Strange Fruit

To speak to Gert McMullen about the origins of the AIDS Memorial Quilt is to go back to a scary, sad time in LGBTQ history: San Francisco in the early 1980s. "People were terrified," she explains, "because they didn't know what was happening. People were just dying. They were trying to figure out, why were these gay men dying?" Gert lost many of her friends in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and thanks to the fear and stigma surrounding the disease, she was often their only visitor. "You would go into the hospitals and there was nobody there and the nurses would put you in a moon suit, basically, to walk in there, because they didn't know what was going to happen," she recalls. No one understood how the disease was transmitted, so many people were afraid to come into close contact with their afflicted loved ones - even during their final days. "I remember a friend of mine who was so lonely and I just kind of touched him, and he just went, 'Oh my god, it's been so long s