Activism and Local Historicizing: Preserving LGBTQ Community Histories

In his recent article, “‘If You Are Reading It, I am Dead’ Activism, Local History, and The AIDS Quilt,” Nino Testa addresses several issues surrounding The AIDS Memorial Quilt, but he pays special attention to Duane Puryear’s panel on The Quilt.

Read more about this amazing project below profiled by Jason Smith, the Public Humanities Lab Assistant.

Duane Puryear, standing on the AIDS Memorial Quilt], photograph, 1989

It’s easy to get lost in the big picture. It’s easy to only see AIDS on a national and global scale. Dr. Nino Testa, however, has recently published material looking at one of the microcosms within the AIDS community.

 Testa’s project focuses on taking The Quilt, the largest community project in the world, and bringing it back to the local community. Duane Puryear is a Dallas local who passed away in 1991.

Testa was working with The Dallas Way as a board member and a volunteer when he saw a small blub on Duane’s panel. The Dallas Way is a group that works to preserve the history of the LGBTQ community in Dallas (For more information: http://www.thedallasway.org/).

Before moving to Dallas, Testa’s dissertation included a chapter on The Quilt and had about a page devoted to Duane’s panel; however, he felt that the chapter didn’t finish how he wanted it to: “I couldn’t find anything on the panel or about the panel.” Seeing Duane’s blurb and remembering his previous work on the topic, Testa moved to dig deeper into Duane’s life and his panel.

Now living in the same city that Duane is from gave Testa a chance to research Duane’s life and his panel outside of what has officially been published.

After asking around, he found someone familiar with the name and found small leads on the panel that had “a little bit here, a little bit there, but none of it was really put together.” Eventually, he met with Duane’s parents to try and put together a more formal history of this panel.

Normally, the panels of the quilt are made by someone else in memorial of someone who passed away from AIDS. Duane’s panel is different because he made his own panel before passing away. What Testa found, however, is that Duane’s original panel was lost, and his parents remade his panel to be officially included in the quilt.

This change in how Duane’s official quilt panel was produced reflects two of Testa’s concerns in his article: activism and local history.

Testa’s hope was that “The AIDS quilt, because it is often abstracted and often explored as this behemoth object – it’s the largest community project in the world – we often have a bird’s eye view of it. Very rarely do people kind of dig into particular panels and think about what does this one panel tell me about not just the person for whom it was made, but about the local history of AIDS in that community.”

Photo of Duane Puryear holding a panel of the AIDS Memorial quilt that he made to represent himself.

Testa’s plan for his work is to help bring attention to The Quilt and have scholars, both professional and hobbyist, think about it in the context of the local, of the individual. He wants to underscore how The Quilt highlights how local communities engaged with memorialization and direct action of the AIDS epidemic.

Ultimately, Testa argues The Quilt, which has been historicized as parallel to histories of direct action, is also “a rich archive of direct action if we know how to read the archive.” Each quilt panel isn’t just a memorialization of direct action, but rather, each panel can be read as a form of direct action.

Testa sees his work as something others could duplicate: “Other people can do similar work with The AIDS Quilt to tell local stories of AIDS activism.”

 Most of his work was done outside of formal research that has been published and worked more with oral and local histories. For him, these local oral histories function as a counterpoint to national information about the AIDS epidemic.

 Testa said people often focus on what Reagan said or did not say or what the CDC did or did not do at the time, but local oral histories can expand and amplify the narrative of local AIDS communities that are often overshadowed by the stories and efforts of larger cities like New York and San Francisco.

 As for Duane and The Quilt, Testa believes Duane’s panel is powerful: “I think anytime anyone sees it, they are very moved by it. As I learned, it is one of the most routinely requested sections of the quilt: people love to display it.”

 The use of Duane’s panel as a centerpiece for activism for the AIDS community falls in line with Duane’s actions in life. Duane believed he contracted HIV as a teenager and became an active member of the AIDS activism and education community later in his life.

 He worked for an AIDS hotline, helped found a speaker’s bureau that shared personal experiences with HIV, disseminated safe sex curriculum around Dallas (including in schools and hospitals, protested city budgetary priorities by planting 700 white crosses with the names of deceased locals who had aids, and volunteered for the Dallas stop of the first national tour of the Aids Quilt. Duane would later fly to Washington, D.C., for the second national Quilt tour to march with the Dallas contingent and read names.

 One of Duane’s friends, Jamie Schield, paraphrased Duane’s desire saying, “It’s not enough to sit and answer phones when they call. We have to go out there and speak. People need to see a face, a young face.’” As much as Duane’s panel can be read as a protest against the AIDS epidemic, his panel represents the actions he took in life. The panel represents his desire to go out and speak to people about AIDS.

 But The Quilt is more than Duane. Each panel is a different person with a different story in a different community.

 Testa said he would encourage people to look at the quilt in all of its enormity. It’s a “deeply emotional experience to see it in person,” but The Quilt is available online: https://www.aidsmemorial.org/interactive-aids-quilt. It also has a search function for dates and words.

 Just as his research focuses on the local, Testa encourages those who look at the quilt to not just focus on the entire quilt but look at specific panels. He said many panels are moving and pieces of art, just like Duane’s panel, which reads: “My name is Duane Kearns Puryear. I was born on December 20, 1964. I was diagnosed with AIDS on September 7, 1987, at 4:45 PM. Sometimes, it makes me very sad. I made this panel myself. If you are reading it, I am dead…”

 Looking forward, Testa also sees his work with Duane’s panel and oral histories as a process he can use for future research. He currently plans to look into the history of the Dallas group Gay Urban Truth Squad (GUTS) for his next project.

 For more information on The AIDS Memorial Quilt, visit https://www.aidsmemorial.org/quilt-history.

For more information on Duane’s life and activism as well as more information on Testa’s work visit http://www.thedallasway.org/stories/written/2021/9/19/duane-puryears-and-the-quilt-panel.

Also visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHLYf_D8NH4 for a public talk Testa gave on The Quilt in 2021.

“‘If You Are Reading It, I am Dead’ Activism, Local History, and The AIDS Quilt” was published in The Public Historian, Vol. 44, No. 3, August 2022.

Nino Testa is an associate professor of professional practice in the department of women and gender studies at Texas Christian University.