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The final name has been carved into the granite at the AIDS
Memorial Grove in San Francisco. There’s no more room for more
names.

It’s not the kind of success that the people who dreamed up the
idea for the celebrated grove in Golden Gate Park in 1991 had in
mind. But a quarter century of memorialization of the scourge
that doesn’t go away seems to have taken up all the available
carving space on the grove’s beloved Circle of Friends monument.

As the grove celebrates its 25th anniversary, it seems as if
every boulder, rock and pebble in the grove has been engraved
with a name, too.

But even as new drugs make inroads in the AIDS fight, activists
say their work remains as important as ever.

“Obviously, advances in medical care continue to show promising
results,” said grove Executive Director John Cunningham. “But
AIDS is still an incurable, life-threatening disease. And the
story of AIDS goes beyond the disease. It goes to the deeper
issues of prejudice and discrimination.”

Among those most discriminated against were people with
hemophilia — more than 9,000 of them died after receiving AIDS-
tainted blood products. Years of prejudice kept them and their
condition in the shadows. This year, the foundation will honor
the mother of Ryan White, the late Indiana teenager and
hemophilia patient who was one of the earliest public faces of
the AIDS crisis. White, who died in 1990, faced years of
discrimination before helping to change national attitudes about
the disease.

“Ryan always said, ‘Let’s treat it like a disease, not a dirty
word,’” said Jeanne White-Ginder, an AIDS activist who will
receive a special award during the World AIDS Day celebration at
the grove Thursday for her work in bringing together the
hemophilia and AIDS communities.

“We have to honor and respect those who went through this
horrible, horrible epidemic,” White-Ginder said. “Too many
people we loved were lost. We need to come together (so) that
maybe nobody has to live with this again.”

A goal of the AIDS community now, White said, is to make sure
everyone gets tested for the disease.

Meanwhile, hours after four stone carvers squeezed in the final
200 names to the final concentric circle on the giant Circle of
Friends monument at the grove, Cunningham said that cuts and
changes in health care policy under the Trump administration
could mean the foundation is in for more battles.

“All our gains are at risk,” Cunningham said. “If they’re going
to gut access to health care, it will compromise everything
we’ve accomplished.”

Cunningham stood beside the giant circle of carved names, which
is something like the black stone wall full of carved names at
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington — with a big
exception, he said. All the people who died during the Vietnam
War are gone. Not so in the AIDS pandemic.

From now on, Cunningham said, new names will have to be

memorialized in another way. The grove is looking into building
a sidewalk of engraved bricks nearby. Sidewalks that can go on
and on have more potential for growth than circles of finite
dimension for an epidemic that has yet to end.

The grove’s many supporters and volunteers joined together for
the traditional grove-lighting ceremony Wednesday before the
annual World AIDS Day observance, scheduled for Thursday at noon.

“The grove is a place of both remembrance and renewal,” said
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who helped it gain
national memorial status. “Twenty-five years (later), we still
strive for a future in which we end stigma and discrimination
(and) at long last, find a cure.”

Also receiving a special award will be Paul Kawata, the
executive director of the National Minority AIDS Council, who
said he is “very concerned” about the priorities of the Trump
administration.

“It’s going to be much more difficult,” he said. “I get worried
when I hear about plans to eliminate the Affordable Care Act and
change Medicaid (funding). We’re at a unique moment in the
history of the epidemic. We finally have the health care
infrastructure now to break the backbone of AIDS.”

After the formal program, the 3,100 engraved names in the Circle
of Friends will be read in a rite expected to take the better
part of an hour.

The grove — designated a national memorial in 1996, one of only
44 in the U.S.— in located at the eastern end of Golden Gate
Park, across from the tennis courts.

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Scourge-far-from-over- but-SF-memorial-runs-out-10645782.php

Stop AIDS! Don't eat your own shit from a stranger's dick!
 

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