A Promise to remember

de Joe Brown

Hundreds of brief letters, most written by people who contributed panels to the huge NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, help humanize the disease by showing how family and friends remember the diverse victims and cope with their losses. Edited by a reporter for the Washington Post , the letters range from mundane to powerful and express a variety of emotions: tenderness, anger, sadness and hope. Some letters surprise, such as a tribute to the "horrible" gay-baiter Roy Cohn and a military man's remembrance of his straight-arrow Army lover. Some sear, such as a mother's lament that "I was taught how to live and how to die with dignity by my son. My only son." The book also includes instructions on how to create a panel and reproduces messages from the Signature Square, a blank piece of the quilt where visitors can inscribe their reactions. A worthy adjunct to our understanding of AIDS, this book should not be taken as a substitute for viewing the colorful, multitudinous and moving quilt itself, which is on display nationally and internationally.