Quilts as Monuments: Gert McMullin - Mother of the AIDS Quilt

As part of our Quilts as Monuments series we revisit the story of Gert McMullin and the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the gay rights movement in San Francisco, Harvey Milk, The White Night Riots and more.

In 1985, Gert McMullin was one of the first San Franciscans to put a stitch on the AIDS Quilt, the quilt that began with one memorial square in honor of a man who had died of AIDS, and that now holds some 110,000 names. The quilt is made up of some 50,000 panels, each 3x6 feet, the size of a grave. It weighs 60 tons. End to end, it would stretch out more than 50 miles.

Gert never planned it this way, but over the decades she has become the keeper of the quilt and has stewarded it, repaired it, tended it, traveled with it and conserved it for some 33 years now.

In 2020, when COVID-19 hit, Gert was one of the first Bay Area citizens to begin sewing masks—PPE for nurses and health care workers who were lacking proper protection—masks she made from fabric left over from the AIDS Quilt. The comfort, outrage and honoring of an earlier pandemic being used to protect people from a new one.

In January of 2020, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, now part of the National AIDS Memorial, returned home to the Bay Area after 16 years in Atlanta. It took six 52-foot semis to get it there. The extensive AIDS archive, which Gert gathered, collected and protected since its earliest days, is now part of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

This episode features interviews with LGBT rights activist Cleve Jones who worked with Harvey Milk and conceived of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and John Cunningham, executive director of the National AIDS Memorial.

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. Mixed by Jim McKee. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of Radiotopia from PRX.