The NAMES project began in San Francisco in 1987, to commemorate victims of the AIDS virus, largely homosexuals, junkies or hemophiliacs stigmatized and ignored by 1980s mainstream America and the media. Emblems of the dead were woven into an ever-growing network of quilts, lending human
faces to dry casualty statistics. This moving documentary, quite properly, less concerns the creation of the world's most famous quilt than the people it memorializes.
Five singled out in detail are Dr. Tom Waddell, ranked sixth in the Olympics Decathalon in 1968, who founded the Gay Games in San Francisco as a reaction against limp-wristed "queer" stereotypes. His doomed battle against AIDS is related by Sara Lewinstein, a lesbian fellow athlete and Gay Games
board member who had asked Waddell to be the father of her child (the disease did not pass on to Lewinstein or their daughter). Robert Perryman fought drug addiction throughout his life and marriage to the deeply religious Sallie. His death from AIDS leaves her HIV-positive, but she accepts it all
as God's will as she works on the quilt. David Mandell Jr. was born "a classic severe hemophiliac" who contracted the virus from a tainted blood transfusion. As his parents struggle with his approaching death, the little boy appears in silhouette in a TV news interview for fear of being recognized
by a hostile public. David Campbell was the lover of Tracy Torrey, a closeted homosexual in the US Navy. In his scenes, Torry lies emaciated in the terminal stages of AIDS himself; he died before the movie's completion, and his panel in the quilt is seen. Jeffrey Sevcik was the partner of Vito
Russo, author of the classic study of gays in cinema, "The Celluloid Closet." Russo, also infected, died in 1990 after the documentary's release.
COMMON THREADS crosscuts chronologically between their accounts, integrating news footage of the era, now tragically naive in hindsight. "It is by no means an epidemic," declares a physician in the early '80s, when only 60 cases were diagnosed. As years pass the American death toll increases:
1,285 in 1982, 3,933 in 1983. It takes the shocking decline and death of a Hollywood icon--Rock Hudson in 1985--to underscore the human cost of the disease. In 1988 deaths climb to 55,388, with infection raising the count of all known AIDS cases to 100,000 by the summer of 1989. Few interviewees
directly address the politics of AIDS. The filmmakers leave that to TV news footage, as both comedy superstar Eddie Murphy and the Moral Majority gloat over the "gay plague" in 1984, and Ronald Reagan's conservative presidential administration is criticized for their timid response to the health
crisis. But the moments that stand out in COMMON THREADS are isolated moments in the lives (and deaths) of individuals, like a dying David Mandell granted his wish to meet the wisecracking TV puppet character "ALF," or Vito Russo's unsentimental, dark-humored recollection of his own diagnosis of
Kaposi's sarcoma.
COMMON THREADS: STORIES FROM THE QUILT won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature of 1989, in advance of Hollywood narratives like LONGTIME COMPANION (1990), PHILADELPHIA (1993), and BOYS ON THE SIDE (1995) that finally confronted the reality of the disease. In 1996, filmmakers Robert
Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman released THE CELLULOID CLOSET, a feature film translation of Vito Russo's book. (Profanity, adult situations.) leave a comment