suggests.
Hopefully this flash of attention 36 years after the quilt was conceived means it will be preserved, and most importantly, displayed regularly, to provoke curiosity, tenderness, empathy, rage – a raw and gorgeous scream.
And another thing… Classic reads, special snacks and the story of an icon
A century of stories I’m engrossed in a new collection of old short stories – A Century of Fiction in the New Yorker: 1925-2025, published to celebrate the magazine’s 100th birthday. There are classic bangers, like The Lottery by Shirley Jackson or The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber, as well as lesser-known but no less brilliant stories. Fiction editor Deborah Treisman writes, ‘Reading through New Yorker fiction from the first century of the magazine is like watching a time-lapse film in which what a story is, or intends to be, changes slightly with each frame.’
Nuts about these Somebody, rip these salted dark chocolate almonds from my sweating hands. I hear the whole Forest Feast range is equally good, but these, my God, are exquisite. The almonds are dipped in thick dark chocolate, so each one has a pleasing heft, but still, I’m downing them like Pringles. I’ve been buying in bulk and hiding bags in cupboards, because they’re too good for the kids.
A life in parts I’m excited to watch Pee Wee As Himself, a new documentary about Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman) by Matt Wolf. Sadly, Reubens never got a chance to see the doc. He unexpectedly cut off contact with Wolf after a year, and died in 2023, having kept his cancer a secret. I look forward to a nuanced portrait of an eccentric genius.
Photograph by Carl Court/Getty Images
Social links
Copyright © 2025 Tortoise Media
All Rights Reserved
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.