Making quilts, spreading hope as the fight against HIV and AIDS continues
A visual reminder of the toll that AIDS has taken was on display Sunday at Main Beach.
About 15 quilts bearing the names of those felled by the disease were placed on the lawn as part of Laguna Beach’s recognition of World AIDS Day, which began in 1988 as a time for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV and show support for people living with the virus that causes AIDS.
The collection includes a quilt made for a 35-year-old lawyer who died in 1991 and one for a 47-year-old UPS driver who died in 1999. On each quilt is the person’s name in large lettering and his or her date of birth and death. Photos are embedded in the material, some looking like they were screen-printed.
In addition, the city’s HIV Advisory Committee, along with the AIDS Services Foundation, Shanti Orange County and the Laguna Beach Community Clinic hosted free seminars and offered free anonymous HIV testing for visitors.
A goal of the event was to encourage people to speak about HIV and AIDS, said Brian Sadler, chairman of the city’s HIV Advisory Committee. He was diagnosed with HIV in 1987 when he was 31.
Sadler, who lived in Kansas at the time, remembers the cold reception he received when telling others he had HIV.
“The stigma pushed me out of [Kansas],” said Sadler, 58. “It got so bad that checkers in grocery stores would point. My banker heard that I had HIV and repossessed everything. I had three days to pay off my house, car and business. That is one of the reasons that I stand up to the stigma.”
He faces the stigma head-on by visiting schools to educate students about HIV and AIDS. The U.S. sees 52,000 new cases of HIV per year, and one in three of these are people ages 15 to 24, according to an advisory committee brochure.
About 1.2 million people in the U.S. carry the HIV virus, it said.
Sadler tells the students that unprotected sex and sharing contaminated needles are high-risk activities, but he also mentions a hemophiliac who contracted HIV after receiving a transfusion as part of her treatment. She died of AIDS at age 17 in 2001. A quilt made in her honor was also part of the collection Sunday.
“That’s the one where students say, ‘Oh my gosh, that could have been me,’” Sadler said.
Garden Grove resident Joan Shaw, a mother of two sons who died of AIDS, managed the quilt collection until her death in 2004, Sadler said. He inherited the quilts and has made additional ones for neighbors and friends.
Sadler and Newport Beach resident Larry Haber, 48, exemplify the changing prognosis for HIV patients. Haber, a member of the HIV Advisory Committee who learned he had HIV 16 years ago, was at the event Sunday as a volunteer with Shanti Orange County, a nonprofit that provides education, support and psychological care to people with HIV and AIDS.
“I had friends who were diagnosed who passed away, so my first thought was death,” Haber said. “Through education and medical advances, I live a happy, normal life. [HIV] is not a death sentence.”
As part of his ongoing treatment, Haber takes one pill a day and surrounds himself with supportive people.
HIV is a “chronic, manageable illness,” said Korey Jorgensen, a family doctor and HIV specialist at the Laguna Beach Community Clinic. “[The disease] does not shorten life expectancy if you get treated.”
Jorgensen said patients who have the disease should expect to take medication for life.
Laguna’s HIV Advisory Committee, established in 1987 as one of the country’s few groups of its kind that reports to a city council, meets the first Thursday of every month at City Hall, 505 Forest Ave.
Laguna Beach High School students are eligible for free HIV testing at the clinic, at 263 Third St., according to a committee brochure. Call (949) 494-0761, Ext. 145, for more information.