My first viewing of the Quilt was in 1987. It was also my first March on Washington. I had just finished playing several minor roles in the Colorado premier of As Is. We struck the set in Boulder, I packed my things, made a brief appearance at the cast party, then boarded the plane to Washington. It was a red-eye, of course, and unlike my usual fitful behavior on plane trips, I was actually able to fall asleep on the plane. I woke up shortly before we landed, in time to see the March starting out from the Elipse and the Quilt spread out on the Mall.
I carried a backpack with all my stuff for the weekend. David, a friend of mine from Boulder, and I had rented a motel room somewhere in the D.C. suburbs, but I didn't want to try and find it now. I didn't want to miss a minute of the march. So I went looking for and found the Colorado delegation. David was there and handed me a small rainbow flag. Not too much later, the Colorado contingent joined the March. It was quite an experience, seeing all those people there. I remember seeing a sign that said "Native American West Coast Lesbians," and it was a large group of people.
After the March, I listened to a few speeches, but soon became bored with the rhetoric. The real power was in the mass of people there, not in what was on stage or what the people on stage were trying to shape the people into. This is a feeling I have had at both the subsequent marches I went to in 1993 and 1996. The speakers were trying to make it seem that the people on the Mall were somehow ratifying their ideas, but the truth was the people themselves were the One True Idea. Look at us, they said, we are so many and so varied. How can you deny us? What could you do that could possibly stop us?
I wandered away from the stage and over to the Quilt and simply started wandering up and down the lanes between the panels. A great sadness came over me, though I had not, as yet, lost anyone I knew to AIDS. I was on the point of tears. Then I noticed to one side of me, gathered around one panel, was a small group of men in leather, supporting each other, one of them sobbing. I looked in another direction and saw a group of radical fairies, complete with flowers in their hair and wide skirts, also supporting each other and crying. When I first came out, I said these were two groups of people I wanted nothing to do with. Yet here, inside the Quilt, I felt a brotherhood with them. Crying over the loss of someone you love makes you human. Denying that makes you inhuman.
I stayed on the grounds very late that evening. I visited the Vietnam memorial and the Lincoln memorial. Then went back to the stage just as the last performance was ending. They called for volunteers to take down the stage. Since I had just done the very same thing 24 hours earlier in Boulder, I volunteered. We took apart the stage, tore down the lighting, and had everything put away in an hour or so. It was then too late for me to catch the Metro out to my motel room, so Edward, one of the other volunteers, offered to put me up with friends of his in D.C. I readily agreed. How we got to the friend's house is a blur - I had been up more than 48 hours. I remember sitting down on the sofa, then lying down on the sofa, then thinking, "This will do quite nicely," and falling instantly asleep.
I returned from the 1987 March truly energized. When I got back to Boulder, I helped campaign door-to-door for the exapansion of Boulder's anti-discrimination statute to include homosexuals and bisexuals. The measure passed by a mere 200 votes. I'd like to think I helped in that. I was outraged when Amendment 2 passed, and felt vindicated when the Supreme Court struck down Amendment 2 in the strongest possible terms. (That Supreme Court decision also gave me the only three reasons I will ever need to support Bill Clinton: Rhenquist, Thomas, and Scalia, the dissenting justices.)
So this trip carried considerable freight. By this time, I had lost a boyfriend (Brian), a roommate (Don), and a good friend (Patrick) to AIDS, and several close acquaintences in the Lesbian/Gay Chorus of San Francisco. I looked for and found Patrick's quilt on the last day of the showing. I stayed there for several minutes, then planted a little rainbow flag - the same one David have given me nine years earlier - beside his panel.
A few hours later, they were folding up the Quilt, putting it away, they said, for the last time. Portions would be shown at various times and locations around the country and abroad, but it was now too big to show all at once in one place. So they were folding it up. I helped. It seemed a number of actions were coming full circle, finding a kind of completetion, and allowing a space for something new to start.