When Christopher Mathews founded the Owen Clinic in 1982, he intended it to be a standard healthcare site for LGBTQ+ San Diegans. But when HIV began emerging in San Diego in the early ’80s, Mathews discovered that the clinic had landed in the right place at the right time.
“A lot of the patients that were coming in were sick with a disease we had never seen before,” said Mathews, who has worked with several organizations helping people living with HIV and AIDS. “The average survival after the first visit was only six months in those days.”
Healthcare workers, survivors and community members gathered at the clinic in Hillcrest last week for a vigil honoring the lives of those lost to HIV and AIDS. It included a display of two pieces of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which has been described as “the largest community art project in history.”
During the vigil, held at the end of the event, participants stood in front of one of the quilt pieces and named family, friends and loved ones who had passed away from the disease.
The event and the vigil were part of Seven Days in June, a week of protest actions around the country that ended Sunday, during which the community spoke out against the $1 trillion in cuts to healthcare spending by President Donald Trump’s administration.
Mathews said a lot of progress has been made in HIV care and fighting prejudice over the years, but stigma around the disease has risen again.
“Now we find ourselves in a sociopolitical environment where a lot of the old prejudices and biases have resurfaced in society,” Mathews said.
First conceived by human rights activist Cleve Jones in 1985, the quilt has grown to include around 50,000 panels since its initial public display in 1987. It is collectively dedicated to the more than 110,000 people who have died from HIV and AIDS.
Flyers at the clinic tell the history of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. (Photo by Nicole Abrams/Times of San Diego)The display at the June 4 event specifically included San Diegans who are part of the 54-ton quilt.
“The AIDS quilt is really representative of why we cannot go back and why we cannot tolerate these funding cuts,” said Laura Bamford, the medical director for the clinic and the event’s organizer.
The clinic put on the event alongside Lambda Archives of San Diego, a non-profit group that maintains a collection of LGBTQ+ history. Lambda Archives’ executive director, Nicole Verdes, noted that they don’t usually work with healthcare-oriented organizations, but felt it would help people to learn about the epidemic in a different setting near the anniversary of the first reported case of AIDS on June 5, 1981.
“It was a good way to highlight different aspects of how widespread this impact of this epidemic of AIDS has been,” Verdes said.
Verdes said that it is important to not only learn about the past, but to also recognize that LGBTQ+ people are being attacked at the federal level.
“I think it’s important to not only remember, but to also come together, to open doors, to talk about it, and to talk about how it relates to what’s happening today,” she said.
Tari Gilbert, a nurse practitioner at the clinic, said that she was a floor nurse in a hospital when HIV began making its way into healthcare; she lost two college friends to HIV, a gay couple who both died not long after moving to New York City.
“People were very afraid of it,” Gilbert said, “and I was horrified by seeing how some people were treated, who were positive. So, I would always volunteer to take care of those patients.”
“It was just devastating to have seen these two beautiful young men be dead within a few months,” Gilbert said.
Seeing the quilt, she said, took her breath away. Gilbert said that even though she did not meet the people memorialized on the panels, she still wanted to know them.
“We’ve lost a whole generation of people to this horrible disease,” Gilbert said. “And I can’t imagine what the world would be like if they had survived.”
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