The Last One - QUEERGURU

During a Candlelight Memorial to slain gay politician Harvey Milk in San Francisco in 1985 Cleve Jones who had been an Intern for Milk and two years ago prior had co-founded the San Francisco AIDS Foundation came up with the idea of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. It took him and his colleagues another two years for the NAMES Project to turn this into reality, but they got there and now almost 30 years later is has grown to become the worlds largest community arts project memorializing the names of over 80000 Americans killed by AIDS.

Nadine C. Licostie’s compelling new documentary about the Quilt started out as record of its Unfolding at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC in 2012, but quickly mushroomed into the story of its history and all its powerful advocacy since then to help stop the rapid spread of the disease.

Jones was, and still is, a passionate activist who possesses a remarkable ability to articulate both the anger the community felt and the needless deaths caused simply by homophobia. Even when the epidemic hit other parts of society other than gay white men, the stigma caused by the initial hysteria still greatly effected the vast majority’s understanding of both HIV and AIDS. As the frightening statistics kept being blazoned across the screen, this documentary not only serves to remind us that not only has the spread of subsided but all the new facts like 1 in 4 of people infected now are under 25 years old, still stuns one into total silence. That and the fact that 64% of Americans that have been diagnosed are still not on medications for a variety of reasons, most of which are economic.

By tracking the outreach work of the Names Project who moved operations to Atlanta to be closer to the largest number of people infected, Licostie’s movie covers their work that deliberately involves as much of the community wherever it can. Whether it be workshops for people to come in and make panels for their own loved ones, or getting into the school system (where the only sex education is abstinence) to display large swathes of the Quilt as a focal point for the students.

She also covers the work of The Womens Collective that was established by the enigmatic Patricia Nails after the death of her husband and their 2 year old daughter specifically to help and support infected women of color. Nails infectious enthusiasm radiates through the Center and gives real hope and life to women who before had none. Watching them make their own contributions for the Quilt is both a heartbreaking and empowering sight.

Little did we think back then that there would be a need for organisations like The Names Project to keep their work going at full steam some three decades later. And lest anyone ever remotely gets complacent thinking that the spread has eased up, then another of the sobering statistics we are hit with is that there has recently been a sharp increase in the number of young gay men now being diagnosed as positive.

The name of Licostie’s documentary is based on the fervent hope of everyone that works so passionately and fearlessly to finally eradicate this disease. In 1987, a quilt panel was delivered anonymously with no background, no instructions. But the caretakers of the Quilt knew just what to do: hold on to it and the hope it conveyed until it could be sewn into the Quilt. It reads simply, “THE LAST ONE.”

Take a big box of kleenex.