I couldn't miss the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt at Tate Modern

And 30 years on it's time to make my late partner a panel

Lawrence Buckley 24th August 1957 - 10th July 2025

I went to see the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt at the weekend. It was on display for four days only in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. I didn’t really have time to make the trip to London from Edinburgh where I live now. But I had to be there. For you.

I knew that if I hadn’t gone, I’d have watched the scenes unfold on social media and regretted it. That phrase, social media, will mean nothing to you. Let’s just say, news travels at lightning speed these days. We don’t have to wait for it.

But, of course, you’re the reason I couldn’t miss it. We didn’t make you a panel back then. But not to bear witness to its display now would somehow have been a betrayal. So, I went - to honour you. And Tim. And Bob. And Michael. The list goes on. And on.

I’ve long assumed it includes Neil. But sometimes I wonder if I’ll find him tending plants somewhere. That perhaps one day I’ll look down from the top deck of a London bus and he’ll be there in the gardens at Gray’s Inn, his hands sifting the soil. That perhaps he made it after all.

But as I encountered friends, old and new, it was you at the front and centre of my story. Its telling and retelling. I had to be there because of you. This is why I came. To leave another indelible mark on my remembering. So that I will be able to say I was there when the quilt came to Tate Modern. For you.

And so, I wanted to explain to you why I had to go even though I’m not sure where to begin. It’s nearly 30 years since you left us - so I’ll start with the bits that will make some sense to you.

You’ll remember those scenes from October 1987 when the Names Project Memorial Quilt was first displayed in Washington – 1,920 panels and counting. We were travelling in Spain, but we saw it in the papers. News travelled more slowly then.

But we could scarcely look away. Even though it was over the other side of the pond, we knew it was part of our unfolding story. Even though you were so defiantly focused on living. We had just bought a house after all. We had so much to do. So much life to live.

And then there’s the fact that I was staying with Julia and Mark in their house in London Fields where we sat round the kitchen table for dinner so many times. I always do when I’m in London these days. A home from home in the big smoke. I’ve even got a key.

They had the kitchen extended long ago but we still sit on the same bench and sprinkle pepper from the same old wooden pepper pot. And you’re still there in the words that pass between us. Your forthright wit. An uncommon presence. Never forgotten.

And then as I left the Turbine Hall on Saturday afternoon after listening to the London Gay Men’s Chorus singing Sondheim as we stood among the panels (our dear friend Sylvie is the vice-chair of their board – lucky them, I’m sure you’d agree), I had a WhatsApp from Sare.

You won’t know what a WhatsApp is, but you’ll remember Sare, the nurse from the team at Barts who helped us navigate those last few months. Did I know about the quilt display, she asked. It was Sare who said a year ago, after I’d wondered out loud whether I should keep writing about those days, about you – ‘never stop talking about it.’

And then there are the bits you won’t know about because you’re not here anymore. The reason the quilt came to be at Tate Modern (which opened at Bankside Power Station five years after you left us) is because a guy called Charlie Porter wrote a book. A remarkable novel, called Nova Scotia House. And the quilt features in it.

I read the novel, hardly pausing, the weekend after it was published in March. It’s the story of Jerry who dies, and Johnny, his lover, who lives. Johnny is 19 when he meets Jerry, 45, who is HIV positive. They have just four years together before Jerry’s death, and now 25 years later, Johnny is looking back.

We had longer, of course. Almost a whole decade. How unlikely did that seem when you told me you were positive on the Embankment in September 1985? The Names Project Memorial Quilt was conceived in San Franscisco just a couple of months later. So many gay men – and others – were already dying.

And however much we set our faces towards the light, all too often in the dead of night, it was hard to forget that you would, barring a miracle, add to their number. I read voraciously then as the stories emerged stateside – most memorably Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time over the Christmas of 1988 when you were away in Key West. I was looking for clues as to what the future held. Ours. Yours.

And almost four decades later I’m still reading. Still trying to understand. Turning the pages of Nova Scotia House with a hunger for meaning. Why did this happen to us? Why did it end your life and change mine? To borrow Charlie’s exquisite words – we had been someone else, someone other before this, we should still be someone else. You should still be here.

And what do I know now? One thing for sure. The miracle came in the form of pills – not the toxic AZT you wrestled with hopelessly, but pills that work. That keep people alive – and well. Except they came the year after you died. They came too late. For Jerry – and for you.

Still, it’s worth saying that the fact they came at all is in the largest measure thanks to indefatigable activism from our community when so many others looked away and worse. So much progress from so much courage against so many odds. Enough to tame the virus and to stop it spreading. God knows we have the tools.

Yet it’s progress that a US government (so malevolent I can’t even begin to explain here) is tearing up with terrifying vigour, even though the crisis far from over – some 40 million people living with HIV across the globe. Honestly, back then we thought Reagan not saying the word, AIDS, and James Anderton’s evocation of a cesspit were criminal. But this administration is more 1933 than 2025.

And now you’re not here, but in the spaces between remembering and forgetting, your presence hovers as determinedly as ever. So, I think it’s time to make you a panel. I’m still useless at anything practical so I might need a little help from friends. But I think I know at least something of what to include in it.

Images as eclectic and contradictory as you were – the working-class boy who decided he was going to Oxford and did – I’m spoilt for choice. Everton FC, The Iliad, Worcester College quad, the rolling hills of Le Marche, our cat Djuna (Barnes), the Pet Shop Boys. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ What indeed? I still can’t fathom that one.

But I do know this. We’re going to keep on fighting. We owe you that. And the 42 million (still counting) who didn’t deserve it either. As Cleeve Jones, founder of the Names Project Memorial Quilt, reminded us at the Tate, the quilt is not merely a memorial, however much that matters. It is a weapon. And I want your name in the armoury.