This past weekend, I went to the UK AIDS Quilt on display in Glasgow. Crafted over a decade from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, it is a smaller cousin of its more famous US relative, though no less meaningful for that.
To say that I went to “see” it feels wrong, as does saying I went to “visit” it. The only phrase that feels right is to say that that I bore witness to it.
The idea of the project was simple: each panel had to measure about 3ft by 6ft, or about the size of a typical grave plot. When you stand in front of the panels, that is what you feel you are looking at. It is like a living cemetery, with so many bodies laid out. There are many men; there are also women; there are children; there are babies.
The quilt begins in my childhood and ends in my adolescence. (There are many panels to Freddie Mercury, and one with a picture of Madonna performing “Vogue”), as the most awful kinds of time stamps.) I remember that world. For a while, for the most part, it did not exist anymore. But now it does again.
Because nothing ever changes, does it.
I used to do quite a bit of quilting myself, although I haven’t created anything new since nearly everything I had made was destroyed in the loss of my home a few years ago. (That’ll put you off your creativity forever.) Still, there were quilts I admired for the craft and creativity, even if it somehow feels wrong to say that.
This one ultimately broke me, though. There are real letters sewn under the fabric ones: from his parents, from his family, from his lovers, from his friends.
As with every panel, you cannot help but look at the dates and calculate each person’s age.
Bearing witness to the quilt was, perhaps, a strange way to start my leave. For my MPhil dissertation, I’ve acquired several folders full of academic papers, bookmarks, and law case citations about the resurgence of bigotry, hatred, discrimination, and even the willful hounding to death of people simply for who they are. The focus of the dissertation is only, and only, the aspects that impact internet regulation through the human rights lens. But I still have to take in the full picture to find those side details. The full picture is awful.
As a policy person, the dissertation has never been a sterile academic project for me, nor a stepping stone to a career in academia, research, or even law. Because the thing is: I am old. I am old enough to know what I am looking at, which is, something I’ve seen before happening again, in a world that should have been left behind decades ago but has now come back.
Now with added internet, Christofascism, and people who really truly do want the world to end and take us all with it.
The result being that I’ve been signed off on academic leave until the new year, because it all got too much. I’ve had to close all the tabs, all the open drafts, all the half-read academic papers and legal filings, and push it all away. Until the spring term, my life is coffee, wine, and the pile of books next to the bed.
I’m grateful for the support of my understanding team at the university as regards my project (and some other things going on in my life too: as the coffee-wine-and-books line suggests, I am all out of client work. I have no work. At all. Hire me, please).
I look forward to returning to the dissertation fresh next year; really, I do.
Even with their kind concessions, I still don’t expect the uni to understand me. Academics working full time in academia, bless them, see citations and performance metrics. They want to look at the draft chapters of my dissertation so they can see the footnotes and the methodologies. Right now I just see bodies.
