San Francisco AIDS Quilt Chapter to Close Its Doors

It started in San Francisco in 1987 when Cleve Jones stitched together a memorial to his friend Marvin Feldman and made the first panel of what would become the AIDS Memorial Quilt. "Outside of a miracle," said local board member Dolores Thompson, it will end on May 31, for San Francisco, when the Bay Area chapter of the Names Project shuts its doors. "Our little team is worn out. We're ready to drop," Thompson said. Only four board members remain to do the work of collecting, exhibiting, and caring for the quilt panels in the Bay Area. The chapter's offices on Sanchez Street are only open eight hours a week.

The Names Project Foundation, the umbrella organization that coordinates all quilt-related activities among the 22 chapters, moved its main warehouse and offices to Atlanta from San Francisco a year ago, and has centralized and reduced the size of its operations after a series of financial setbacks. The foundation created a new chapter agreement that prohibits local chapters from soliciting funds by direct mail, requires them to coordinate fund-raising activities from national corporations with the main foundation office, doubles the shipping costs for quilt panels from the Atlanta warehouse, and requires that they pay an increased rental charge per panel. The San Francisco chapter board calls the new agreement, which they were required to sign by February 1, the "straw on the camel's back," according to Thompson.

"We're absolutely committed to a long-term presence for the quilt in the city of its birth," with an office in San Francisco, said quilt founder Jones. "I see a turning away from the epidemic by gay white men at the same time that the majority of new infections are among people of color," Jones said. "We've got to be custodians for this enormous work of art and plan for how it will be cared for when this epidemic is over, and, simultaneously, we have to use the quilt to hasten the day when a cure and vaccine are found."

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