Pelosi Remarks at AIDS Memorial Quilt 25th Anniversary Reception

Contact: Nadeam Elshami/Drew Hammill, 202-226-7616

San Francisco – Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi delivered remarks at the AIDS Memorial Quilt 25th anniversary reception. Below are the Leader’s remarks:

“Scott Douglass, it took me by surprise – there he is, Mike Smith, Cleve Jones, Supervisor Wiener, Sanjay, Leslie, all of you, thank you for all you have done as far as the Quilt is concerned in terms of its origins and now its continuation in San Francisco. Yes, Cleve was right, when they first came to me about the Quilt 25 years ago I said: ‘whose idea is this anyway?’ I went to Congress, I knew how to knit, crochet, hem, darn, tape, you name it, I can do it, embroider, and I don’t sew, and I have five-children. [I said], ‘so, if I don’t sew, who is going to do this? I don’t know where you got this idea but I don’t think people are ready to sew. So much for my vision and my knowledge about how people would respond.

“Imagine. They had this idea and immediately took charge and before you know it even I was sewing a patch for my flower girl in my wedding who died of AIDS. So, they had – this may be easy for you to look at and say: ‘isn’t this a great idea.’ Believe me, this was an original idea that even some homemaker like me didn’t even think would take off. And it did, but enough about that.

“It was in the context of a few years earlier, several years earlier, and somebody heard of something that was going on at UCSF. There was a disease that had symptoms that had not been observed since the Middle Ages. It didn’t have a name but it was something quite phenomenal and the people at UCSF, the doctors there, were recognizing that something historical was happening there. A few years later, it had a name: AIDS and we were trying to get the Democratic Convention in San Francisco. Just imagine the way they were talking about us in the rest of the country. They want us to go there, to San Francisco where they have AIDS and all that that implies? And we said: ‘yes,’ and really I was very proud of the decision made by the Democratic Party to come here in spite of some of the, shall we say, scare tactics and not staying by the other cities. I’m just saying by people in general, of the fright they had in coming here, it’s really important to us that we could have a convention in San Francisco, California in the beginnings, origins of HIV. In the meantime, as a concept, it was one, sometimes two, funerals a day, right Jack? Two funerals a day. And in-between visiting friends in hospice, or hospitals, or in their homes, we went every day to see Scott Douglas until the very end, hold him in our arms as they were getting thinner and thinner and frailer and frailer. This was our experience. And so when Cleve, and Mike, and others came and said they wanted to have this fundraiser, this press event around this idea, my did they strike a chord, and just as I said, as you know, the story took off.

“So, then we decided we wanted to have it on the [National] Mall and the National Park Service, bless their hearts, didn’t realize that we wanted the whole mall and they were saying ‘we have a little corner, a street corner, and you can have a sample of it.’ And I said: ‘you’re not hearing what we’re saying. We want to have this whole mall.’ Well, we were using everybody’s name in the book in order to, and I even said to President Bush Sr. at the time: ‘we even used your name, Mr. President, so thank you,’ because it wouldn’t have happened without the Administration approving it, [we] went down to the Department of the Interior and to the mall, but in any event, there was this phenomenal thing happening, well they told us we’re going to kill the grass. Kill the grass? People are dying and you’re telling me we’re going to kill the grass? I mean, what are we talking about here? So, they said: ‘well, okay,’ eventually they said every 20 minutes we would pick up this multi-tone Quilt so that the air could be aerated underneath and then we could do it. Done.

[Laughter]

“Where’s Leslie? Thank you for your good humor – one thing we had a volunteer – we’re going to stand around the Quilt and every 20 minutes we’re going to lift it up and aerate the ground, I don’t know how we’re going to hold it up, but nonetheless, so that was the arrangement but it was something spectacular. You would need a roadmap to get through because there were so many patches to the Quilt. We really had to have a blueprint of the Quilt to find your friends in that, so many of our friends, so many of our friends, Sanjay, it was really so heartbreaking and yet it was so magnificent, but guess what? That Friday night, some may not know this – they used to have the ‘Newsmaker of the Week.’ Guess who the ‘Newsmaker of the Week’ was, Cleve Jones was the ‘Newsmaker of the Week.’ They showed helicopters flying over this Quilt. The whole world saw the Quilt, and saw it, and was crying tears, and the restorative quality of it, the renewal of it. People constructively used their grief to memorialize in a way that made their patch and their person part of something so big you had to get into a helicopter, or an airplane, to fly over the Capitol of the United States to get the full impact of it to date, to that date, which was of course only the beginning. So, it was something really quite remarkable and that we would be here, Sanjay, thank you, where it all began and where Harvey Milk had his last camera shop, just all the history of it. It’s something remarkable.

“I remember the last days of Scott Douglas. Well, we all told stories over and over again of our friends. I remember when Jim Foster passed away we were at the Grace Cathedral and it was almost time for Communion and I said to some people: ‘you know, I’m Catholic but I think we can receive Communion in a Christian church even if you’re not Episcopalian. If you’re Catholic, you can.’ And some said: ‘well, I’m’ – they were other things, not Jewish, they were Christian but they had not been, shall we say, strictly observant in recent years. In fact, they had never been observant.

[Laughter]

“So, I said: ‘you know, we’re here for Jim Fosters funeral and your first Holy Communion because you are in the room with God.’ Anyways, I have these stories, but I remember Scott, so precious to us all, and I went over there one day and we went every day to see him and he said: ‘I’m so unhappy.’ And I said: ‘why?’ He said: ‘because I got up this morning’ and I said: ‘well, we’re happy that you got up this morning.’ He said: ‘this was the day I was going to meet John F. Kennedy in heaven’ and that’s how he thought about it all so much hope, even to the end of that, of what would happen next. The thing is that we were going through all of this here and the rest of the world was sort of oblivious, or in denial about what was happening.

“Very self-servingly I tell again the story of when I went to Congress and I was there on my first-day, this was a few weeks after. So, I went to Congress and they said you will be sworn-in and because you’re in the special election you will just be sworn-in and that’s it, and don’t say a word because no one wants to hear a new Member speak. So, I got sworn-in and the Speaker said: ‘would the gentle lady from California like to address the House?’ Oh my gosh, well alright, well the Speaker said so, Members were saying ‘be very brief, be very brief, nobody wants to hear what you have to say.’ So, I went up there, was very brief, I thanked my parents who were there and my constituents who have sent me there and I said: ‘I told my constituents when I came here, that they sent me, and that I am here to fight against AIDS.’ Period. It was like 10 seconds. It took me longer to describe it than to do it. So, I turn around thinking the folks that sent me there would say: ‘perfect, you were very brief.’ Oh my god they were – ‘what is your problem?’ I said: ‘I was brief, how much briefer could I be?’ They said: ‘how on Earth would you like to be identified here as the first thing you talk about being AIDS? Why did you say that you came here to fight against AIDS?’ I said: ‘for a very simple reason because I did. Because I did.’

[Applause]

“This Quilt is emblematic of so much else. It’s a community project and everything we did from then on and that everything we did from then on was about community based solutions, whether it was research for a cure, whether it was prevention, or whether it was care, it was about community based, great wisdom coming up from people caring for people and that became the Ryan White Care Act, and then we had to fight for the funding. People’s minds started to change for a lot of reasons, mostly because non-menacing manifestations of the AIDS epidemic, of the Quilt. It was just non-menacing. It reached people. It touched them in their homes and in their hearts and it really was a large reason why people’s thinking changed about it. People not only did not fear it, they took pride in their association with it. So, I’ll never forget, I have to be honest with you that 25 years ago [I never thought] we would be fighting this fight; we would be here 25 years later at this beautiful Catch Restaurant without a cure, without a cure. I would have never have believed that. I wouldn’t have believed it if you said: ‘10 years after, if you said 20 years after.’ But much has been done – we were having meetings with people, teaching them how to make out wills and what do we do this and this and this and then before some months went by, and interventions occurred, they were looking for jobs because they could maintain, more than survive, thrive, and so many others as well. So, we’ve managed it but we have to get rid of it. So, that it’s just a sad, sad memory of the past.

“But think of the strength of this community. The strength of this community and the model it was for the country. Everything we did legislatively: housing opportunities for people with HIV/AIDS, Medicaid if you had HIV and not full blown AIDS, to be on Medicaid, every issue you can name in terms of the funding related to community based solutions. We had the scientific geniuses that we all have here and that was important and they knew it was important to listen to the community. We had the care and the concern of people and San Francisco needed, even to the point of recognizing early on that if we’re going to find a cure for HIV/AIDS, if we’re going to address this issue, we had to have an international mobilization against AIDS. How many? I mean, I don’t know how many of you were born at the time but marches on Market Street for international mobilization against AIDS years ago and it was, you know, personal in our community, in our city, but we were thinking globally because we knew that was what we had to do.

“But, in any event, I just in conclusion want to, did I say in conclusion before already – to pay tribute to Cleve Jones, really a pioneer and visionary. Mike Smith, a person who enabled this to happen and be sustained over time. Leslie talked about how people were drawn to it and volunteered and cried and repaired their soul and memorialized folks across their life. We are so proud. We are happy to carry the ball now and Sanjay, thank you for giving us a home to come to, to hold onto because it’s really, very [much] an honor to be associated with what you have done and again, it is again a manifestation of the pain, the suffering, the sense of community, the strength of this community, and the fact that we will keep fighting until there is a cure.

“Thank you for allowing me to be a part of this. I did, as I said, make a Quilt, a patch for a girl in my wedding. I never realized that that would be the case, but it is so, and so I feel personally attached, so I understand how other people feel personally attached. This isn’t just a civic endeavor, it is a personal attachment that we all have to this Quilt, to this issue and to Mike, thank you, you have done so beautifully all throughout. Oh I could talk about so many of you in this room and again, some of you weren’t born yet. So, in any event, it is an honor, really an honor. And I feel very proud of myself for getting through this without crying.”

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