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Digital AIDS "Quilt" Woven From Personal, Connected Memorials

by Terrence O'Brien on December 15, 2009 at 03:15 PM

Wikis Update the AIDS Quilt For the 21st Century
There are already plenty of ways to memorialize people online: Tributes.com is trying to push newspaper obituaries into the print grave, while MySpace accounts have been unofficially memorializing lost friends and family for years, and Facebook officially launched memorial pages back in October. Chris Bartlett saw how these online services were creating timeless tributes to the fallen, and realized it was the perfect tool to remind others of a lost generation of gay men who passed in the '80s and '90s, before the successful development of powerful antiretroviral drugs made AIDS a manageable disease and not a death sentence.

Bartlett's site, The Gay History Wiki, collects the stories of many of 4,600 gay Philadelphia men who died in the 1980s and '90s. His site acts as a sort of social network for the deceased: telling their stories, hosting tributes from friends and family, and illustrating the connections between these men. Unlike other tributes, like memorial pages on Facebook, Bartlett's site is open to the public, though it is closely managed to prevent it from being vandalized.

The Gay History Wiki is just part of new renewed push to make sure that people don't forget that not long ago HIV inevitably led to AIDS, which always ended in death. This modern AIDS quilt assembles slivers of peoples lives into a rich tapestry to be preserved forever on the Web. [From: The New York Times]

Tags: aids, gay history wiki, GayHistoryWiki, history, hiv, memorials, top

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