AIDS Memorial Quilt block on display at Vancouver church

One little bit of the biggest, most vital community arts project on Earth is visiting Vancouver through Jan. 18.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt was begun in 1987 by a group of San Franciscans who feared that the lives lost to a devastating and mysterious disease would be shrugged off by history — because most of its victims were gay.

When Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome first appeared in the early 1980s, it was immediately identified as “the gay disease.” It took years for health and government officials to catch up to the reality — that while some groups were more affected than others, the sexually transmitted disease could affect anyone. In the meantime, people with AIDS were reviled and rejected, as if reaping the just reward of their homosexuality.

Three decades later, attitudes are radically different and so is the prognosis for people with AIDS. While there’s still no cure or vaccine, advances in treatment have turned what used to be a death sentence into a livable chronic condition. Advances in education and prevention have sharply reduced new diagnoses of AIDS in recent years.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, there were nearly 40,000 new diagnoses in 2015 — a 9 percent drop from 2010 — and 1.2 million Americans are now living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus, the precursor to full-blown AIDS.

So it’s almost as if the earliest years of AIDS shame and silence were a historical blip. But the people who died of AIDS during that era often disappeared in silence — with no funeral or service of any kind. Their families and friends felt stigmatized. Funeral homes refused to handle the remains.

That’s how the AIDS Memorial Quilt got started: a display of names of the dead on the San Francisco Federal Building in 1985. All the names resembled an enormous patchwork quilt when exhibited on placards, and organizers ran with that idea. The growing quilt was first displayed on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1987, and a nonprofit association, the NAMES Project Foundation, was started to accept new panels, care for the quilt and send it out in sections for public viewing.

The foundation is now headquartered in Atlanta and the quilt has grown to more than 49,000 individual panels that memorialize nearly 100,000 people. If all the panels could be assembled into a single genuine quilt, it would weigh more than 54 tons and cover 1.3 million square feet.

The panels are deeply personal and widely diverse — featuring not just sewing on fabric but also nearly every artistic technique you can think of, including ink, spray paint, photographs, collage and all sorts of attached mementos and keepsakes. Most are for family members and friends, but there’s some hero worship too: many fans made panels for rock singer Freddie Mercury, who died in 1991, and for Hollywood hunk Rock Hudson, who died in 1985.

The NAMES Project website welcomes all quilt contributions; while donations are always welcome, it says, there is never any cost to include your panel in the quilt. The website even offers step-by-step instructions and pointers about materials, techniques and durability, and it outlines how panels received in Atlanta are reinforced and stitched together into 12-foot-square “blocks.”

Those blocks are what go on temporary display all around the nation, at venues like Mill Plain United Methodist Church.

Remembering Bruce Bone

Bruce Bone’s panel is near the upper left of the block now on display in the church lobby. Parents Marilyn and Larry Bone enjoyed a quiet look on Tuesday afternoon, before the block went on public display. They hadn’t seen the panel Marilyn made for their son in many years.

Bruce Bone was born in Texas on Jan. 7, 1958. According to the panel, he loved music, flowers, dogs, his family, art and literature, church and his alma mater, Texas Tech University, where he earned a degree in architecture. In college he had a relationship with a married man who went by the nickname Sonny; according to Marilyn and Larry, Sonny had contracted AIDS from his unfaithful wife, who died of it before he did.

Bruce and Sonny lived together for 16 years. Bruce’s parents were not shocked when he came out to them as gay; they’d suspected as much, Larry said.

“It didn’t matter,” said Marilyn. “He was precious to us. We never thought of him any other way.”

Larry and Marilyn Bone loved the funny and irrepressible Sonny too, and came to consider him their son-in-law. This was long before gay marriage seemed anything more than a pipe dream.

When Sonny died of AIDS in 1992, Bruce and Marilyn made a memorial panel for the quilt. When Bruce told his parents that he had the disease too, “It was the worst day of my life,” Larry said. “It was a certain death sentence at the time.”

Bruce made a life of it for as long as he could. He didn’t want colleagues at his architectural firm in Washington, D.C., to gossip behind his back, so he convened a meeting to announce that he was HIV-positive. He volunteered for the National Institutes of Health’s first clinical trials of drugs to treat AIDS — and his timing was barely off, Larry said.

Bruce’s own personal physician, also a man with AIDS, has enjoyed the results of those clinical trials and survives to this day, Larry said. But Bruce died in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 13, 1995, at age 37.

Biblical stories

The quilt panels are up for public viewing 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily — except Friday, when the church is closed — through Jan. 18. Meanwhile, the Rev. Sue Ostrom of MPUMC said that her sermons at 9:30 and 11 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 15, will relate AIDS to Bible stories about leprosy.

What was called leprosy in biblical times may have been a misunderstood bundle of serious diseases and minor skin conditions, Ostrom said, but the result was serious public fear, hatred and exclusion.

“Jesus broke that barrier,” Ostrom said. Touching people with leprosy made Jesus himself “unclean” in the eyes of his peers, but he obviously didn’t care about that. Ostrom said her sermon will touch on “embracing those who have been excluded.”

Her foster son has AIDS, Ostrom added.

“The good news is, people are living with it rather than dying from it,” she said. “That is a gift from Bruce.”